Kukje Gallery will participate in Art Basel’s new OVR:2020, an innovative online viewing room platform announced by the fair organizers, running from September 23 through September 26, 2020. Following the cancellation of Art Basel’s Hong Kong, Basel, and Miami Beach editions—the last of which was announced September 2, 2020—the fair has responded to this year’s unprecedented challenges by initiating a suite of new digital venues designed to facilitate the very highest level of visual art experience, promising that the OVR will present a series of “freestanding, highly focused, thematic edition[s].” The first initiative, titled OVR:2020, will be dedicated to only showing works made in 2020. The second edition, titled OVR:20c and running from October 28 through 31, 2020, will feature works exclusively made in the 20th century. Each edition will be limited to 100 participating galleries, each showing no more than six works simultaneously, in order to create a highly curated experience. Art Basel’s director Marc Spiegler remarked: “While the art market still faces difficult times… it is pivotal for us to continue exploring different ways of supporting galleries and engaging with our audiences.”
Kukje Gallery’s virtual booth on OVR:2020 will feature new works by modern and contemporary Korean artists. This selection will include important pieces by internationally acclaimed artists such as Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 20-36 (2020), which employs the technique of bae-ap-bub, his signature method of pushing paint from the back to the front of the burlap, and Haegue Yang’s Sonic Obscuring Hairy Hug (2020), which derives from her Sonic Sculptures (2013-ongoing) made of bells. Yang will hold solo exhibitions at numerous international institutions opening this fall including the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2020: Haegue Yang―O₂ & H₂O at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (September 29, 2020, through February 28, 2021), Haegue Yang: Emergence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (October 1, 2020, through January 31, 2021), Haegue Yang: The Cone of Concern at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (October 15, 2020, through February 28, 2021), and Haegue Yang: Strange Attractors at Tate St Ives (October 24, 2020, through May 3, 2021). The artist’s commissioned installation titled Handles (presented as part of The Hyundai Card Performance Series) for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, remains on view through November 15, 2020. Also on view in Kukje Gallery’s virtual booth will be Suki Seokyeong Kang’s sculptural installation Tender Meander #20-03 (2018-2020); Kyungah Ham’s Needling Whisper, Needle Country / SMS Series in Camouflage / Greedy is good K01-01-01 (2020), a meticulously hand-embroidered painting from the artist’s SMS Series created in collaboration with North Korean artisans; Lee Kwang-Ho’s Untitled 4776 (2020), a landscape painting that depicts Gotjawal, an indigenous ecology that includes a wide variety of trees, vines, and grass unique to Jeju Island; and Kibong Rhee’s The Wet Psyche (2020), a dreamlike representation of natural elements such as water, fog, and trees.
Installed in Kukje Gallery’s Seoul location is a wholly immersive multimedia environment of luminous, surging waves by the media artist unit a'strict through September 27, 2020. Meanwhile at Kukje Gallery Busan, the newly opened solo exhibition of the celebrated German photographer Candida Höfer, widely acknowledged for pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography, remains on view through November 8, 2020.
