For more than 60 years, the attachment to minimalism and abstraction has remained strong within Korean pictorial identity. Often delicate and subtle, it entered the French artistic landscape in the early 1990s, notably through the Dansaekhwa school of painting.

Since then, a new generation of Korean artists, who arrived in France around ten years ago, has contributed to the dynamism of the current Parisian art scene. This generation has succeeded in renewing traditional materials and techniques across a range of contemporary mediums and practices.

Their work has thus gradually moved away from the schools of painting that have shaped the history of Korean contemporary art. They now abandon a common visual language, often concerned with a predominant aesthetic, in favour of an exploration of humanity and nature, questioning the plurality of expressions and artistic possibilities.

Une autre scène de Corée offers a new perspective on this artistic diversity, whose works take us back and forth between cultural attachment and contemporary research. The exhibition explores the relationship between the tangible and the immaterial, the visible and the impenetrable, through a language that is above all organic and spiritual.

Joowon Jo provides a particularly fine example of this bridge between traditional roots and the development of modern digital techniques. Through the use of 3D modelling, combined with her coloured ink paintings, the artist brings a series of stepstones into coexistence. In Korean popular culture, mountain walkers stack stones and then make a wish. The stepstones offer pathways through the illusion of textured paper and invite our gaze to move into the heart of the image. The viewer is free to take whichever paths are offered.

In contrast to Joowon, Seunghwan Lee leads us towards a controlled nature within a defined and limited digital space. Mathematical sciences play a predominant role in the work of this young artist, who questions the close relationships between humans and their plant environment.

Uncertainty no longer has a place in an algorithmic organic world that nevertheless creates the illusion of chance.

Jihee Han's silent paintings create a divergence and lead us towards a meditative harmony with nature. This young painter, who arrived in Paris 12 years ago, does not directly reproduce existing landscapes that she might observe; she draws on her memories to bring together on a single canvas the different states of calm and turmoil that nature tends to offer us.

Thus, emptiness occupies a prominent place in Jihee's pictorial space, as it does in Minhwa, a genre of Korean folk art. Shades of blue, black and white alone are enough for her to bring together water, mountains and ice in a space-time that is both still and rhythmic.

These shifting changes of state, from solid to liquid and from liquid to solid, can also be found in <Invisible Gravity>, a sculpture by Hyeoki Kwon. Hyeoki depicts fragile hands holding a block of ice whose melting within the exhibition space is inevitable. The relationship of benevolent closeness that unites humans with water, a symbol of life, slowly disintegrates to the point of becoming painful.

Une autre scène de Corée thus brings together four artists around a creative narrative arising as much from the observation of nature as from a sometimes contradictory vision of the bond that unites humanity with it.

Lisa Lebel