Exhibition Dates: March 27 – April 20, 2025
Venue: 333Gallery/Seoul (Chungdam dong 7-1)
Opening Reception: March 27, 2025 | 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Seungean Cha (Korea)
Seungean Cha is an artist who has developed a unique practice that merges weaving and painting, navigating the boundaries between traditional textile craft, installation, and contemporary art. Beginning her career in textile arts, she has reinterpreted the language of contemporary art by integrating the material processes of weaving with conceptual frameworks.
In this exhibition, she presents re-re-Honeysuckle-1 (인-인-인동문-1,2) and One thing-5 (한가지-5)—works that visualize the passage of time and the stratification of sensory experience through the dyeing of vertical threads and the act of weaving itself.
Seungean’s work is an attempt to find order within the fragmented and entangled histories and experiences shaped by rapid modernization. The repetitive labor of weaving is juxtaposed with Western painterly languages and traditional craft materials, offering a visual and conceptual expansion that transcends surface aesthetics to engage with accumulated meaning through labor, matter, and time.
Her works propose a way of experiencing Western forms not as abstract, disconnected concepts but as embodied and living experiences. The tension between the systematic structure of weaving and the spontaneity of painting allows viewers to perceive hidden gaps in space and time on the surface of her work.
In this exhibition, Seungean’s works serve as a conceptual and material axis—interweaving femininity, labor, memory, and sensation, as well as the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Seungean Cha earned her BFA in Textile Art from Hongik University, followed by an MFA in Industrial Craft from the Graduate School of Industrial Arts at the same university (2002), and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2010. She has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Korea and internationally. Her works are part of the collections at major institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, and the Seongnam Cultural Foundation. Through a number of residency programs, she continues to be a leading figure reshaping the boundary between contemporary Korean craft and painting.
Hyunsook Hong Lee (South Korea)
Hyunsook Hong Lee presents Moving Ovoo 1 – South Gobi Desert, Mongolia and three works from her Menopausal Rite series (Flying Practice_03, Flying Practice_04, and Jangsutang_MG_4945) in this exhibition, offering a unique perspective that views the female body and its life cycles not as a path toward extinction, but as the beginning of a new form of creation.
For the artist, menopause is not an “end,” but part of a larger natural cycle of “returning” and “blooming again.” She reimagines the female body as an entity connected to the earth—a generative space that holds within it the traces of disappearance. Moving Ovoo 1, shot in the vast South Gobi Desert of Mongolia, visualizes the themes of mobility, instability, and return to origin through bodily movement in nature. The Menopausal Rite series explores the changes of the female body as an opportunity for re-authoring one’s narrative, beyond biological definitions or social expectations.
In particular, Menopausal Rite_Jangsutang captures a joyful yet profound performance of elderly women in a traditional Seoul bathhouse, transforming the aging female body into a site of communal celebration and self-declaration. This piece liberates the female experience from conventional ideals of beauty and societal roles, and instead frames menopause as a dynamic, generative repositioning of life.
Hyunsook’s work challenges the binaries of strength and softness, continuity and rupture, life and disappearance—not as fixed oppositions, but as an ever-shifting flow. Her practice invites viewers into a moment of stillness and sensory contemplation. Just as the exhibition title Take the Flower Seriously suggests, her work encourages us to reconsider the female body, the symbolism of nature, and the transitions of life with greater depth, nuance, and seriousness.
Hyunsook Hong Lee earned her BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Hongik University. She has held major solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the Arko Art Center (2021), Coreana Museum of Art (2022), Busan Biennale (2024), Gwangju Biennale (2023), and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2024). She is recognized as one of Korea’s leading feminist artists.
Ji Su Kwak (South Korea)
Ji Su Kwak is an artist whose work subverts the emotional undercurrents and hidden structures of everyday objects to question socially prescribed identities and norms. Her latest work, Skin Squad, Break the Encirclement!, presented in Take the Flower Seriously, is a playful yet incisive installation that captures complex inner emotions and a spirit of resistance. Through this piece, Ji Su explores the redefinition of femininity and existence with sharp wit and layered sensitivity.
Using discarded tangerine peels—objects commonly found in supermarkets—the artist symbolically challenges the idea of a “solid and controlled form” often expected by society. These hollowed peels, having lost their fruit, stand defiantly in their most fragile state against an invisible siege. Though small and humorous in appearance, they adopt exaggerated fighting stances, visualizing the paradox of strength within vulnerability. Rather than reinforcing binaries such as strength versus softness or beauty versus defiance, Ji Su presents a nuanced and contradictory sense of identity.
Her work dismantles the rigid frameworks of femininity defined by dichotomies like tradition and modernity, softness and power. Instead, she offers an imaginative path toward liberation from societal gravity—akin to stars reducing their mass to escape gravitational pull. Through mundane and overlooked materials, Ji Su constructs a personal and poetic form of resistance.
Importantly, her art does not merely deliver feminist messages; it invites viewers to reconsider overlooked objects with fresh emotional resonance and critical inquiry. Ji Su believes “pleasure” is one of art’s fundamental roles. She hopes audiences will feel a sense of joy when engaging with her work—yet leave with a lingering awareness of the underlying tensions and questions embedded within it.
Ji Su Kwak holds an MFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University (2024) and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). She has recently solidified her artistic voice through solo exhibitions such as Bedtime Story (2024, WWW SPACE 2) and Last Strongholds (2024, SNU Wooseok Gallery). In 2023, she won both the Sea Prize and the Popularity Prize at the Chunman Art for Young competition. She has participated in numerous residencies, including Suwon Art Studio (Korea), Vermont Studio Center, and ACRE Residency (USA).
Taein Song (South Korea/France)
Taein Song is a painter whose practice poetically explores the intersection of personal introspection, female subjectivity, and the emotional climate of contemporary life. For the artist, painting is a meditative process—an internal dialogue—and the resulting images function as self-portraits. Her series presented in Take the Flower Seriously draws inspiration from French pâtisseries, creating symbolic portraits of women that embody a duality of delicacy and opulence, desire and disappearance.
Triggered by her emotional response to cake displays in Paris, Taein reimagines these visually indulgent yet ephemeral confections as metaphors for the female condition. Beautiful yet fleeting, desirable but rarely possessed, each cake—like a woman’s body and identity—is labeled, showcased, and continually replaced, echoing the cycles of societal consumption and erasure. The painting Who Are You?, featured on the exhibition poster, illustrates a tense encounter between a flower and a snake. Rather than reinforcing traditional symbolism, Taein redefines the flower as a wild, uncanny life force and the snake as an innocent, transparent being. The two gaze at each other like mirrored selves, reflecting the complex, layered constructions of identity shaped by social expectations and internal contradictions.
Taein’s work doesn’t present overt social commentary; instead, it distills personal experience into symbolic imagery, posing open-ended questions to the viewer. She resists binary narratives of femininity—strength versus softness, tradition versus modernity—and fluidly navigates the spaces in between. Her use of natural and floral motifs transcends fixed interpretations, embracing emotional and symbolic complexity.
Taein’s paintings speak in a poetic language that originates from the self and resonates with the times. She hopes viewers will stand before her works and engage in a silent inner conversation, leaving with a personal sense of resonance and reflection.
Taein Song has been based in Paris for many years, working as an in-house painter for Louis Vuitton’s Maison Vendôme (2017–2022) and previously as an artist with Maison Moynat (2011–2017). In 2025, she released the Cherry Blossom Artist Edition in collaboration with Guerlain, earning recognition for her ability to harmonize artistic sensibility with commercial aesthetics.
Mytille Tibayrenc (France/Thailand)
Mytille Tibayrenc is a French artist currently based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Known for her compelling figurative works, she draws upon the visual language and symbolic traditions of Medieval and Renaissance painting to create highly original portraits that challenge contemporary ideas of gender, beauty, and power. In this exhibition, her paintings blur the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, strength and fragility, beauty and violence, offering a visceral and visually rich interpretation of Take the Flower Seriously.
Mytille dismantles conventional gender expressions by attributing traditionally masculine attributes—such as conquering postures and burning red flowers—to female figures, while rendering male figures with softness and vulnerability. These androgynous or paradoxical portrayals destabilize the viewer’s expectations and evoke a sense of tension between appearance and identity. Her work invites contemplation on identity that exists between definitions, resisting clear categorization and instead proposing new, fluid configurations of self.
Deeply influenced by Renaissance religious iconography and medieval symbolism, Mytille adopts classical compositions only to subvert them through a contemporary lens. Nature and floral motifs recur as central elements in her work—not merely as symbols of beauty, but as metaphors for power, vitality, blood, and rebirth.
Since relocating to Thailand in 2006, Mytille Tibayrenc has also played a vital role in the local art scene as director and curator of the Toot Yung Art Center. In 2022, she represented France at the Bangkok Art Biennale with a striking painting installation at BACC. Her works, suspended between decoration and impact, offer a layered experience where viewers are simultaneously drawn into the sensual beauty of the paintings while being prompted to question their assumptions about gender and power.
Jihee Yeom (South Korea)
Jihee is a painter who weaves together poetic imagery, theatrical symbolism, and imaginative narratives to explore the depths of emotion and existence. Her work resists fixed identities and roles, instead offering a sensory language through which being can be reexamined across layers of illusion, narrative, and image.
For this exhibition, Jihee presents a series of collage paintings developed around the themes From Hysteria to the Stage of Drive, Poesie del Disamore (Poetry of Disaffection), and The Ornament Hermit. These works reinterpret symbols of femininity and nature through the stage of personal memory and literary imagination. Within stark contrasts of black and white, Jihee doesn’t present light and darkness as binary opposites but as necessary conditions for expressing the intrinsic weight of existence.
Often arranged like theatrical stages, her compositions portray life as a fleeting performance, populated by poetic subjects who cross its set not by scripted roles but through images and imaginations rising from within. These characters do not conform to social norms; rather, they write their own scripts, guided by inner visions. Through this, Jihee opens the possibility of understanding femininity and nature not through linguistic definitions but within the expansive time-space of imagination and sensation.
Her series The Ornament Hermit, inspired by recurring dreamscapes, expands into mixed media—painting, drawing, and game graphic novels—reflecting a deep solitude and voluntary isolation. The result is a sensory stage where viewers are invited to encounter the poetic facets of life at the boundary between dream and reality, pain and hope, life and death.
Jihee Yeom earned her BFA in Painting and Video Art and her MFA in Painting from Hongik University. She has participated in major Korean residencies including the Incheon Art Platform, SeMA Nanji Residency, and Toji Cultural Foundation. Her works are housed in public collections such as the Seoul Museum of Art, Osan Museum of Art, Incheon Foundation for Arts and Culture, and the MMCA Art Bank. In 2025, she was selected as “Artist of the Year” by the Incheon Foundation, establishing her position as a notable contemporary painter known for her poetic and sensory visual language.
Jin Young (South Korea)
Jin Young has long explored the anxieties of contemporary life and the essence of existence through a language of symbolic figures and innocent humor. Her signature motif—people with parrot heads—symbolizes the modern human condition: constantly internalizing societal roles and external gaze, echoing the voices of others rather than one’s own.
In this exhibition, Jin Young metaphorically addresses themes of nature, femininity, and the cycle of life through these parrot-headed figures. The recurring imagery of trees and forests stems from artificial parks in urban environments—spaces of retreat that paradoxically feel like isolated islands within the city. Against these backdrops, she places figures releasing “hope balloons” or flying kites, visualizing a gentle yet persistent journey toward reclaiming the self in the midst of repetition and confinement.
Jin Young’s work invites us to see femininity and nature not merely as softness or fragility, but as metaphors for finitude, restoration, and expanded self-awareness. Through her quiet yet firm visual voice, she suggests that being a woman is not defined by societal frameworks, but by an inner force of regeneration and becoming.
Her artistic gaze, like that of a child—innocent yet sharply perceptive—offers a language of feeling. Jin Young believes that the answers to life are not found in grand truths, but in the subtle “vibrations” of the present moment. Through her paintings, she encourages viewers to listen to their inner voices, find liberation through laughter, and reattune themselves to life’s true frequencies.
Jin Young studied Korean painting at Kyung Hee University, where she also completed her MFA. Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, GS Construction Gallery, the Korean Folk Painting Museum, D.CAMP, and more. Her practice transcends mere character illustration, establishing a warm and poetic language that reflects the emotional landscape of our times—touching on alienation, resilience, and hope.