After a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Jukhee Kwon went on to study at Camberwell College of Arts in London, where she obtained a Master’s degree in Book Arts.
All her highly protean and surprising plastic art revolves exclusively around books. These highly poetic works are always three-dimensional, even if they sometimes take the form of a Western-style painting. She never renounces her culture; on the contrary, she impresses it on us with refinement and modesty. Books becomes organic. In and around them, new life bursts forth and unfolds. It’s as if nature is reclaiming its rights over culture. The function of books is removed: you don’t have to read them, you have to see them.
The fragility of the works plays a central role in the viewer’s perception. It inspires respect and benevolence. It gives us access to a form of spirituality, without irony or sarcasm. The repetition of meticulous elements together constitutes a work of patience. Is it any wonder, then, that her studio is located in Italy, near Rome, in a former convent? It was there, for example, that she found abandoned books that she recycles in her work. As the artist herself tells us, through her work she reproduces, in her own way, the prayers her mother used to say in the temple for her family and friends.
It’s clear that the artist’s culture is at the heart of her work. It is her intentionality that gives meaning to her work, not a kind of formalism. This is where she resolutely distances herself from any Western heritage. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said: to be a formalist is not to love form too much, but to love it so little that you detach it from meaning.
Especially as in Jukhee Kwon’s work, the extraordinary diversity of forms in her works unambiguously celebrates the productive force of nature, as if in a play of mirrors. Through a poetic metric in its forms, language makes a comeback. We hear the wind, a waterfall, a bird returning to its nest, the murmur of the growth of things, the migratory flight of birds, the paper meanderings that trace paths on the ground...
Ultimately, the Western heritage that seems closest to the artist’s work is Romanticism, the artistic movement that gives nature an essential place. Thinking about the profound relationships that make us beings of nature is a primordial task that we must accomplish again today.
In her art, Jukhee Kwon practises a form of humility in her relationship with nature that opens the way to a concrete spirituality. This is why she transforms culture into nature: books are alive.
After a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Jukhee Kwon went on to study at Camberwell College of Arts in London, where she obtained a Master’s degree in Book Arts.
All her highly protean and surprising plastic art revolves exclusively around books. These highly poetic works are always three-dimensional, even if they sometimes take the form of a Western-style painting. She never renounces her culture; on the contrary, she impresses it on us with refinement and modesty. Books becomes organic. In and around them, new life bursts forth and unfolds. It’s as if nature is reclaiming its rights over culture. The function of books is removed: you don’t have to read them, you have to see them.
The fragility of the works plays a central role in the viewer’s perception. It inspires respect and benevolence. It gives us access to a form of spirituality, without irony or sarcasm. The repetition of meticulous elements together constitutes a work of patience. Is it any wonder, then, that her studio is located in Italy, near Rome, in a former convent? It was there, for example, that she found abandoned books that she recycles in her work. As the artist herself tells us, through her work she reproduces, in her own way, the prayers her mother used to say in the temple for her family and friends.
It’s clear that the artist’s culture is at the heart of her work. It is her intentionality that gives meaning to her work, not a kind of formalism. This is where she resolutely distances herself from any Western heritage. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty said: to be a formalist is not to love form too much, but to love it so little that you detach it from meaning.
