Shinhan Gallery hosts emerging artists in "Yearning, Toward the Other Within"

Shinhan Bank is hosting the final exhibition of its 2026 Shinhan Young Artist Festa at Shinhan Gallery in Seoul through November 11. The showcase features approximately 20 works by Kwon Min-cheol, Moon Seo-jin, and Lee Seung-yeon, concluding a nurturing program that has supported 325 artists since 2003.

Shinhan Bank is holding “Yearning, Toward the Other Within,” the final exhibition of this year's “2026 Shinhan Young Artist Festa” emerging artist nurturing program, at Shinhan Gallery in Seoul until November 11.

The “2026 Shinhan Young Artist Festa” is an art incubating program operated by Shinhan Bank since 2003 to support the creative activities and growth of emerging artists. Over the past 24 years, the program has produced 325 artists through a total of 175 exhibitions, providing selected artists with support for the entire exhibition process, including exhibition space, production costs, and artwork transportation.

This exhibition features approximately 20 works, including sculpture, installation, and video, involving curator Eo Yu-jin and emerging artists Kwon Min-cheol, Moon Seo-jin, and Lee Seung-yeon.

There are three attitudes of "yearning" within the exhibition space. One person casts objects like cups and shoes that seem to have been used by someone never met, preparing a room filled with the emotions that person might have felt. Another person crushes plants that have reached the end of their lives to make paper, planting seeds within it to scatter over burnt land.

Why do these three artists move their bodies with such painstaking effort? This exhibition places "yearning" in the place of that answer. Here, yearning is not a heart that simply prays for something to come true, but a posture of turning one's body toward absence without rushing to fill the deficiency or pretending it does not exist.

Kwon Min-cheol shows an attitude of preparing a place for an absent person through installations that feel like entering the room of someone who is no longer there. Chasing the abstract idealism embedded in concepts conventionally used in daily life, the artist presents the imperfection that arises during the process of creating material forms, decomposing and expanding the cliché senses inherent in objects into various forms of subjectivity.

The artist casts objects that seem to have been used by "you, whom I have not yet met" using common materials found around the sculptor, and hangs curtains printed with the sky of "perfect" weather. His works, which feel as though they should be touched carefully and gently, provide the pleasure of imagining invisible beings through the hints provided by their titles.

〈Blue Filter〉 is a work installed on the exhibition walls in the form of a curtain featuring an image of the sky. The artist notes that the blue sky of clear weather we encounter possesses a certain regularity, such as freshness and coolness. Based on this regularity, the artist generates a so-called "perfect sky" through AI and realizes it in the form of a "curtain printed with the sky" by printing the image on thin fabric.

However, the installation—which uses unnecessary metal carabiners as curtain rings on the thin fabric—deviates slightly from conventional forms, creating a look that appears natural yet somewhat awkward. Through this, the artist poses questions about the conventional imagery of the "sky" we encounter and the way we perceive objects with specific appearances and emotions.

Moon Seo-jin makes paper using the "bodies of plants that have reached the end of their lives" obtained from places traveled and stayed in overseas and South Korea, and plants seeds within them. Because the seeds can only germinate when the paper collapses and decomposes, arrival in his work always passes through extinction.

The gesture of sowing seed paper over a glider field passed by a forest fire does not guarantee the return of the forest. Nevertheless, this act, created by the entanglement of human gliding, wind, heat, climate, and seeds, becomes the most concrete form of a response extended toward lost land.

Through the Lake Journal, his psychological confession is delivered vividly, conveying a practical attitude that inspires even awe through the repetition of making mountains that will soon melt away on ice that could break at any moment, accompanied by beads of sweat. If there are hands that create things that will disappear, there are also hands that grope for things that have already disappeared.

〈Standing Things〉 is a single upright sheet of paper and a sculpture whose form changes according to the flow of time. The artist makes paper from plants collected from various places where they stayed and plants seeds inside them. The paper is simultaneously the final form of the plant's life and a starting point that generates new life through the process of collapsing and decomposing over time.

If this massive paper sculpture is placed in an outdoor space, it slowly collapses and decomposes while being exposed to dew and rain. Afterward, in the place where the paper was placed, the planted seeds germinate and sprouts grow. The process of one form's extinction leads to the process of new life's beginning, and the work speaks of the dynamism of beings that live through repeated encounters and partings via circulation.

Lee Seung-yeon digs through non-linear time and thickly accumulated layers of history to attempt to form relationships with non-human existences left in a place. 〈Sishikae〉 starts from the experience of directly seeing and touching the surface of sea cliffs in earthquake-damaged areas of Japan. The artist transfers the undulations of the strata, created over a long time by waves and wind, into relief, repeating the process of carving out and rebuilding the surface.

What the artist intends to transfer at this time is not a direct reproduction of the appearance of a specific place, but the traces of time and change accumulated on that surface. The artist continuously touches and gropes the surface of materials that have already changed and become disordered, attempting to sense the time remaining within them. In the work, the geological time the land has passed, the time of the event known as a disaster, and the time of the artist's body groping that surface overlap together.

An official from Shinhan Gallery stated, “We hope this exhibition serves as an opportunity for visitors to view the existences around them in a new way through the perspectives of the three artists,” adding, “We look forward to them appreciating the ‘Yearning’ expressed through different materials and modes of expression and reflecting on the existences and their meanings within their own memories.”

Read the original (Korean)