Auction house Phillips, local galleries hold exhibits alongside Frieze Seoul

British auction house Phillips is holding a group exhibition on works that will be available for purchase in private sales and at its upcoming Hong Kong auction in November.

″Reclining Nude, with Raised Knee II″ (c. 1950s-1960s) by Sanyu [PHILLIPS]

[Gallery Listing]AZURE HORIZONS: A JOURNEY THROUGH BLUESongwon Art CenterThrough Sept. 8: British auction house Phillips is holding a group exhibition on works that will be available for purchase in private sales and at its upcoming Hong Kong auction in November.

As the show’s title suggests, the pieces on view are mainly in blue tones, featuring artists like Nicolas Party, Ugo Rondinone, Lee Ufan, Devon DeJardin, Liu Yin, George Condo and Kim Min-ku.

Chinese-French painter Sanyu’s masterpiece “Reclining Nude, with Raised Knee II” (c. 1950s-1960s), which Phillips announced will make its auction debut in November, also made a visit to this exhibition. Depicting a yellow nude female form lying down, the large painting was previously in a private collection in France.

“Peinture 202 x 143 cm, 25 septembre 1967” (1967) by Pierre Soulage and “Mondrian, Hello” (2002) by Liu Ye are also set to be auctioned for the first time.

(02) 797-8008 exhibitions.phillips.com

″Shared Destinies″ (2014) by John Pai [GALLERY HYUNDAI]

SHARED DESTINIESGallery HyundaiThrough Oct. 20:This is John Pai’s first Korean solo exhibition in over a decade, which looks back at the 86-year-old Korean American artist’s body of work.

Born Pai Young-chull, the artist and his family immigrated to the U.S. in 1949, when Pai was barely a teenager. He devoted his life to creating artworks that are mainly defined as large metal sculptures made by welding wires together. He is a professor emeritus of the Pratt Institute.

Based on Pai’s interest in topology, especially the ideas of “order and structure,” his installations tend to be characterized by spirals and grids — think the Möbius strip — as shown in “Shared Destinies” (2014), one of his recent sculptures. Some others are simply asymmetrical and irregular, like his earlier pieces “Forgotten Rule” (1990) and “Risen, Fallen, Walken” (1987).

Pai explains that he is like a composer, likening each wire to a single musical note, accumulated to ultimately achieve “invisible melodies.”

“Shapes and spaces are all musical ideas,” he said during a news conference at the gallery on Wednesday. “The shape happens because of the way two and three and four [wires] connect with each other and a rhythm, density and pattern emerge.”

(02) 2287-3500 www.galleryhyundai.com

″Phantom and A Map / Poetry 03WBXS01″ (2018-24) by Ham Kyung-ah [KUKJE GALLERY]

PHANTOM AND A MAPKukje GalleryThrough Nov. 3:The solo exhibition of Ham Kyung-ah is taking place in the K1, K3 and Hanok spaces inside the gallery. The 58-year-old artist primarily produces large-scale embroidery using abstract squiggles and lines that allude to sociopolitical issues — but she doesn’t stitch them herself.

For about a decade since 2008, most of the manual labor was done by North Korean artisans. Ham would send her initial sketches via a secret middleman and afterward would receive the embroidered fragments and combine them on the canvas frame.

These anonymous artisans that live across the 38th parallel are the “phantoms” of Ham’s works, hence the exhibition’s title. Ham has hinted in her captions that a single large embroidery piece takes around 1,400 hours per artisan, to sew together the thousands of threads.

But Ham herself is skeptical about the existence of her phantom figures.

“My own work is purely made from analog methods, but the only way for me to learn about the people over the borders is through digital mediums,” she told press at the gallery on Friday. “Sometimes, it feels like there is a separate reality out there somewhere.”

The exhibition also features tapestry pieces that were co-produced with the Oakland-based fine art studio Magnolia Editions and more recent works that are comprised of fabrics like velvet strips, ribbon tape and polyester, giving the impression of dark digital screens.

(02) 735-8449 www.kukjegallery.com

″Cosmos (Catalunya 1)″ (2016-24) by Michael Joo [KUKJE GALLERY]

SOFT SKILLS AND UNDERGROUND WHISPERSKukje GalleryThrough Nov. 3:The gallery’s K2 hall is showcasing the latest works of Michael Joo, a 58-year-old Korean American artist who explores “perception, identity and liminality” between the arts and sciences. Simply put, to understand Joo’s art requires listening to his stories, as they all have distinct identities and meanings behind them.

“They’re either very personal or also hidden, and they may not be immediately known, but hopefully sensed because of their transformation and particular visual qualities,” he told press at the gallery on Friday.

Joo examines his roots and identity, thanks to his multicultural upbringing, via his installations that consist of glass easels, silvered alabaster (a type of mineral similar to calcite) on dichroic glass or paintings of silvered epoxy.

His works largely utilize mirrors, which he explains as a tool to reflect the exhibition space, and also a reflection of the land and finally, the viewer.

(02) 735-8449 www.kukjegallery.com

BY SHIN MIN-HEE [shin.minhee@joongang.co.kr]