Jakupsil

Spring Pop-Up Series

May 22 – 29, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, May 23, 6-8 pm

co-organized by Yena Park

Jakupsil is pleased to present TRACE, a group exhibition featuring works by eight emerging artists: Jieun Cheon, Ruoxi Hua, Korkimon, Yoorim Ko, Zengyuan Ma, Yena Park, Kutay Tufekci, and Yue Yuan. On view from May 22 through May 29, 2025, the exhibition explores the corporeal and incorporeal vestiges that define our existence—marks left upon bodies, spaces, memories, and psyches. Through diverse mediums including painting, installation, sculpture, and mixed media, these artists excavate the residual imprints of lived experience, investigating the territories between presence and absence, the tangible and ethereal.

The title encapsulates the themes of memory, remnants, embodiment, and liminality that run through these artists' diverse practices. In an era increasingly defined by displacement and digital mediation, they interrogate what remains when connection fractures and identity fragments. Through their varied approaches, the artists map territories of liminality—spaces between belonging and estrangement, visibility and erasure, preservation and decay—that resist simple categorization.

"To live is to leave traces." — Walter Benjamin¹

The exhibition begins with works that investigate stratification and systematic deconstruction. Cheon, Hua, and Tufekci each explore the tension between structural order and its inevitable dissolution, albeit through distinct formal strategies. Cheon's installations in The Calendar of the Permutations of 1000 Arms examine epistemological systems through methodical layers of pen drawings and acrylic paintings supplemented by brass and quartz elements. The drawings deconstruct arm-bone structures, while paintings utilize vermilion to depict organic decay, sequencing temporal progression through material extremes. In The Anti-Fractal Map, she maps Gothic architectural elements through geometric grids derived from fractal theory, revealing inconsistent spatial relationships beneath structured compositions, a visual manifestation of rational systems confronting non-rational phenomena.

Hua's paintings on jointed panels emphasize transitional non-places, interstitial zones of urbanism that resist psychological investment. The Green Stripe fragments pictorial space through physical construction and chromatic division, creating visual analogs for spatial discontinuity. Sharp linear elements simultaneously divide and connect compositional sections, producing a calculated cognitive distance. Tufekci's work explores digital imaging processes via analog means. C4M3L CRU5H achieves a technical paradox by creating textural complexity while maintaining a flat surface. His arsenal of brushes, markers, and sanders produces distressed surfaces with calculated material accretion. The torn-paper-like finish creates a trompe l'oeil effect that manipulates perception while revealing pentimenti of previous states. This exploration of "surface trauma," where excavation functions as constructive rather than destructive operation, creates palimpsests where procedural history remains partially accessible. Together, these artists reveal how meaning emerges precisely at the point where systematic approaches confront their own limitations.

"The body is the inscribed surface of events." — Michel Foucault²

The body emerges as contested terrain throughout the exhibition, with Korkimon's practice foregrounding corporeal transformation through formal distortion. Her large-scale graphite drawings deploy monstrous figuration to examine the impossibility of complete interpersonal access. The precision with which she renders anatomically ambiguous forms produces tension between representation and dissolution.

Through works like Grab A Granny, she enacts the paradoxical gesture of attempting to reassemble what was never whole. Yuan's approach involves layering acrylic and colored pencil to create palimpsestic surfaces where bodies emerge and recede. In Appendix, she presents double entangled figures reminiscent of Francis Bacon—bodies caught in metamorphosis, where flesh slides across skeleton in chromatic waves. Her work questions whether we are truly who we appear to be, positioning the body as site of perpetual becoming rather than fixed entity. Ma's The Tree in the Garden and the Tree in the Wild employs botanical-anatomical hybridization. Having long seen women as trees—independent yet validated by external perception—Ma juxtaposes those "pruned into uniform beauty" against those "growing wild in the mist." Her Witch Hunt presents an alternative feminist reading where feminine divinity faces immolation rather than sanctification—a critique of aesthetic standardization through formal means.

Park and Ko engage with absence through distinct technical approaches. Park employs untreated fabric as compositional foundation, foregrounding the substrate while signifying intentional incompletion. Her chromatic methodology utilizes cold blues and greens to articulate spatial recession, while surrealist elements create perceptual instability. Curtains in her compositions symbolize irretrievable realms that remain unreachable, while clothing lines represent layers of memories leaving only faint traces. Eyes become crucial motifs conveying contrasting emotions, and disappearing pearl necklaces symbolize impermanence—visual metaphors rendered through technical precision. Ko builds translucent washes and textured passages of acrylic and oil pastel that interrupt and animate the surface. Her investigation of "aura" positions color not as ornamental but ontological—a medium through which unseen energies are felt and rendered. Her approach produces visual fields simultaneously ephemeral and structured, engaging themes of transformation and emotional presence. The paintings offer contemplative spaces for subtle encounters with presence, where materiality becomes a conduit for sensation rather than depiction.

What unites these diverse practices is their attention to palimpsestic accumulation—the way meaning is constructed through layers of material, memory, and cultural inscription. TRACE invites contemplation of what persists when physical proximity fails, when societies enforce conformity, and when understanding confronts its limitations. The works occupy threshold spaces—between abandonment and attachment, order and chaos, dissolution and connection—testifying to art's capacity to preserve and transform the residual marks of being. The exhibition offers not discrete objects but a constellation of temporal and spatial incursions—moments where absence becomes presence, where memory materializes between what is revealed and what is withheld.

¹ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447.

² Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148.

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