PARIS — October 2025. ARARIO GALLERY will participate in Asia NOW 2025, held at Monnaie de Paris from October 21 to 26, 2025. At Booth S05, the gallery will showcase four Korean artists — KIM Soun-Gui (b.1946), LEE Jinju (b.1980), Yohan HÀN (b.1983), and CHA Hyeonwook (b.1987) — highlighting the evolving intersections between tradition and contemporary experimentation in Korean art.

Representing distinct generations, these artists engage with the aesthetic continuum of East Asia while expanding it through diverse media including painting, installation, photography, and performance. Together, they offer a multi-dimensional view of how materiality, spirit, and thought converge in today’s Korean contemporary art.

A pioneer of Korean experimental art, KIM Soun-Gui has lived and worked in France since the 1970s, developing a practice that bridges video, sound, performance, and philosophy. At Asia NOW, she presents works from her Foolish Photography series, created with a lensless pinhole camera, and Lottery Village (1999), an installation composed of discarded lottery fragments. Both works question the perception of reality and critique neoliberal society’s structure of desire.

LEE Jinju reinterprets the techniques of traditional Korean painting through layered compositions that blend dreamlike imagery and psychological depth. Her Black Painting series and new Shaped Canvas works evoke intimate narratives of memory, anxiety, and recovery through subtle pigment and brushwork rooted in East Asian aesthetics.

Through sculpture, performance, and installation, Yohan HÀN explores the body’s rhythm and gesture using drums made of animal hide — historically spiritual objects — as a sculptural medium. His works transform this ritual instrument into a vessel of physical memory and material resonance, bridging ancient symbolism with contemporary form.

CHA Hyeonwook visualizes emotion through color and motion, layering pigment on hanji (traditional Korean paper) using repetitive dry brushwork. His paintings reveal lines born from pressure and rhythm, embodying the coexistence of Eastern sensitivity and Western abstraction.

Through this presentation, ARARIO GALLERY illuminates the depth and diversity of Korean contemporary art, where tradition is not static but continuously reborn through dialogue with global contexts. The exhibition underscores the gallery’s long-standing commitment to positioning Korean artists within the broader discourse of international contemporary art.

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