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Global Sindoh

Sindoh Art Space holds Solo Exhibition of the Master of Modern Art, Kwak Duk-jun

※ This exhibition is closed for public viewing for the purpose of preventing the spread of Covid-19. We apologize for any inconvenience.

 

Sindoh, a company specializing in 2D & 3D is holding a solo exhibition of Kwak Duk-jun who has expressed his reflections on society and existence. His Solo Exhibition will be held until June 24th at Sindoh Art Space in Seongsu-dong, Seoul.

 

Kwak Duk- Jun is a Korean-born Japanese artist who is known for his works covering a wide range of modern artistic genres, from painting, lithography, and video to installation, in Korea and Japan.

 

Moreover, we can see his early paintings using traditional Japanese dyeing techniques which were drew in the mid-1960s, when he began his career as an artist after a long struggle with tuberculosis at this exhibition.

 

With no invitation given, the upcoming exhibition is closed for public viewing for the purpose of preventing the spread of Covid-19.

 

An outsider who belonged to neither Korea nor Japan

 

 

Face without a Hope, 1969

 

Born in 1937 in Kyoto, artist Kwak Duck-Jun in Japan was stripped of his Japanese citizenship and given an immigrant status in accordance with the Treaty of San Francisco after World War II ended, because his parents were Koreans who moved to Japan during the Japanese colonial period. As a Japanese-born Korean and an outsider who belonged to neither Korea nor Japan, artist Kwak Duck-Jun lived a unique life. His personal anguish—from birth to adulthood—about his social status and origin of existence is expressed throughout all his works via unique and varying styles and methods.

 

He spent his childhood in Japan and majored Japanese Arts at Hiyoshigaoka High School, Kyoto, Japan, in 1955. After the graduation, Kwak Duck-Jun actively held various solo exhibitions not only in Japan but also in major art galleries in overseas.

 

Kwak Duck-Jun gained his reputation in Korea for the first time by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Artist of the Year exhibition held in 2003. A year later his art works were praised by the art community for its special exhibition at the Osaka National Museum of Art, 2014.

 

Furthermore, he held solo exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art (1992), Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts (1999), and Busan Museum of Art (2001) and at various other museums.

 

His unique world of art started to take shape during 70s

 

The newly opened exhibition features artworks by artist Kwak Duck-Jun who has gained international fame through his experimental projects, which are known to have demolished the absoluteness of previously standardized concepts. The show highlights his early works employing traditional Japanese color-dying methods in particular from the mid-1960s when he started to walk the path of an artist after overcoming pulmonary tuberculosis.

 

After three long years of struggling to overcome pulmonary TB, his world of art, coming alive in brilliant hues, captured the sense of isolation and human bondage and his internal fight to win back life.

 

 

Clinton and Kwak, 1993, C-print, 150 x 105 cm

 

 

Kwak Duck-Jun, Repetition 792, 1979,

Mixed media on wooden panel, 70x100

 

During the following 1970s, his unique world of art started to take shape as he began to work on conceptual works. Video works featuring his own body including his representative work “President Kwak series,” in addition to “Repetition” from the 1980s and “無意味(Meaninglessness)” from the 1990s until today, repeatedly asked the paradox of duality of the world and exposed the fabrication of truth through his style of ironic humor and cynicism concerning relations between society and individuals, reality and consciousness, and distance between media and personal ownership.

 

 

TIME. December. 21. 1981 Drawing,

oil, paper on canvas, 130.3x162cm

 

 

<Exhibition Overview>
Place: Sindoh art space (3, Seongsu-ro 24-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul)
Date: 2021~4.21Wed ~2021. 6~24 Thursday
Opening Hours: 10:00 am ~ 5:00 pm (Closed on weekend, public holidays)