Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) from March 26 to 30, 2024. With 243 participating galleries from 40 countries across Asia, Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, representing a 37% increase compared to last year’s edition, the return of the fair to its pre-pandemic scale is expected to once again place Art Basel Hong Kong at the forefront of the global art market.
In keeping with this expanded scale, this year’s fair will feature an equally diverse array of programs. The main sector, Galleries, will feature a total of 201 galleries, while Encounters, curated for the seventh consecutive year by Alexie Glass-Kantor (Executive Director of Artspace in Sydney and the curator of the Australian pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia) will present 16 large-scale installations; other sectors including Kabinett, Insights, Discoveries, Film, and Conversations will also be on view. At this year’s Encounters, projects by the contemporary artists Haegue Yang and Daniel Boyd will respectively greet visitors inside (Encounters booth EN1) and outside (Pacific Place) of the fair venue. For more information on Encounters, please click on this link to access the relevant press release.
This year, Kukje Gallery presents a comprehensive range of works by both Korean and international contemporary artists. Works on display will include Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture (描法) No. 040424 (2004), painted in a golden-olive hue that echoes nature’s palettes, alongside Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 23-58 (2023), showcasing a beautiful convergence of white and red. Following exhibitions at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Ha is currently featured in the exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Also on view will be the first-generation Korean woman sculptor Kim Yun Shin’s Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2001-691 (2001). Kim was recently announced as a participant of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024, and is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery (K1, K2) that surveys her painting and sculptural work. Made of Algarrobo wood, a unique type of Argentine wood, Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2001-691 captures the material’s innate vitality and presents both an aesthetic and spiritual unification of the inner and outer surfaces of the wood. This year’s selection also includes Nucleus 88-50 (1988) by Lee Seung Jio, a pioneer of Korean geometric abstraction. Lee has been the subject of increased global recognition, following his successful two-person exhibition with the Italian master Agostino Bonalumi at Mazzoleni London last year.
Kim Yong-Ik, currently celebrating his solo exhibition spanning the gallery’s Busan and Seoul Hanok spaces, will also present one of his new paintings, titled Exhausting Project 24-16: Conceptual Painting Disguised as a Retinal Painting (2024). As of December 31, 2018, the artist has been working on Exhausting Project, an ongoing series aiming to “exhaust” all of his remaining paints, colored pencils, and other art supplies within his lifetime. The work of the contemporary artist Jae-Eun Choi, based in Seoul and Tokyo, will also be on view—Choi held her solo exhibition, La Vita Nuova, at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum in Tokyo last year. Her work, From Tear Garden (2016), a collage consisting of aged paper and flower petals, alludes to the artist’s practice of visualizing the passage of time and the cycle of life.
Haegue Yang, whose project at Encounters has quickly emerged as one of the highlights of the sector, will be presenting her Sonic Rope – Aureate Triangle (2023) at the booth. Yang, who is known for her multisensory sculptures that stimulate the senses including sight and sound, will once again engage visitors with a vertical ‘sonic sculpture’ activated by human touch. Yang’s Encounters project, titled Contingent Spheres, will also feature one of her ‘sonic sculptures’ which evokes the Korean folktale of Sister Sun and Brother Moon’s heavenly escape. Also on view will be Jeong #02 (2023-2024), a new work by Suki Seokyeong Kang, whose solo exhibition MARCH is taking place at the gallery’s K3 space. Kang’s Jeong series is based on the Jeongganbo (a musical score created by King Sejong of Joseon Dynasty in the 15th century) that utilizes each square of the character Jeong (井, a Chinese character for a well) as a metaphor for the spatial/social ‘space’ occupied by an individual. Adopting the linear form within the character as an armature, Kang captures an infinite sense of space by composing exquisite compositions via multiple layers of colored silk that embrace the passage of time.
Works by international artists include the celebrated video artist Bill Viola’s Delicate Thread (2012), utilizing the artist’s signature slow-motion technique to evoke a subtle portrayal of time, thereby offering a poignant moment of peace in the midst of the bustling fair. The Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone’s orange red nun (2021), a part of the artist’s large-scale bronze nuns + monks series, will also be featured at the booth. The anthropomorphic sculpture consists of two distinctly painted parts—a single large monolithic stone capped with a smaller headstone. Together, their uncanny balance of finely textured forms and towering proportion exudes a sense of solemnity and divinity. Rondinone is the subject of the major solo exhibition BURN TO SHINE upcoming at Museum SAN, Wonju, Korea (on view from April 6, 2024). Meanwhile, the Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will present Nebe na Prahou (2024), which depicts the sky in a pattern reminiscent of a bull’s-eye on a stainless steel mirror that reflects its surroundings. The First Nations Australian artist Daniel Boyd, who also debuts a major site-specific installation for offsite Encounters this year, will show Untitled (IANATAB) (2024), a new painting featuring his signature convex and translucent dots that translate into ‘lenses’ through which one views the world.
Meanwhile, Kukje Gallery is hosting a series of exhibitions that welcome visitors across its Seoul and Busan locations. Kim Yong-Ik’s solo exhibition Distant and Faraway Utopia, featuring recent works from 2016 until now, including the artist’s latest Exhausting Project series, is on view throughout the gallery’s Busan outpost and Seoul Hanok until April 21, 2024. The solo exhibitions of Kim Yun Shin and Suki Seokyeong Kang are installed across Kukje Gallery Seoul (K1, K2, K3). Kim’s exhibition, which encompasses wood sculptures and paintings created over her prolific career, marks her first solo exhibition since her recent move back to Korea, after having lived in Argentina for almost four decades. Kang’s exhibition, which is also her first exhibition with the gallery, follows her successful solo exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art last year and presents a range of new works that actively expand the artist’s visual language of painting.