Butterfly out of Eden: Texturing the immaterial

Min Jungyeon – “Jalousie”

“Butterflies out of Eden”, the current group exhibition at Fellini Gallery, presents eight Paris-based artists who have left their motherland of Korea to establish themselves in the country of the first ready-mades. The outcome is a body of work that is conceptual as well as aesthetic.

Influenced by their personal experiences in France and by post-structuralist theory, the artists present their ideas on existential phenomenology and on the textures of memory and consciousness.

Lee Soonyoung – “Nocturnal Thinking”

For example, Lee Soonyoung’s photographed dioramas are comprised of interiors filled with objects and invaded by overgrown plants. They recall Alice In Wonderland, or Boris Vian’s Froth On The Daydream. The artist has created and captured a zone where the real, the possible and the imaginable meet. Quite the reverse, Lee Sangwon’s watercolours represent people practicing leisure outdoor activities. They are reminiscent of photographs by Martin Parr or Andreas Gursky. Leisure is a context where people can be seen more objectively, and Lee Sangwon is depicting society in all impartiality; making its bare weft threads appear.

Lee Sangwon – “Snow boarder” (2012), watercolor on paper

Lee Jeongwoo – “Gare de Boulainvilliers”

While Chung Kwanghwa is materializing the substance of memory, Min Jungyeon depicts a fantastical and organic world. Chung is casting objects out of plaster, staged in a white evanescent environment created out of delicate plaster powder. Rather than relating memories, the artist is materializing them. This scenery is white like a movie screen; we can project what we want onto it, revealing the multiplicity of memory. Min Jungyeon’s landscapes evoke cancerous cells, or can be reminiscent of animation film Akira’s famous mutation scene. They look realistic on a large scale, and fantastical in their details. She creates a space of investigation connecting the virtual and the real, revealing to where the climax of imagination can lead.

The Butterflies detect living possibilities, or determine a meeting point between reality and imagination. They make various threads of living appear, or they materialize the texture of memory and stretch imagination, ultimately texturing the immaterial.

Chung Kwanghwa – “La Palette”