Haunch of Venison kick off 2011 with Korean artist Meekyoung Shin's remakes of western statues and oriental objects d'art; paired with German artist Susanne Kühn's vividly coloured paintings of surreal environmental myths.
Translation - Meekyoung Shin
Haunch of Venison
16.02-02.04.2011
Translation Series (2009)
Meekyoung plays joke with collectors and challenges the viewers on the concept of authenticity, durability and artistic values through recreating antiques and sculptures with soap as the raw material. Translation series are mock antique vases, made to every detail of the original. You could appreciate the patterns in the original vase on her version, but how would these patterns look after a period of time when the soap molecules start to diffuse? If you like the piece because of its pattern, does it make the work lower in artistic value when the pattern starts to fade away? Or does such physical nature actually qualify as part of the artistic value?
Golden Buddha (2010)
Venus (1998)
Ghost series (2010)
The centrepiece of the show is the Ghost series, a collection of around 200 vases grouped in clusters of an imac colour spectrum. Although the artist's focus is the "notion of the transience of the original by stripping the forms of both their perceived solidity and their decorative markings, leaving only an echo of the original form", one cannot stop thinking such act has the usual commercial calculation in that each cluster would be eventually sold individually to collectors. And this rainbow spectrum is very much an open palette to cater for individual buyer's preference of his/hef favourite colour.
Ghost series (2010) - close up
Panorama of Ghost series (2010) - video link
Full photo set
*****
Garden Eden - Susanne Kühn
Haunch of Venison
16.02-02.04.2011
The Couple (2011)
While Meekyoung focuses on a twist of the aura of the original objects, Susanne's subject is a complete jam of the 3-dimensional meta-enironment in a 2-dimensional canvas.
Originally from East Germany (Leipzig), Susanna now lives in Freiburg. There is an inherent sense of the dark Grim tales in the ambience of her paintings. Things seems to be situated in a gravity-less space, so the interior and exterior flow and merge with each other. The human subjects inside her paintings, if any, are often only relating to a portion of this environment and not realising the extent of flux beyond that. That they seem all too happily living in the Garden Eden before Satan arises, is somehow a cynical reflection of the Black Swan phenomenon in the credit crunch.
Garden Eden (2010)
