NYAB Event - Yi Hwan-Kwon "From the Movies"

Yi Hwan-Kwon "From the Movies"

Gana Art Gallery

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Gana Art presents an exhibition of sculptures by Korean artist Yi Hwan-Kwon. This will be the artist’s first solo U.S. exhibition and will be comprised of his newest body of work, including sculptures from his Movies series.

One of the most widely recognized and admired young Korean sculptors today, Yi Hwan-Kwon’s renown is testament to his focus and originality. His unique, distorted sculptures made of Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) create optical illusions that offer a disorienting exploration of movement, the time-space continuum, and the divergence between two and three-dimensional planes. Yi Hwan-Kwon’s sculptures invite viewers to decipher a blurred perception of a startlingly comforting faux reality.

Yi’s compressed and elongated sculptures are modeled after digitally altered 3-D photographs and portray proportionally distorted yet familiar figures. He sculpts and casts his sculptures in FRP, a highly malleable medium, as they would appear on a wide-screen TV. Sculptures from his Movies Series titled “Leon and Matilda” take their inspiration from scenes remembered from films watched in childhood such as Luc Besson’s Leon and They Call Me Trinity. An avid TV and movie watcher from an early age, Yi yields to his long-standing fantasy of entering cinematic scenes only to recreate and reframe them -- integrating and superimposing random and often opposing properties that result in an improbable yet captivating outcome in a realistic register. According to art critic Yi Heui-Yeong, Yi’s oeuvre is his work of recovering childhood memories: “Yi’s work corresponds to the present in which poignant assertions and serious appeals are often embraced through the recovery of his memories, of growing and transforming organic life forces.”

Yi Hwan-Kwon was born in 1974 and lives and works in Seoul. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Kyung Won University in Korea. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, Seoul, Korea; POSCO Museum, Pohang, Korea; Ander’s Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany; Edwin’s Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia; Edwin’s Gallery & Nus Museum, Singapore; CAIS Gallery, Seoul, Korea and the Pao Galleries, Hong Kong, among other venues.