Trash as Sculpture, Photos as Paintings: A Tale of Artistic Re-creation
Creatrip Team
4 months ago
Two solo shows at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul place a young Korean artist, Jeong Hee-min, alongside Catalan master Joan Miró. Jeong’s “Garden of Anguish” (through Feb 7) transforms digital images into layered paintings and sculptures using 3D processes and gel medium, exploring how technology shapes perception and the uneasy, hybrid surfaces where virtual imagery meets material texture. Works like Folded and Pulled 1 (2025) and Black Leaf Time (2025) blend biological forms and digital distortion to give virtual images renewed material autonomy. Upstairs, “The Language of Sculpture” presents Miró’s late bronze works (1976–82) made in Mallorca, where found objects from local crafts and coastal ecology were recombined into poetic assemblages; the show includes Irving Penn’s 1948 portraits of Miró. The gallery notes a conceptual link: both artists reclaim “found” imagery—Jeong from the digital realm and Miró from everyday objects—to remake meaning in sculpture and painting.
