Gallery Walk: Salvation for Those Who Can — Art as a Question of Survival and Sense
Creatrip Team
a month ago
Gallery Hyundai in Seoul presents eight young artists born after the 1980s under the title 'Sauve qui peut' (translated here as 'Save yourself if you can'). The show gathers work exploring migration, female abstraction, digital imagery, East Asian painting, queer identity and post‑AI painting across three floors. The curator’s stark title suggests emergency, yet the exhibition is neatly organized into themed sections: ‘Movement, Gaps and Drift’ (1st floor), ‘Female Abstraction, Language of the Senses’ (2nd floor) and ‘The Refusing Subject’ (basement). This order both clarifies and limits the works; the show’s strength lies in pieces that quietly slip free of those labels. Han Seon‑woo’s 'Return' ('귀가') remakes online images through Photoshop and AI into oil painting, presenting a hybrid body that no longer fits its home. Lee Hye‑in’s 'Rosa' (a rose and also the artist’s mother’s baptismal name) captures blooming and decay as overlapping temporal states. Other artists, like Jeong Jin‑hwa and Joy Soup, destabilize reverence and identity by smudging figuration or defacing familiar objects (e.g., a tombstone reading 'REST IN POOP', and dismantled instruments in 'Unplaying'). The show argues that names (migration, woman, queer, AI, abstraction) can help visibility but also box artists in. Where art still matters is in pre‑label sensory experience — works that move slowly and persistently beyond tidy categories. The exhibition runs through July 26.
