Dinosaurs were birds too

Hannah Hyun Jeong, Ju Young Kim, Younsik Kim, Chaeeun Lee, and Jimmy Vuong.
Curated by the artists in the exhibition and Tinatin Ghughunishivli-Brück.
Photographs  by Younsik Kim

Exhibition Essay by Tinatin Ghughunishvili-Brück

Certain migratory bird species cover impressive distances of up to 10,000 kilometers each year to ensure their survival. Some of the smaller birds, such as nightingales and swallows, cross the Alps, the Mediterranean, and the Sahara, for instance, to winter in West Africa. These birds adapt remarkably quickly to their new climatic environments after undergoing an extremely demanding journey. Some even travel alone, making them one of the few species, alongside humans, to practice such "migration" outside of groups, leaving their original habitats. 

This survival strategy imposed by nature on birds is both arduous and impressive, evoking thoughts of the challenges often faced by people who move abroad for various reasons. However, unlike birds, humans often struggle to adapt to new environments. This may be due, in part, to prejudices and fears about foreigners that manifest themselves in bureaucratic processes and daily life. It's worth noting that Homo sapiens was, for the longest period of its existence, Homo migrans. It was only with the onset of the Neolithic era between 20,000 and 10,000 BC that humans began practicing agriculture and adopting sedentary lifestyles. Sedentism, development, and what we call progress brought forth strong geographical and cultural affiliations, causing us to forget our shared origin, among all the wonderful achievements of humanity.

Expanding this perspective not only to the origin of the human species but to all living beings in our known universe provides a profoundly deep outlook. This extended perspective can be seen as a significant tool for overcoming xenophobia, as it guides us toward promoting acceptance and recognition of the diverse nuances and fluid boundaries of identities. The reference to "identifying" with birds in the conceptual framework of this exhibition sheds a bright light on the idea that our human identity is not set in stone but rather a multifaceted fabric. Accepting animals as part of human identity opens the door to broader acceptance and appreciation of diversity. It encourages us to celebrate and promote queer and diversity-related identities. This leads to a society that not only respects the various facets of the human experience but also views them as enriching for all of us.

In this context, it is not surprising that the artists in this exhibition demonstrate a deep interest in themes such as identity change, adaptation, changes in living environments, and transient states. All five of them have left their familiar surroundings or have grown up in families with immigrant backgrounds. In a way, the metaphor of migratory birds reflects the ongoing adaptation to life in a transitional space, be it physical or emotional.

Hannah Hyun Jeong, born in 1997 in Seoul, South Korea, creates a magical world in her oil paintings where the depicted figures merge with their surroundings in a dreamlike manner, becoming one with them. This world is inhabited by beings that seem to emerge directly from her daydreams, childhood memories, and the unique visual vocabulary of her homeland. These beings can turn their innermost feelings outward, transforming the pulsating of their hearts into radiant light and the rhythm of their lungs into tangible temperature. The color scheme in her paintings follows a symbolic order that generates simultaneous intensity and translucent lightness.​

Kuba Paris Submission
Gallery Talk - Maxvorstadt Update​

DISPERSIONEN

Works from Kretschmann class, Academy of fine arts, Munich:

 Julie Bender Herdina, Burcu Bilgiç, Cheng-Hsin Chiang, Shirel Golde, Hannah Jeong, Johannes Kiel, Tabata von der Locht, Lina Killinger, Nadja Krommer, Lukas Niedermeier, Paula Niño, Geumok Oh, Ikue Ohta, Réka Tímea Petöcz, Sumire Sakuma, Zihan Teng, Jimmy Vuong, Silin Wang, Weizhi Wu, Hang Zhou. 

In chemistry, dispersion refers to the distribution of the finest particles in a mixture of substances. The exhibition DISPERSIONS arose from the correspondence of people and things, which can also be understood as a distribution of different perspectives and content substances in a frame. As in chemistry, the substances involved do not dissolve into each other, they disperse and thus produce a transformation of the mixture. The works of the participating artists react to and with each other, creating a new space of mutual perception and reflection. The individual authorships cannot always be clearly assigned, they mix, run into each other, dissolve their boundaries, and practice a literally delimited mutual learning process. The exhibition develops a variety of experimental and collaborative formats: painterly installations, dialogic performances, conceptual series of works, wall-based paintings, drawing battles, or site-specific interventions that lead to various individual events during the exhibition's runtime. 

The exhibition in the HBKsaar gallery marks the beginning of the cooperation between HBKsaar's studio for conceptual painting (Prof. Katharina Hinsberg) and the AdBK Munich's class for painting and graphic arts (Prof. Schirin Kretschmann and Lea Grebe). The exchange between the students of both universities will be continued in 2024 in a joint exhibition at the Galerie der Künstler/BBK Munich

Present Life focuses on the analysis of daily activities and how they influence the meaning and perception of life. Explore the concept that even the simplest and most banal activities can have a profound meaning and that everything we do has an impact on our well -being and existence.

The exhibition “Allerbeste Aussichten. Neue Generation Kunst” (Best Possible Prospects. A New Generation of Art) resumes an exhibition format started in 2016 in collaboration with three renowned German art academies. It specifically focuses on the youngest generation of visual artists: the participating artists are still in education or have recently completed it. They are thus in the midst of the exciting development process of their individual artistic visual language. What they have in common is a questioning of processes and current conditions of creating images, as well as their reception and perception by the viewer. At a moment in which digital images are omnipresent—as well as their creation, reproduction, and reception—the question of what kind of artworks are currently being created in which educational structures is more crucial than ever, as are the issues young artists are dealing with today. The exhibition brings together works from a wide variety of genres and media, many of which have been produced especially for the exhibition. They are characterized by a general openness to the conception both of genre and the image. On view are photographs, paintings, performative, installation, and mixed-media works, video and paper works, drawings, sculptures, as well as digitally generated images. The direct connection to the Paul Ege Art Collection and the PEAC Museum is established not only through a general questioning of the art image itself; the students are also guided and informed by professors whose works form part of the collection.

The participating artists are: students of Fine Arts at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute of the University of Greifswald: Charleen Dahms, Anne Martin, Johanna Herrmann, Ulrich Schneider, Rabea Dransfeld, Sten Niklas Washausen, Jakob Stolte, Paula Finsterbusch—supervised by Prof. Christian Frosch, Professor of Painting, Drawing, Space and Interdisciplinary Artistic Strategies, and Cindy Schmiedichen, Artistic researcher in the faculty; students of the Painting and Graphic Arts Class at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich: Khashayar Zandyavari, Paula Niño, Cheng Hsin Chiang, Lukas Niedermeier, Ikue Ohta, Johannes Kiel, Tabata von der Locht, Jimmy Vuong, Hannah Jeong, Caroline Kretschmer – supervised by Prof. Schirin Kretschmann; students of the Conceptual Painting class at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken: Laura Sperl, Suyoung Kim, Hwakyeong Kim, Jaeyun Moon, Ham Babaei, Meret Sophie Preiß, Johanna Disch, Leonie Mertes, supervised by Prof. Katharina Hinsberg; as well as the professors and lecturers mentioned above.

PEAC

In an engaging dialogue between four positions, the group exhibition I ALLIED WITH YOURS focuses on young perspectives on the medium of painting and the transformation of reality through figurative practice. The artists Sarah Neumann, Hannah Jeong, Boris Saccone, and Jimmy Vuong are united not only by their friendship but also by an insistence on representation. Their figures and landscapes are far from a mimetic realism; rather, they assert their relationship to us and the material reality that surrounds us by invoking the subconscious and its images. The relationship to the real is not so much in the representational character of the works, but in the interstice of image and viewer and the reflexive exchange of the works with each other. Intrinsic to the works as well as in the spatial dialogue, the divergent forms of figuration allow us to reflect on the range of possibilities of how the intangible and vague, such as memories, dreams, feelings, can be manifested on the canvas. An emphasis on the dreams and nightmares, the symbolic and ornamental is juxtaposed with an exploration of familiar places, such as the forest or the domestic space. The evocation of security and safety, a glimpse of human warmth, is abruptly disrupted by isolated figures and objects, which do not seem to find their place in the world. From aggressively-naïve animal settings, whose riddles lead astray, we look at fragmented bodies in dissolution. As different as the motivic and thematic reference points, spatial and figurative relations, or life-world experiences processed in the works may be, their interaction points to common questions of proximity and distance, existence and loss, defensibility and protection. In the confrontation of the diverse painterly explorations, multi-layered contexts and a poetic openness are made possible, reflecting the search for a distinct style and artistic positioning.

HANNAH JEONG’s oil paintings can be read as delicate invocations of memories and the subconscious: the feeling of water on the skin, human touch, childlike playfulness, or the fear of growing up. Her organically sinuous figures move in domesticated interior and exterior spaces in which multilayered narratives about bizarre and enigmatic occurrences, intimacy and loneliness, refuge and longing unfold. The principle recognizability of their places and figures functions as a link to the audience, which is lovingly confronted with its own lost past charged with meaning. I ALLIED WITH YOURS can be understood as an excerpt of the vibrant range of young, figurative practice and is driven by the idea that artistic productivity can only unfold in mutual exchange, in which we cling to each other with all the friction that arises here.

Text: Emily Nill

Kuba Paris

Rundgang.io

KARL & FABER 

Duo exhibition with JImmy Vuong