Frieze and Kiaf Seoul 2025 may have closed their doors, but Korea’s autumn art season is far from over. Beyond the market-driven spectacle of art fairs, two solo exhibitions now open in Seoul and Busan remind us of art’s deeper function: to question, to unsettle, and to prompt reflection. Park Young-hoon at Kwanhoon Gallery and Bang Jeong-a at Gallery Mac approach this task from strikingly different angles, yet both invite us to reconsider how we live today.
Park Young-hoon at Kwanhoon Gallery: Estrangement as Reflection
At Park Young-hoon Kwanhoon Gallery, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the venue, Invisible Precious Things 2025, transforms the gallery’s two floors into a field of optical play and memory work.
Park is known for his unconventional use of materials—spraying automotive pigments across aluminum panels and layering adhesive tape in dotted formations. The results shimmer with shifting wavelengths of light, resembling digital pixels on a screen yet grounded in a tactile, manual process.
This exhibition marks a further step in his exploration of dépaysement—the strategy of displacing familiar objects into unexpected contexts. Plastic toys, childhood characters, souvenirs, and consumer detritus lose their original function and instead become vessels of memory. In their dislocation, they conjure both personal attachments and shared cultural recollections. What was once trivial is reactivated, charged with a sense of estrangement that prompts viewers to rediscover forgotten emotions.
Bang Jeong-a at Gallery Mac: Embracing Contradictions
Further south in Busan’s Haeundae district, Bang Jeong-a Gallery Mac is presenting The Person Who Doesn’t Distinguish Between Water and Fire. Bang, long recognized for her realist paintings that cut sharply into the contradictions of contemporary society, here expands her practice into new materials and formats.
Around 20 works are on view, spanning canvas paintings, silk-based works, and paintings rendered directly on cotton batting—the inner filling of quilts. The exhibition’s title comes from the opening line of her notebook: “I like water, and I like fire.” Rather than suggesting simple openness, it conveys her determination to confront life’s contradictions head-on.
Her images stage encounters between disparate elements: a leopard seen from a bus window paired with a woman clutching a leopard-print bag; a figure immersed in a fish spa, face frozen in detachment; another buried under a zebra-patterned blanket. These juxtapositions capture the paradoxes of daily life with uncanny clarity. Among the highlights are two monumental cotton works first unveiled at Kiaf Seoul 2025, now shown alongside silk and large-scale canvas pieces that push the very boundaries of painting’s materiality.
Two Artists, Two Languages of Inquiry
Park’s estranged objects reveal invisible sensations and forgotten memories, intertwining the personal with the social. Bang’s juxtapositions of opposites—water and fire, predator and prey, comfort and unease—lay bare the contradictions that structure our reality. One artist prompts reflection through the uncanny; the other embraces paradox to illuminate tension.
Together, their exhibitions remind us that art, beyond fairs and markets, is a space where estrangement becomes self-reflection and contradiction becomes inquiry.
Invisible Precious Things 2025 continues at Park Young-hoon Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul through October 22, while The Person Who Doesn’t Distinguish Between Water and Fire runs at Bang Jeong-a Gallery Mac in Busan until November 1.
Sayart / Maria Kim sayart2022@gmail.com
