Full description from the venue
SunGallery presents the group exhibition CHO WEOL JU EUI (Panvital Transcendentalism), on view from August 26 to September 29, 2026. Initiated in November 1990 by art critic Im Doo-Bin, this movement was never merely a new school within the Korean art world. It was a declaration of a new way of seeing: one that sought to move beyond both the loss of communication with the public brought about by the extreme abstraction of the 1970s and the narrow materialist perspective that constrained the socially engaged art of the 1980s. At its heart was a proposition to understand existence not as matter, but as life. Beginning with its inaugural exhibition at Galleria Art Museum, the movement brought the idea of “restoring the value of life” into the heart of the Korean art scene of the 1990s through five group exhibitions and public performances. It was later invited to Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, where the exhibition Transcendence: Light of the East introduced its ideas to an international audience. Rather than emerging from the adoption of Western artistic movements, CHO WEOL JU EUI was born from an independent philosophical reflection rooted in Korea. With the passage of time, the significance of this self-generated artistic movement has become ever clearer. More than three decades later, amid an era marked by conflict, division, and accelerating technological change, the idea that “I and the universe are connected by the thread of life” once again speaks to the present. CHO WEOL JU EUI views existence not as cold matter, but as a profound and mysterious manifestation of life, seeking through art to reaffirm the value and dignity of life within the cosmos.