Pipe Gallery is presenting “Threshold,” a three-person exhibition featuring Kim Chansong, Lim Jihyun and Hwang Wonhae, from Oct. 6–31.
The exhibition approaches a threshold as both a boundary dividing spaces and a point where different sensations and forms of existence meet. Its works examine how divisions between inside and outside, reality and image, and subject and painting become unstable through contact.
Kim Chansong explores moments when the body loses its apparent solidity and is perceived as a fluid or unfamiliar physical object. Her earlier works fragmented or enlarged parts of the body and obscured faces to reconsider the relationship between the viewing subject and the observed body.
Her recent practice focuses more closely on skin. Rather than treating it solely as the body’s outer boundary, Kim presents skin as a living surface that encounters the external world, passes through time and records traces of contact. Physiological responses such as sweat indicate how the body interacts with its surroundings before conscious thought.
Lim Jihyun begins with the vitality and forms found in plants and other natural objects. She enlarges and transforms observed shapes while rubbing and pressing against the canvas to generate new images.
Through repetition and overlapping gestures, forms emerge and dissolve across Lim’s paintings. The original subject becomes less important than the process through which it is broken apart and reconstructed. Her work treats painting as a changing field of perception rather than a fixed representation.
Hwang Wonhae examines the surfaces and outer structures of urban architecture. She focuses on façades, glass, reflected screens and distortions that complicate the distinctions between interior and exterior, reality and image, and flatness and volume.
Concrete architectural forms and abstract images overlap in Hwang’s paintings without either becoming fully dominant. The city appears not as a completed structure but as a shifting surface marked by movement, time and the unstable position of the body within it.
Although the three artists begin with different subjects, their works share an interest in surfaces where boundaries are formed and disrupted. “Threshold” considers those boundaries not as fixed lines but as sites of contact, change and renewed perception.
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Maria Kim sayart2022@gmail.com
