Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Frieze Los Angeles 2024 (hereafter Frieze LA), scheduled from February 29 to March 3, 2024. This year, Frieze LA welcomes visitors at Santa Monica Airport, with over 95 galleries from 21 countries participating across the Main and Focus sections (Focus is for selected galleries established within the past 12 years). This year’s event presents a diverse and exciting array of programs including a free, public exhibition of ambitious interactive works curated by Art Production Fund, and a section devoted to Los Angeles nonprofits including GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean art professionals based in LA. Winners of both the Frieze Impact Award and the Deutsche Bank Frieze Los Angeles Film Award will also be announced during Frieze Week, bringing an added boost of excitement to this dynamic arts city.   

 Kukje Gallery will introduce a selection of earlier to recent works by Korean modern and contemporary artists, spanning diverse genres including painting, sculpture, and installation. This includes Écriture (描法) No. 230216 (2023) by the seminal Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo. Created in collaboration with master ceramicists, this series demonstrates the artist’s deep interest in clay as a naturally occurring material and how it is transformed in the process of firing. The selection also includes Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 22-38 (2022), which employs his bae-ap-bub technique, a method of pushing paint from the back to the front of the canvas. Ha, a pioneer of the Korean avant-garde and a central figure in Dansaekhwa painting, has recently exhibited his early works including the White Paper on Urban Planning series in Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-70s, currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, following its display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2020-207 (2020) by Korea’s first-generation woman sculptor Kim Yun Shin will also be presented at the booth. As implied by the title, the work explores the sculptural process of adding one’s spirit to the work, where “two becomes one through interaction, then splits again to become two different ones.” The artist—whose inaugural exhibition at Kukje Gallery opens in March—will exhibit in the upcoming 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opening in April. Furthermore, the booth will present Nucleus 73-18 (1973) by Lee Seung Jio, a prominent figure widely recognized for leading geometric abstraction in Korea. The artist, known for his Nucleus series characterized by cool color palettes and repeated pipe-motifs that create contrasting, optically charged compositions, participated in a two-person exhibition with the European master Agostino Bonalumi last year. Moreover, the booth will showcase Moon Jar (2005) by Kil Sung, an innovative ceramic artist who has resurrected traditional forms such as the idodawan, or tea bowl, blending traditional craft with modern aesthetics.  

  The selection will also include various works by Korean contemporary artists, including EWB 09 (2019) by Koo Bohnchang, who has reinterpreted Korean cultural artifacts through a modern lens. Koo is currently presenting the first-ever museum retrospective exhibition Koo Bohnchang’s Voyages at the Seoul Museum of Art in central Seoul. Meanwhile, Face 183 (2017) shot by the celebrated film director Park Chan-wook will showcase his still photography to local collectors. The artist describes his photography practice as an “antidote” to his filmmaking, where spontaneity plays a crucial role. The booth will also introduce Gimhongsok’s Untitled (Short People) Amethyst, Orange, Light Turquoise, Cornflower, Wild Strawberry (2023) from a series of sculptures comprised of inflated balloons cast in bronze 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. Also on view will be Lee Kwang-Ho‘s Untitled 4819-62 (2023) from his series of landscape paintings that depict the Kepler Track wetlands, a highly diverse indigenous ecology in the South Island of New Zealand.   

  Additional selections include Here and Elsewhere – Catherine (2016), a photographic collage and sound piece created by the moving image and installation artist Yeondoo Jung, who was chosen for the MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2023. Jung’s works are known for surrealistic landscapes where the real and the virtual seem to intersect and where he utilizes cinematic framing to invest his seemingly serene subjects with a palpable tension. His works can be found in the collections of major international institutions, including the Leeum Museum of Art, MMCA, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, the Essl Museum, and the Calder Foundation. The booth will also showcase contemporary artist Haegue Yang’s Bifurcating Marigold Vertical Garden (2023), an installation work that evokes a vertical garden using venetian blinds—an industrial yet domestic material that has become a signature of the artist. The artist is currently presenting Haegue Yang: Continuous Reenactments, her inaugural solo exhibition in Finland, at the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM). This past December, Yang joined ArtReview’s Power 100 roster, ranking 71 on the list of the most influential figures in the art world as announced by the British arts magazine.  

  Currently on view from February 1, 2024, at Kukje Gallery’s K2 and K3 spaces in Seoul, is the Korean contemporary artist Gimhongsok’s solo exhibition Normal order aimed at failure. Gim, who has worked across a wide variety of forms and mediums for the past two decades, investigates the gray areas of perceived social order, challenging binary thinking, and probing the tension between Western modernity—observed in social, cultural, political, and artistic practices—and corresponding modes of resistance in the “non-West.”