- Artist Jiyoon Koo Gyungjin Shin Jong Oh
Schematic Drawing
2010 Charcoal 45 x 34.5 in
Subtle Anxiety: This Is How You Feel Now
Jiyoon Koo, Jong Hyun Oh and Gyungjin Shin
July 15 – August 14, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 15, 6-8 pm
DOOSAN Gallery New York is pleased to announce Subtle Anxiety: This Is How You Feel Now, a group exhibition of three young Korean artists─Jiyoon Koo, Jong Hyun Oh and Gyungjin Shin. The exhibition will be on view from July 15 through August 14.
In psychoanalytic terms, anxiety is characterized as an unpleasant feeling, typically accompanied by uneasiness, nervousness, fear or worry. Feelings of anxiety are generated from witnessing overwhelming visual images of an accident, such as an automobile crash, a disastrous event like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a war, a natural disaster, or even from watching a series of TV commercials that constantly lure us into unnecessary urges to buy. Therefore, anxiety has become a rather generalized mood or condition, which reflects the present society; it seems to be a somewhat subtle phenomenon and it is hard to detect the specific reasons that actually cause it. This exhibition captures the invisible anxiety in our current culture and transforms it into visual languages through a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, video and site-specific installation.
Ironically, this anxiety motivates and accelerates artists to create imagery, and its outcome gives the viewer a great illusion of how we feel; it might also be a visual representation of what we have been facing. The artists presented in this exhibition share the common denominator of existential anxiety, which brings about obsessive behavior, panic, fear, boredom, and emptiness.
Jiyoon Koo creates an abstract painting, which was inspired by a social phenomenon that are always being destroyed and replaced with another such as construction sites. The circle of violence in urban development is a constant theme for her and she tries to encapsulate a numbing aftereffect of this cruel cycle of construction and destruction of buildings in a city. Jong Hyun Oh uses banal materials, such as fish wires or clear plastics, to make site-specific installations, which is a rather poignant, fragile way of physically showing the tension of space. Even though these vulnerable objects produce an unsettling tension right before they are about to unravel, Oh exquisitely balances them out within an inch of falling apart. Gyungjin Shin investigates her idea of “identity in flux,” which represents her fluid self, constantly changing, and dying in every moment, with a performance video and an installation.