Art Sonje Center presents the exhibition Night Turns to Day from December 28, 2019 to February 9, 2020.

Though we assign meaning to the passage of years, time is merely a continuing expanse. Twenty years have passed since all the fuss over the “21st century,” and while we would like to believe the world is moving in a slightly better direction, we also look back and wonder what has really changed. Time has flowed amidst the vicissitudes as people have joined forces and strived to turn moments of doubt into hope, only to be thwarted once again. For Night Turns to Day, we join five women artists to look at time as its passes now, speaking to the things that have changed, the things that haven’t changed, and the things that must change. Eunyoung Kang, Chorong An, Song Min Jung, Jiyoung Yoon, and Hyein Lee have each pursued different approaches, working in their respective media of plants, photography, video, sculpture, and painting. This single setting brings together the work of Lee Hyein, who juxtaposes the process of painting with its results to record time and object together; Chorong An, who uses different forms of installation to explore the ways in which photography captures particular scenes and records the associated time; Eunyoung Kang, a flower shop owner and artist who shows narrative imagination through her arrangements of plants; Jiyoung Yoon, who has gone from exploring methods of physically embodying psychological and relational circumstances like “sacrifice” to experimenting with sculpture-based subversion of the structures of inequality distorted by longstanding mythology; and Song Min Jung, who interrogates the present moment with video work that cuts across multilayered timelines and settings where darkness and light intersect. Their different works of art each adopt a different approach to looking back on the past and recording time, yet all of them converge upon female narrators and female narratives. Remembering a past where we have witnessed close and distant tragedy so often that it seems like old news, the exhibition looks ahead to the as yet unfamiliar number that is “2020.”

Eunyoung Kang (b. 1985)

Eunyoung Kang studied at Hongik University with a major in engraving and minor in Eastern painting. She creates images of plants and flowers under a concept of layers that creates images in engraving. She has sought out the similarities between engravings and plants in her Photosensitive Life (B½F, 2015) and curated and participated in Cross-plane (Gallery OOOJH, 2018). In 2017, she collaborated with Gloryhole for the 2017 Gwangju Design Biennale. She has also taken part in Garden of Sins (Elephantspace, 2018) and created a flower garden for the stage of Park Minhee’s Chunmyeongok (Spring Indolence).

Song Min Jung (b. 1985)

Song Min Jung graduated in contemporary art from Konkuk University. She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions including the Asian Film and Video Art Forum (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2019), Young Artists Korea (MMCA, 2019), PRO-TEST (SeMA Bunker, 2019), Perform (Ilmin Museum of Art), and Lotus Land (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2017). Her solo exhibitions include COLD MOOD (1000% soft point) (Tastehouse, 2018) and Double Deep Hot Sugar-The Romance of Story (B½F, 2016).

Chorong An (b. 1987)

Chorong An is a photographer who explores the flexibility and possibility of the photographic medium as something that can be converted into different forms and materials. The beginning of her work in the photographic medium came with her independent publication Passive Objects (2015), for which she assembled photographs of objects that served as motifs in three-dimensional work. Since forming the photography due CO/EX with Joowon Kim in 2016, she has focused on ways of presenting photographs in space according to specific rules and the methods of translation for photographic images that have acquired a physical “body.” Her major exhibitions include Seoul Babel (Seoul Museum of Art, 2016), Honey and Tip (archive bomm, 2017), Phantom Arm (SeMA, 2018), and PRO-TEST (SeMA Bunker, 2019), and she also took part in planning for the photography exhibition/sale platform The Scrap.

Jiyoung Yoon (b. 1984)

Jiyoung Yoon’s interest lies in showing the attitudes adopted by the individual to live “better” or to “improve” when presented with the environment of a particular incident or situation. Her work is also based on an interest in different ways of showing hidden “structures of sacrifice.” Her recent exhibitions include Carpenter’s Scene (Insa Art Space, 2019), Aging World (SeMA, 2019), Ecological Sense (Nam June Paik Art Center, 2019), and We don’t really die (ONE AND J. Gallery, 2019).

Hyein Lee (b. 1981)

Hyein Lee’s artistic work is based on an interest in painting as a way of perceiving with immediacy the environmental conditions faced by the individual body. She has taken part in residency programs at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2013), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2014), and DOOSAN Gallery New York (2015). In addition to her solo exhibitions Perfect Days (Daegu Art Museum, 2013) and Sync (Sindoh Art Space, 2018), she has also participated in the exhibitions Artist File 2015: Next Doors (MMCA/National Art Center, Tokyo, 2015), Under My Skin (Hite Collection, 2016), and Will you be there? (Project Fulfill Art Space, Taipei, 2018).

Opening Reception 2020. 12. 27, 5pm