Group Show: you, me and usNov 22, 2024 – Jan 25, 2025

An accumulation of personal choices and preferences – the colours and proportions an artist is inexplicably drawn to, the way their hand works with a certain material, the solutions they find to the problems they pose – the specifics build up. Through each work and across every series, these glimmers of personality culminate, becoming something grander and more universal than a simple reflection of the self.

From a vocabulary of simple shapes and marks, Yoona Hur expresses the breadth of her visual and emotional worlds, playing with a sense of distance and scale to evoke both the interior and exterior, the minute and the magnificent. Her series ‘Inner Garden’ is an intimate, microscopic inspection of the world, a zooming in on its details. Like individual blades of grass, each brushstroke is a completed action, a single sweep of the hand, a moment in time.

Rendered in pure, powdered pigment on Korean hanji paper, Hur’s ‘Inner Knowing’ series is composed entirely of circles and horizons. Both abstract and innately representational, the circle is the sun in the sky, the moon at night, a single cell and the entire world. While this shape draws you in, pulling you into its centre, the horizon line suggests distance, a divide between here and there, near and far – opening up the vast space between the viewer and what lies beyond.

A glossary of similarly universal shapes and forms – images and marks that aren’t figurative per se, but are recognised, instinctive, known – are developed in Nancy Kwon’s work. A mountain range is summoned in a simple sketch; rippling water is captured, its movement stilled; smooth, pebble-like forms appear as if through erosion; and one can trace the indentations of a finger as it is pressed into wet clay, or dragged through it.

A distillation of academic research and her own lived experience, Kwon’s work expresses technical brilliance alongside an exploration of spirituality, culture and family. A rotund, lidded vessel, titled ‘Conception Dream’, is embellished with a vast, mountainous landscape – an image that appeared to the artist many times during her pregnancy. Recalling the shape and proportion of Korean moon jars, another of Kwon’s vessels features a tiger motif, a reference to the conception dream of her great grandmother, who dreamt of her son as a tiger inside a clay pot.

A series of carved clay spirals with cragged edges and coarse surfaces resonate at a deeper level beyond words. Like fossils, these objects feel as if they were unearthed from another time, their meaning and intended use unbeknownst to us. Ceramic tiles coated in a thin, milky glaze are presented in diptychs and triptychs; explorations of heat and material, these fragments wholeheartedly avoid representation and remain resolutely ambiguous.

Myoung-Ae Lee evokes a similar sensation in her work, using the language of abstraction to give shape to ideas that exist in the collective consciousness, namely “the relationship between you, me and us – between objectivity and subjectivity, the whole and the individual.”

Thick chunks of material – composed in layers of cardboard, linoleum, linen and hanji - are presented as an integral object, a single piece. Created in pursuit of the autonomy of the surface, these freeform structures offer the artist a substantial interplay between the surface and the subject. Painted a deep brown, these shaped ‘canvases’ are host to small flecks of colour and grainy brushstrokes, a collage of textures and techniques.

Raw hemp and cotton, burlap and twine – the coarseness of her chosen materials reveals the details of their construction, their warp and weft laid bare so that the artist might capture something of the delight and horror of pulling at a loose thread…

There is an unpicking at play, a purposeful fraying of the edges, a meaningful deconstruction. Drawing attention to both the individual strand and the interwoven structure, each artist presents a nuanced vision of fragility and strength, the singular and the collective.