OVERVIEW

LOCATION : 8th Floor, Imperial Palace Hotel, 248-7, Nonhyun-dong, Gangnam-gu Seoul, 135-010 Korea
FAIR DATES : Friday, 11. 25 - Sunday, 11. 27, 2011 11 am - 8 pm

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SPECIAL PROGRAMS

Dongbang Yogoi_On the Doors
Curated by art in culture

There is Dongbang Yogoi at Doors Art Fair! Dongbang Yogoi is a special program run by the monthly art magazine, art in culture, with the aim of introducing and promoting young and emerging Korean artists. The word, Dongbang Yogoi means weird Yogoi (artists) in hopes that these sensation-making creators will lead the next generation of Korean art around the hub of Asian and world art. The program has played a significant role as a door and a pathway to support recent art school graduates who might fall into highly-educated but unemployed status right after graduating, to start off smoothly as professional artists in the real art world.
6 selected artists in art in culture's "Dongbang Yogoi_On the Doors" at Doors Art Fair 2011 work in various genres including painting, installation and photography. The mediums used and how they were treated may seem familiar, and yet we can't fail to notice the intensity and sharpness of these young artists addressing their issues in the meeting or confrontation with society. The energy of "meeting and clashing" of these Yogoi will create a synergy in Doors Art Fair that was initiated with a mission of supporting the emerging spirit in art.
Sangwon Kwak is interested in reorganizing and synthesizing fragmented stories alleged in articles taken from mass media. Kwak says his work takes an "imaginary telescope" to look closely at reality. The juxtaposition of scenes from unknown sources and texts in his paintings is rendered with loose and free brush strokes, producing new meanings from them.
The composition of Chun Nuni is quite complicated and ambiguous. She is drawn to the forms and their relations that seem to proliferate without limit on the nutrients derived from the surface of a canvas. Anxiously changing into one another, the seemingly smashed and dripping forms appear to reflect the artist's obsessive and compulsive inner self and her gloomy disjunction from reality.
Myoungeun Ha tactically employs recognizable images from art history. Ha then transforms the taken images into a Pop art style of her own with unique frames around built-in canvases, of which the outcome can be considered a semi-flat sculpture or high relief painting. The artist calls her work a conceptual pop art of double-structures.
Song Song experiments in a wider scope of mediums and pop media like music, animation, movies and games. She lays emphasis on "virtual reality," which doesn't exist in the real world but has a strong power to make people hallucinate. Song's work is evidence to prove the charm of virtual reality and it becomes the artist's alter ego that reveals the other side of her identity.
Daehwan Kim takes apart the structure of people's emotions today that has been coded by certain criteria. In order to express the limitation and uniformity, Kim creates work using everyday objects like office supplies and ready-mades including acrylic drawing templates, copy paper and vinyl folders. Kim's work is a clear re-assemblage of such emotional code that is involved in a bigger discussion of issues such as luxurious brand name goods, appearance supremacy, pet animals and ultimately, art.
Gicheol Shin addresses the anxiety of contemporary people. His photographs use the format of a long standing genre in art history, the still life, to depict the fearful, anxious psychology that sneaks into every part of daily life. A glass on the verge of falling off a table, broken pieces of sculpture, mirrors, candles and fruit are meticulously arranged as icons of anxiety.

Fair Sponsor's Special Exhibition_Samsonite
Sponsored by Samsonite Korea l Curated by Taeyoun Kim, Mijin Oh

Changeover
Doors Art Fair proposes a special mecenat program for corporations that wish to return their profits to society through valuable cultural work. This program is genuinely designed in aims to provide a unique opportunity for the company to take an active part in art and the exhibition by presenting and communicating with artists and thus sharing their visual language with visitors as their prospective clients, of which the whole approach is to step beyond commonplace sponsorships that are indirect and often fall on a one-off or piecemeal level.
Samsonite Korea is the first to participate in this special sponsoring program starting at the Doors 2011. With stylish and durable design and over 30% of the world's luggage market share, Samsonite is a leading global brand loved by travelers worldwide.
A bag is a container for carrying necessary stuff when a person physically moves from one place to another. It is to bring part of his familiar surroundings with him and therefore, it could be said that the space he was in is moving spiritually as well. Interested in the concept of space, Minjeong Kim primarily works with video installation. She videotapes existing real space, and brings life to it with the sound of her breathing, and then projects it back onto the initial space. Space is just like our mind which holds our thoughts, and a bag travels with the space in it.
The paintings by Myungsu Ham are reminiscent of the soft texture of vibrant knitting wool. Recalling neatly-folded clothes in a travel case, the woolen-knit cityscapes and landscapes in Ham's work seem to weave the time of our memories and thoughts. A travel bag filled with personal items always holds the time of memories on the way back home. It is time that enables us to hoard experiences from our sensory perception.
Chongwoon Choi tenderly challenges our perception. He uses ordinary objects such as wood and metal pipes. In one of his works, water pipes seemingly frozen in winter ice are shaped in "THIS IS HOT" whose text and visual opens up our predetermined way of perceiving things.
A bag prepared to leave carries what we need for our journey while a bag on the way home brings the messages of time which will change the way we see the world and is also food for our imagination.
There are possible things and impossible things in everyday life and reality. For companies, their duty is to create profits from their goods and services whilst the process of business involves difficult tasks such as dealing with the realistic matters of properties, capital and employment. Art conveys messages that will be food for imagination. Artists also have their own realistic problems, and yet their creation provides us with an opportunity and food for our imaginations that will help us escape reality.
We hope that this special mecenat exhibition at the Doors 2011, through the generous sponsorship and active participation of Samsonite, will be a resort where true refreshment takes place for the artists, the viewers and the company.

OPEN THE DOOR! Curated by Taeyoun Kim

Doors Art Fair aims to be a passageway of diversifying the art market and embracing more artists to be valued in contemporary art.
"Sensibility is thought to be innate while discernment is gained. Sensibility doesn't necessarily rely on discernment, but at times it does. Discernment can reach all, but without sensibility, it knows only what it knows."

The International University in Imagination
Curated by Jinsup Yoon
Featured Artists: Nanna Hyunjoo Choi, Kyungsun Jun, Pajama Jun, Wongil Jun, Intae Kim, Wonjoo Park, Abigail Stern, Jiwon Yoon

The International University in Imagination (I.U.I) is an alternative educational institution established on February 11, 2011 by Jinsup Yoon, who is a renowned art critic and artist working in South Korea. Its goal is based on the peaceful and happy coexistence of human beings through the creative development of humankind's infinite power of imagination.
The institution will not only pursue friendships between members but through diverse on and offline activities. Its members are comprised of a number of specialists, artists, business people, educators, scholars, etc. from around the world. These individuals will seek to improve the existing condition of humankind through ongoing discourses consisting of dialog, lectures, and various artistic and cultural field activities. Included in the discourse will be the politics and participation of a global society which will explore solutions to environmental problems. The constant underlying theme is the coexistence of human beings and nature as part of a global ecosystem.

DOOR 2011 GALLERY