Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel’s 2021 edition at Messe Basel from September 24 to 26, 2021. Art Basel remains the world's largest and most respected art fair and the upcoming edition will by far be the largest physical fair to open its doors in Europe since the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, as well as signal the prospective rebound of the global art fair calendar with Frieze London and FIAC scheduled for October. Upholding the successful launch of the hybrid format integrating both physical and virtual platforms, used for their previous Hong Kong edition earlier this May, the upcoming iteration of Art Basel will also offer both in-person and online experiences via Online Viewing Rooms and virtual walkthroughs that will run concurrently alongside the physical fair. A new addition to the fair’s digital presence will be Intersections: The Art Basel Podcast, hosted by Art Basel’s global director Marc Spiegler in which he will speak to leading figures working across creative disciplines including art, architecture, and fashion.
The 2021 edition will feature 273 top-tier international galleries from 33 countries from continents including Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa participating in different sectors including Galleries, the fair’s main sector; Feature, which includes projects from established and historical artists; Statements, which presents exciting new solo projects by emerging artists; Edition, which introduces leading publishers of editioned works, prints, and multiples; Parcours, featuring site-specific works around the city of Basel; Film, and Unlimited, which is a pioneering exhibition platform for projects that transcend traditional exhibition contexts, including large-scale sculptures and paintings, video projections, installations, and live performances.
Of the sectors, Unlimited is perhaps the most popular program in Art Basel, frequented by art lovers from all over the world. Kukje Gallery will introduce Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 18-201 & Conjunction 18-202 (2018) at the fair’s most anticipated curated sector. Born in 1935, Ha began his artistic career in the early 1960s and spearheaded an important organization known as the Korean Avant-Garde Association. His early interest in unorthodox materials including barbed wire, newsprint, and scrap lumber was a direct response to the context of postwar Korea, and culminated in the artist’s use of burlap as a primary medium for his ongoing Conjunction series, a lifelong project that Ha began in 1974.
The artist’s contribution to this year’s Unlimited sector presents what Ha regards as the essence of his Conjunction series. The installation features two of the artist’s signature inventions: bae-ap-bub, the artist’s technique of pushing paint from the back to the front of the burlap canvas, and the “smoking” technique where thick, sooty smoke is applied to wet paint, leaving exquisite and unpredictable effects on the surface. These works evince the key role Ha has played in radically redefining painting as well as his incisive material choices including burlap, a readymade material deeply associated with the Korean War and U.S. troop presence in Korea. Balancing both aesthetic concerns and innovative techniques, Ha has successfully fused physical labor and mindful action with incisive social commentary in powerful abstract compositions.
For the Galleries sector, Kukje Gallery is pleased to present a wide-ranging installation featuring works by critically acclaimed Korean and international artists. The booth will highlight important pieces by Dansaekhwa artists including Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 20-75 (2020) from the artist’s signature series; and Park Seo-Bo’s Ecriture (描法) No. 120306 (2012) from his Ecriture series. Also on view will be Kibong Rhee’s Conditions of meaning (2014), a dreamlike representation of natural elements such as water, fog, and trees; and Tender Meander #20-03 (2018-2020), a sculptural installation by Suki Seokyeong Kang, whose multimedia installation Black Mat Oriole (2016-2017) was introduced in the Unlimited sector at Art Basel in 2019.
These works by important Korean artists will be shown alongside those by acknowledged international masters including the celebrated British-Indian contemporary artist Anish Kapoor’s Glisten (Mipa Blue 5 to Spanish Gold Satin) (2018) from the artist’s iconic series of concave discs; the American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, whose the optic becomes (2018) from her ongoing series of Redaction Paintings appropriates declassified but often heavily redacted U.S. government documents released by the Freedom of Information Act; the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Rose of the Louvre (2020), a sculptural rendition of his La Rose du Louvre paintings, which are permanently installed in the Louvre’s Puget Courtyard, made with the artist’s signature mirrored glass beads. Othoniel will become the subject of a solo exhibition titled The Narcissus Theorem from September 28, 2021, through January 2, 2022, by invitation at the Petit Palais, featuring over seventy new works across the museum and its gardens. This highly anticipated occasion will mark the artist’s largest solo show in Paris since his retrospective My Way at the Centre Pompidou in 2011. The gallery’s booth will also feature the Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s Painting with history (The moon is a camera, smile at it, let the Hunger Games begin) (2021), a new painting which employs the artist’s signature medium of denim on canvas. The artist’s work relates the rise of denim culture with the importation and appropriation of western culture in Asia, a legacy that has affected everything from fashion to modern art; the artist’s complex relationship with denim reflects its association with pop culture and rise to becoming one of the most ubiquitous materials in the light of globalization. Kukje Gallery announced the representation of Arunanondchai—a painter, filmmaker, and most importantly storyteller who weaves together enchanting webs of personal narratives and historical constructs—earlier this year and will open his first solo exhibition at the gallery next year.
At Kukje Gallery’s Seoul location, the highly anticipated solo exhibition of Park Seo-Bo will open September 15 and will remain on view through October 31, 2021. Featuring sixteen works from his hanji Ecriture series, which the artist began in 2000, the show will create a space to heal the mind through colors inspired by nature and our surroundings.
Meanwhile at Kukje Gallery Busan, the first-ever solo exhibition of the BAFTA and Cannes award-winning film director Park Chan-wook, titled Your Faces, will be on view from October 1, 2021, consisting of a carefully curated group of his photographs.
