Undoing Oneself

The 2025 ARKO Art Center Invitational Exhibition, Undoing Oneself, is part of the program that highlights mid-career artists, a culmination of Arts Council Korea’s Mid-Career Artist Support Project and Artist Research—Study—Critique Support Project. This exhibition brings together five artists—Kang Hong-goo, Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Oksun Kim, Kim Jipyeong, and Ha Cha Youn—each distinguished by their unique medium, visual language, and methodology. It traces their trajectories as they reference, resist, and renew historical temporality, grounding their practices in specific media that form the foundation of their work.

Undoing Oneself explores the paths of these mid-career artists, tracing how they engage in acts of self-critique and self-reference as they articulate their artistic worldview. The primal question “Who am I?” becomes an attempt at articulation, a journey that moves back to the “I” through recursive questioning. This exhibition frames the process of self-reflection and redefinition through the lens of medium—the foundation of an artist’s visual language. Such a return to the medium becomes the ground for its reinvention. Here, medium is not limited to material support, such as painting, photography, sculpture, or media. Instead, it encompasses not only the artisanal and technical acts of making but also the artist’s conceptual attitudes toward the medium, shaped by historical context, educational frameworks, and inherited conventions surrounding traditions in which the artist was brought up. For the artist, revisiting and interrogating the essence of the medium functions as the driving force of their visual language. In this process, the artist acknowledges the history and intrinsic vocabulary of the specific medium while simultaneously subverting the grammar of established norms and temporal conventions, repositioning the “self” in the present by going against the foundations they already have.

To define oneself is to return to one’s origins—the essence and foundation of “I”—and to undergo renewal through critique and reflection. Yet, this reinvention of the self is not confined to the individual. Instead, not only is it a personal work, but it signifies the intersection with historical time, locating the artist’s relation with the evolving trajectory of Korean art, as well as their coordinates within the magnetic field of contemporaneity. This exhibition unfolds stories of artistic navigation, anchorage, and dialogue with art through an exchange of Correspondence between the five participating artists and the curatorial team.

Stepping away from the immediacy of the fashionable, the time of obsolescence brings forth the value and potential of what is retrospective, anachronistic, and past. In this time of obsolescence, there resides an inexperienced present of the “self.” The artist, in redefining themselves, becomes a subject of contemporaneity. As one artist remarks: “I will be/am somebody else today.”[1]

[1] Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Diarrhea-Causes, symptoms & Treatment, trans. Lee Hanbum (Seoul: rasunpress, 2025)

Participating artists: Kang Hong-goo, Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Oksun Kim, Kim Jipyeong, Ha Cha Youn