Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 2022 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach at the Miami Beach Convention Center from November 29 to December 3, 2022. The upcoming edition will celebrate its 20th anniversary and will be its largest to date, featuring 282 galleries from 38 countries from continents including Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Galleries will participate in different sectors including Galleries, the fair’s main sector; Kabinett, introducing curated exhibitions based on an art-historical approach; Meridians, curated by Magalí Arriola, the Director of Museo Tamayo, for the third consecutive year and featuring twenty ambitious and monumental presentations pushing the boundaries of a traditional art fair layout; the remaining sectors include Positions, Nova, Survey, and Edition.
Taking part in Galleries, Kukje Gallery will introduce a comprehensive selection of works by renowned Korean and international artists. The gallery will showcase Untitled (c. 1960s), a work on paper by the pioneering abstract expressionist painter Wook-kyung Choi, whose independent spirit and bold experimentation charted new paths in modern and contemporary Korean art history. Choi was recently featured as the subject of Kukje Gallery’s booth for the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters 2022 earlier in October, receiving much praise for her unique abstract paintings, collages, and ink drawings from international private collectors and institutions alike.
Also on view will be important works by a wide range of Korean contemporary artists including Kibong Rhee’s new painting Where you stand B-3 (2022), a dreamlike representation of natural elements including water, fog, and trees on polyester fiber and canvas. Rhee recently opened a solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in Seoul and Busan titled Where You Stand, featuring new works in his iconic style. The booth will also introduce Gimhongsok’s Ten Breaths (2015) from a series of sculptures comprised of inflated balloons cast in resin and stacked on top of each other to form a column. Varying in size, the balloons are blown up by the artist’s friends and acquaintances before being cast, a process that signals a symbolic transformation of their breath into a tangible object. In conjunction, the booth will highlight one of Haegue Yang’s "appliance sculptures" titled Twelve Pyeongchang-gil Moisture – #2 HY24018 (2022), in which a kitchen sink has been hung on the wall, along with a venetian blind that hangs in front. Earlier this month, Yang ranked 93rd on the world’s top 100 artist list known as the Kunstkompass, announced annually by the leading German business magazine, Capital. The only living Korean artist to be listed, Yang has moved up from 99th last year, when she was first placed in the prestigious rankings. In addition, just last month Yang was awarded the 13th Benesse Prize, presented in collaboration with Singapore Art Museum, the organizer of Singapore Biennale 2022, in which her work is featured. Along with Singapore Biennale, the artist is part of numerous group activities around the globe including Do we dream under the same sky, Okayama Art Summit 2022, Planet B. Climate change and the new sublime at Palazzo Bollani in Venice, Monochrome Multitudes at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and Museum in Motion at M HKA in Antwerp.
These works by some of today's most important Korean artists will be exhibited alongside those by widely recognized international artists including the British contemporary artist Julian Opie’s Deer 1. (2020), a light box reminiscent of the public signage and corporate logos that proliferate across cities and an iconic format frequently adopted by the artist. Kukje Gallery’s booth will also highlight new works by the Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX, including Interface Painting (2022) and As Close As We Get (2022). Framed within the context of the coastal resort city of Miami Beach, both works allude to underwater infrastructure—in Interface Painting, porous blocks of aluminum foam, painted bubblegum pink, allude to coral and in As Close As We Get, a modular set of concrete building blocks suggests urban foundations—inviting viewers to contemplate the relationship between humans and other species, highlighting what lies below in a bid to reimagine and reanimate our urban ecologies and how we coexist.
In Korea, Kukje Gallery is showing Where You Stand, the gallery’s fifth solo exhibition with the Korean painter Kibong Rhee, across the K1 and K2 spaces in Seoul along with the gallery’s Busan space. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Busan, the entire show features approximately 48 recent works that were made over the past two years, all featuring the artist’s signature technique of layering painted plexiglass or polyester fiber over the canvas in order to establish a convincing optical depth, creating scenes that are either in the process of disappearing or taking form, thereby capturing an in-between moment in time and space. The show will remain on view through December 31, 2022.
