The exhibition “The Second Life” focuses on individual subjects and personal lives as they are inscribed in artistic reality. Rich with possibility, the existence of each artist unfolds in multiplicities, shaped by chance encounters and turning points. In contrast with the current prevailing interest in communities, the exhibition foregrounds the uniqueness of each individual being and the protean nature of life. The experiments of six Korean artists suggest the extent to which individuals can transform their own destinies, particularly through artistic creation.
A painter, singer, composer, actor and director, Hyunjin Bek (b. 1972) presents paintings which depict moments of life and the abstraction of emotions. Working between South Korea and New Zealand, Yona Lee (b. 1986) translates through an installation the tension that she feels between travelling and rootedness. When they are abroad, artists Hanqing Ma (b. 1990) and Mona Yoo (b. 1987), who together form the duo Han & Mona, use flashes of Morse code to express the situations of conflict and negotiation they encounter in cross-cultural engagements. At the Atelier Hermès, they present a slice of life based on this experience. Bokyung Kim (b. 1988) similarly found herself immersed in the indifference of a third country after abandoning her artistic career. She was able to reconcile herself with her practice of knitting, paper weaving and drawing thanks to the profusion of the acanthus leaf motif, which appeared to her as a symbol of resistance. Finally, Minha Park (b. 1985) draws on her sensitivity to optics to incorporate a virtual character created by a generative AI into her daily life, observing the symptoms of its hallucinations by way of hypnosis to explore its own subconscious.
Presented together at the Atelier Hermès, these different artistic approaches are closely intertwined with the individual trajectories of the artists themselves. Though we undeniably share a common life, the exhibition “ The Second Life” highlights the unique dimension of the “second” – an other, fundamentally original existence that we experience on a personal and intimate level.
