Vibe Era

Ilmin Museum of Art (Director Kim Taeryung) is pleased to present Vibe Era, a group exhibition on view from August 26 to October 25, 2026. In an age where a convincing mood or effect replaces aesthetic judgment and form, Vibe Era explores contemporary abstraction and its images as precursors to such transformations. Like evolving organisms seeking unresolved forms, the participating artists—Park Rim, Park Junghae, Park Hyunjung, and Han Jihyoung—experiment with abstraction amid the continuity between a past lost in its making and the future it points toward.
 
Over the past decade, abstract art has been challenged from two directions. The first concerns its aesthetic legitimacy. Here, abstraction is accused of failing to engage with current social and political realities, reduced instead to decoration or commodity. The second concerns its historical legitimacy. From this perspective, abstraction is regarded as a futile residue of the exhausted modernist project. Because it is an exhausted form, it is said to lack historical necessity; without historical necessity, it is presumed to have no critical content; without critical content, it becomes a safe commodity; and its successful absorption into the market is then taken as further proof of its exhaustion. The two critiques thus reinforce each other in a circular logic. Yet in an era when every style from the past can be summoned without its source and context, abstraction instead appears as the artistic response that most clearly reveals the conditions of the image itself. The fact that today’s generative technologies function as a kind of abstract filter reinforces that contemporary abstraction can no longer be reduced to non-representational painting or a particular art-historical position. If abstraction can be reimagined as a system for generating images, then vibe is the effect through which that system is sensed.

The abstraction presented in Vibe Era is neither the purity that remains once representation is removed nor self-contained pictorial spaces detached from reality. Instead, the four participating artists realize abstraction through organic processes in which bodies and materials, tools and memory continually act upon one another as forms gradually emerge. Their works resemble evolving organisms. Each choice becomes the condition for the next, like how seemingly insignificant genetic traits breed distinctive mutations of future generations. As in biological mutation, their processes involve heterogeneous elements coming into contact and transforming one another; and, in the exhibition, these transformations are explored through form. Within systems that create provisionality, through processes of painting and erasing, folding and unfolding, observing and classifying, collecting and shredding, spreading and drying, joining and dismantling, forms are exposed to mutations no preconceived plan could foresee. In The Metamorphosis of Plants, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes a mutated rose whose flower gives rise to a new stem, from which a combination of red petals and green leaves emerge. He understands the rose’s form as a continuous developmental history branching at different stages, for the petals do not arise from nothing but remain connected to the leaves that came before them. The mutation he observes is, thus, an event that reveals the hidden principles of formation. The same is true of abstraction, which carries mutation at its core. As a process of transformation, abstraction pursues neither the desire to represent the world through resemblance nor the ambition to establish an autonomous realm detached from it. It pursues a different aim altogether.

Abstract images in the era of vibes preserve within their forms the resistance and deviations that run beneath mood. These images retain in themselves the traces of choices and delays that effect alone cannot account for, giving form to the feeling of “something taking shape.” Vibe grows ever stronger by feeding on the optimism that anything is acceptable and the possibility that anything can become anything else. Rather than affirming or rejecting that promise, abstraction shows that every form carries into its future the past that was lost in its making.