Um Jae Guk
solo show
11/24~11/30, 2025

Um Jae Guk’s exhibition, Ludens art, broadly draws on the theme of ludere, or “play”, as conceived of in cultural theorist Johan Huizinga’s treatise, Homo ludens: a study of the play element in culture (1938). The exhibition is something of an intermedia Gesamtkunstwerk, including Cobalt-Klein blue canvases punctuated by spilled, ribboning impasto skeins, droplet- besmirched textiles, and vari-colored ttakji toys whose thick rectangular folds are painted in motley azure, chartreuse, and speckled strokes. Creme-colored and unspooling fingerless gloves tacked on an upright panel grow threadbare as the fabric spills into a cascade below. A glowing ultramarine canvas, inspired by Yves Klein’s palette, sits, punctured by slit pocks that suggest a thrusting-piercing mechanism. Although this work in particular does not represent any perforating device, in another canvas we find such a tool impaling rust-red and flecked-white globules, beaded along the picture plane.
Each of Um Jae Guk’s works is steeped in a kind of sensorial archival history that admits of usage past, including apparently purposive tool- and garment-use rendered unusable by way of artistic predication. In turn, the objects are, as the artist themselves notes, “poetic metaphors” that home in on the notion of authorial creation vs. audience participation. In particular, the richly colored ttakji, counterposed with the static canvases, evince this dichotomy. In this manner, Guk is working in a rich tradition that includes artists like Steve Balkin, Richard Tuttle to Scott Buron, each of whom created phenomenologically attuned toy-based works during the latter half of the 20th century. In addition to such artistic precedents, Um Jae Guk’s installation- based enterprise is preceded by venerable exhibitions like Betty Parsons’ 1963-64 Toys by artists and the 1975 exhibition, Artists make toys at The Clocktower Gallery, each of which was galvanized by aspiration to collapse categorial divisions between a self-standing static work and aleatory audience participation.
Hongbin Kim
solo show
Oct 28 ~ Nov 15,2025

