HRD FINE ART

Introduction

We are pleased to announce our first exhibition of the year 2019, which showcases the paintings by Korean artist Hyunjung Kim titled "Razzle Dazzle," opening on March 1st. This exhibition will be the artist's first ever solo exhibition in Japan, too.

Hyunjung Kim paints landscapes and sceneries that she has encountered in everyday life, which are banal and ordinary, by applying thin and subtle layers of oil paints onto her canvases. Some are based on what she actually saw and experienced, some are based on images taken from the Internet and other sources. Either way, her starting points are photos or digital images, somewhat detached from her real, physical experiences and memories.

Some of her paintings require several months of intense work, forcing her to face those all-too-banal subject matters through myriad of brushstrokes. This painstaking process would then result in new emotions and physical experiences: ordinary subject matters, exquisite painting practice, and the time consumed and emotions amassed all that while, all come together to form a kind of complexly layered fabric. That fabric of emotions in turn affects the viewer’s memories and emotions, giving birth to a new "reality" that goes beyond superficial "realism."

The title of this exhibition, "razzle dazzle," is an English slung that refers to glitter, panache, gorgeousness typically used in the field of entertainment business. It is somewhat miraculous that, ordinary, even desolate sceneries painted by Hyunjung Kim would ignite bright, glittering sparkles of emotions inside our minds.