On the Way to Form

《On the Way to Form》 examines how the works of three artists arrive at form through different materials, processes, and durations. Each artist begins with a clear direction, whether recalling a scene once observed, designing the structure of an image, envisioning a form, or constructing a mold. Yet form is not completed by the initial conception alone. It takes shape through elements of chance embedded in the properties of materials, the movement of the hand, and the effects of time. The three artists negotiate the interplay of these elements in their own ways, following the possibilities that emerge within the work as they search for form.

For Hyounsoo Kyung, form is a new order attained when deliberately accepted errors pass through a process of selection and refinement. For Ahnnlee Lee, it is an image that emerges through the accumulation of observation and memory, association and repeated mark-making. For Sukyung Chung, it is the unpredictable result produced when a meticulous structure, shaped by hand over an extended period, passes through fire, gravity, and the long duration of waiting. The three artists approach form along distinct paths: error and refinement, observation and accumulation, and design and waiting.

Furniture and tools brought from the artists’ studios, together with fragments left behind by the making process, demonstrate how this time also accumulates beyond the artworks themselves. These objects are traces of the time invested in the works, the positions once occupied by the artists’ bodies, and the environments shaped by repeated decisions and actions. The studio is also a place where, within conditions established by the artist, previously unknown forms and relationships can be discovered. The artist may set a direction toward form but cannot control every movement that occurs along the way. The work gradually reveals itself as intention and the unintended, planning and change, control and waiting become intertwined.

More interested in formal qualities than conceptual concerns, Hyounsoo Kyung has long taken naturally curving roads, subway maps, and structures found in topography as starting points for his work. When these structures were accidentally corrupted in Adobe Illustrator, the artist chose not to erase the errors and instead discovered forms that had not previously existed. Small fragments of data extracted from vast road networks were repeatedly distorted and broken down, gradually transforming into curves and planes unrelated to the original terrain. Kyung brought these accidental errors into the work as a way of moving beyond the repetition of familiar abstract forms.

To transfer these digital images onto canvas, the artist uses fine-line tape to preserve sharp edges, applies paint over the surface, and then peels the tape away. This meticulous analog process attempts to reproduce as closely as possible the bright, vivid colors of a backlit screen on the surface of a painting.

In the new works, created through drawing on an iPad rather than in Illustrator, Kyung introduces human expressions into geometric structures, giving each image a distinct personality. Through the familiar element of human expression, the artist hopes to bring the viewer closer to the work and allow his own energy to be conveyed naturally through the image, while anticipating the new energy generated through that encounter.

Kyung describes the studio not simply as a place for painting, but as an analog filter that briefly captures fragments of data circulating through the virtual realms of the internet and digital media and compresses them into the material form of painting. In this quiet and rigorous space of decision-making, insulated from the outside world, he condenses the tension between the coldness of the computer screen and the tremor of the hand onto the surface of the canvas.

Hyounsoo Kyung(b. 1969) studied painting at Chung-Ang University and completed his graduate studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has held solo exhibitions at Lee Eugean Gallery and Willing N Dealing, among others, and participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Arario Gallery, ARKO Art Center, and the Seoul Museum of Art.

Ahnnlee Lee begins with natural materials such as plant matter and marine remnants, transforming them into sensory structures through a range of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. For Lee, who is drawn to gathering, collecting, and combining things, materials are deeply connected to the places and periods that have shaped the artist’s life, as well as to memory and relationships. Every chosen material and every relationship it forms carries its own meaning.

The objects and scenes Ian Lee encounters in everyday life may appear to have been found by chance, but they are in fact the result of sustained observation, filtered through memory, experience, relationships, and sensation. The graphite drawings presented in this exhibition were made while Lee was living in Paris. Circles and triangles, birds and sand, the body of an elderly person, tangerines on a table, and shells on a beach do not remain within the bounds of their observed appearances. Passing through connections among memory and language, emotion and imagination, they shift into unfamiliar forms. Viewed from a distance, the dark forms appear as solid, smooth masses. Up close, however, they reveal themselves to be composed of countless fine pencil lines. The repeated act of mark-making, sustained for months and sometimes years, condenses individual moments into a single surface. The forms appear to possess the solidity of physical matter, yet they also retain the fragility of something that could easily be disturbed by the touch of a hand. Here, form is not an image completed in a single moment, but a state reached through the accumulated repetition of small gestures and time.

Ahnnlee Lee(b. 1985) earned a BFA and an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Lee has held solo exhibitions at Wooson Gallery and ONE AND J. Gallery, among others, and participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including VSF in Los Angeles and HITE Collection.

For Sukyung Chung, who works with glass, an artwork is not made by the artist alone but completed together with the kiln. The process begins with meticulous preparation. She conceives the form, cuts colored, transparent, and sometimes discarded glass into precise pieces with a saw, models the arrangement, and creates molds using wax, silicone, and plaster. Once the glass enters a kiln heated above 800°C together with the mold and the door closes, however, the work leaves the artist’s hands. After passing through fire, gravity, and the unseen time within the kiln, each work comes to contain rule and chance, form and formlessness, designed structure and natural transformation at once.

Inside the kiln, pieces of glass with different densities and properties meet, press against one another, and seep into each other, leaving unexpected traces. As heat and time act upon them, chance gives rise to another order. Chung sees this process as resembling the relationships between people. The countless relationships we form with other people, time and space, objects, and nature collectively shape who we are. The traces, memories, and emotions left by these relationships have neither form nor color, but resemble waves. Chung defines this as “the beauty of relating.”

In this exhibition, Chung brings these difficult-to-describe sensations and emotional waves together with fragments of the plaster molds that entered the kiln. Arranged to form a single rhythm, the installation gives visual form to “the beauty of relating.”

Sukyung Chung(b. 1973) became fascinated with stained glass while in Russia and subsequently studied glass art in the United Kingdom and Korea, developing a distinctive sculptural language through her exploration of architectural structures and abstract forms found in nature. She earned a BA in Glass Design from Moscow Industrial Design Art University and MA degrees in Ceramics and Glass from the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. She also completed doctoral coursework in Industrial Design at Kyung Hee University. Chung has held solo exhibitions at YÉOL Bukchonga, MONOHA, and Gallery Mosoon, among others, and participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Factory2 and Gallery SKLO.