HRD FINE ART

Introduction

HRD Fine Art is delighted to announce an opening of a two-man exhibition showcasing work of Ayako Kurihara of Japan and Sojin Yeom of Korea, titled "The Game Must Go On," from June through August.

Both Kurihara and Yeom create artworks without limiting the media they work with, including painting, drawing, video, and installation, freely leaping over barriers of material and technique.

Kurihara's major series is titled "Mind Games," which she has been working on for several years. Based on the rules of a popular go-like board game called "Othello," she creates a painting by alternately stamping or dropping two contrasting paints, eventually filling up the gridded canvas, etc. Sometimes adopting performance, interactivity, and video creation, Kurihara hints at game-like aspects of our world and the rules that govern us. For this exhibition she will also perform work-in-progress creation in the gallery, and the exhibits will be constantly changing throughout the exhibition period.

Sojin Yeom inquires into the state of humanity and human relationship in modern society where digitization is the watchword and the Internet strongly affects our lives. Within the cyber space, we are forced to (or willing to) play the roles of virtual characters, just like in those role-playing video games. It might be said that Yeom, through her artwork creation, is performing a delicate balancing act between virtuality and reality. For this exhibition Yeom presents a group of works inspired by her visit in Singapore, a country which is now a global IT frontrunner and often dubbed "world's testing ground" or "artificial nation."

The game must go on - we play the game of life that we never complete, and what do we win and what do we lose in it? This exhibition aims to provide new perspectives to these rather philosophical questions through the work of Kurihara and Yeom, both of whom seem to face the questions themselves seriously, but not without a sense of humor.

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Supported by Kuramaguchi Art Institute, Kyoto (KAIK)
Video equipment cooperation by Keita Hayashi
Material cooperation by Fukunishi Washi Honpo