Young Soo Kim, Jiyoung Park, Seung-hwan Yun, Cho Jung Hye’s contributions to the Kate Oh group exhibition, “Urban Wave”, can be cleaved into three intersecting branches: textural assemblage (to which Young Soo Kim and Jiyoung Park’s works belong), naturalism (Seung-hwan Yun’s domain) and geometric abstraction (where Cho Jung-Hye’s patterns traipse). Young Soo Kim’s cryptically titled works, F2401-1-Fragments and Field2401-1-1-Something scattered (both 2024) are telling, descrying where, exactly, the rapprochement between the artists variegated might be located: nature. Albeit, “nature” is not a particularly elucidating concept—insofar as the entirety of the “furniture of the world” and all states of affairs can be subsumed within the ontological category of “nature”, it is a loose class. These artists are dealing with a more particular conception of nature, one where nature taken to be a series of composites subtending the vicissitudes of earth’s surface—it is “nature” as understood colloquially, through the paradigm of the wilderness’ call and waves’ crest; the German Romantic inculcation of nature, betoken as phenomena simultaneously set against and besides ¬¬man. Each of these four artists espy nature so told, taking it up rather successfully.

Cho Jung-Hye’s The Maze/The Road Without a Road and Ripple are, at first glance, the furthest from the barren wilderness. The former work contains an intersecting, mandala-like maze without any of the symbol’s devotional airs. It is cleanly executed, Jung-Hye’s warp and weft recalling Dan Walsh’s patterning of lozenges and Agnes Martin’s matrices. The Maze/The Road Without a Road also makes inventive material use of mother-of-pearl, which allows for it to glean with a luminescence. This gleam indicates that whichever glance of nature we are privy to here is not nature containing or deracinating an image of the empirical world. In this sense, Jung-Hye’s work is diametrically opposed to Seung-hwan Yun’s photographic mixed-media sepia-soaked crags and spindling trees. Jung-Hye is instead concerned with patterning natural phenomena, tracking the ocean’s wave or plant’s conatus into an isomorphy of lines. Ripple bespeaks to the ripples of pools but would equally be effective as a representation of a tree’s rings (which, itself, is a representation of age). The eponymous ripples’ bisected mother of pearl (a choice media for the artist), in its silver and coal black bisections, suggests movement. The artist does something sculptural here—something wrapped in the optical—without quite traipsing into “op-art” or kineticism. The movement is but suggested, both here and in the artist’s interlaced mazes. Although the optical facets of the work cede movement, where nature is exacted, it is not ocular but a representation of natural phenomena mapping movement. Jung-Hye’s artist statement, which cites “chaos” as the fundamental idiom of the world, is itself in keeping with the mathematical reduction of phenomena. The artist has achieved such a reduction effectively, keeping percipient’s perceptually engaged.

Yun’s aforementioned sepia stones and trees are empyreal if not elegiac. These are works that present the wilderness as we perceptually receive it, but only to a limited degree; they invite the color-bedaubed world only to shirk its tones and reduce it to shadows. The forensic titles, Jeju Wimi Port-Hyeonmuam and 1063 Sunheul-ri Jeju are precise enough to, paradoxically, proffer bewilderment: the lost percipient asks themselves, “where are we looking?” It is a lost question. The distancing effect of the title is itself undercut by the familiarity that these wilderness scenes exude; they feel as if they were plucked from a dream. The adumbrated stone faces suggest the texture of wilderness, an uneven coarseness readily manifest in Young Soo Kim’s F2401-1-Fragments and Field2401-1-Something Scattered. The former’s charcoal cleaves and ridges, evenly arranged into a protruding rectangle, are almost violent. The work’s jagged black teeth threaten to erupt or parcel on the ground as smooth shards. F2401-1-Fragments is, in its contracted layering, more frenzied than Field2401-1-Something scattered, which posits five charcoal stones amongst an Yves Klein-like deep blue dehydrated plane of craquelure crinkles. The piece is reminiscent of the ocean and desiccated desert earth, an apt synthesis of the wilderness’s opposites. Unlike F2401-1-Fragments, it also does not betray nature as a threat. Although man is present nowhere in the artists’ work, the viewer of Field2401-1-Something scattered feels at home in the world. Yun has effectively demonstrated the twin poles of nature, the Heraclitean force of nature-as-movement and the Parmenidean static univocity.

Lastly, Jiyoung Park’s Because I’m here and Maybe I’m standing here naked (both 2024) make the wilderness thoroughly alien, albeit without transfiguring it into an object demanding a victor. The works are less about poetry than man’s place—his original position—in the wild. Like Yun’s sepias, the natural semblance is here distanced. In Park’s work, however, this leitmotif is affected through representational devices and the figure’s relationality to them. Park does not discern a man/nature delineation but instead, and in a manner that resembles De Chirico’s adumbrated arcades, congeals the wild world into a rhythm. The works are, as the de Chirico reference suggests, almost Surrealist. Because I’m here evinces a legged boulder, the five upright ashen figures becoming one with the structure they uphold; the Sisyphean tale’s recurrent tragedy is sublated via collaboration. This is the optimistic image of man. In Maybe I’m standing here naked the same figures turn away, floating ghostly heads wrapping their legs. Here, man is consumed by that which surrounds it. Maybe I’m standing here naked is formally impressive, making incisive use of perspective, the peopling figures drifting into infinitude. Its theoretical insights are even more rewarding. The de-faciliazed figures become monuments, growing into and then stalking away from a mist-topped cold land.

These artists, despite their diversity in style and penchants for different media, all deal with one of the most fundamental questions of being: the very concept through which we, mankind, distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. They engage this matter, which has for the entirety of art history captured even the most cosmopolitan limner, with great dexterity.

(Text by Ekin Erkan)