2GIL

2GIL29 GALLERY has mounted flow, the exhibition of Sookyeok Shin(b. 1967), an assistant professor of Hong Ik University. This is one of the closing exhibitions of 2015. The layered visual depth of his work leads us to “immersion,” and the “flow” of serene thought makes us feel the sublime. The subject taken of this exhibition is the diverse inner streams his work offers. Shin suddenly left Korea to study in Japan after graduating from the Hong Ik University Department of Painting and its graduate school and received a doctorate in painting from Tokyo University of the Arts. He started working in earnest with his first solo show after coming back to Korea in 2009. His work is a study on space and time and light and place where an individual’s situation and experience are remembered and reminisced on through the fluid, reconstructed scenes of a city, an indicator of mundane life. Whereas his previous pieces were explored the nature of the individual and society through a persistent observation and investigation of old buildings and common environments in a city, his latest works of 2015 display simplified depictions of the frames of buildings. Upon closer examination we realize this concept is further expanded. He discloses the multilayered structure of meaning using a technique of embodying form by piling up layers in consecutive order after thinly applying oil paints. This structure realizes the flow of non-visual moments, forming a sort of network. In his works, buildings that seem to float in a vacuum fill his canvas or some parts are reproduced. The buildings lead to a reconsideration of the meanings of reality and unreality, border and imagination, and representation and gaze as things whose sphere is extended to the space of imagination and mental images beyond a physical space. Man or life is formed with memories and the open world with infinite encounters with the past. The buildings he represents in his work are not mere perceptions of the past but a chain of an infinite past existing together with the present and even including the future. Shin’s differentiated research on light, color, and space discloses self-reference and autonomy, enabling viewers to feel the flow of fluid perception and the expansion of infinite senses.