The often quoted Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” takes on an environmental angle for Gallery Baton, a Seoul gallery making its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, where the rage against the dying of the light — be it our own or our planet’s — will be fodder for several artists.
Three of them sat down to talk about their works over coffee on a recent fall afternoon at Gallery Baton in the fancy Hannam-dong neighborhood of galleries and embassies, along with the gallery’s director, James Jeon. It was Jeon who came up with the idea of Thomas’s poem as an allegory for the fight against climate change.
The poem, published in 1951, has resonated over the decades. “I was so struck by how Thomas’s poem was used in the film ‘Interstellar’ a few years ago as a plea for the survival of life on this planet,” Jeon said. “I had never thought about it as a statement on the environment, but it really stayed with me.”
A few artists immediately came to mind when Jeon began to conceive the exhibition. He decided that the gallery’s debut at Art Basel Miami Beach seemed like a great global platform.
One of those artists was Jimok Choi, a South Korean-born artist who studied and lived in Germany. The gallery will bring five of his paintings to Art Basel Miami Beach, including “Shadow of the Sun” and “The Light of Absence” (both acrylic on canvas), which Choi said was about portraying the sun as the substance of life and one of its threats as the earth warms. With the blurry hodgepodge of green, blue, gray, and a spot of pink and white, Choi said he was celebrating sunlight in ways people might not think about.
“When you look into the sun and then close your eyes, you see so many color spots,” he said. “I’m trying to represent what we see in light, when our eyes are open, and without light, when our eyes are closed. My theme for this series is about the absence of light that we could face every day. But I want to connect with it and see sunlight and all kinds of light, even the light that is inherent in our bodies.”
The search for light is also celebrated in the paintings of Choi Soo Jung, who incorporates embroidery into many of her acrylic paintings. Gallery Baton will take two of her works, both titled “refractionreflection” and centered on the idea of caves, to Miami.
“The structure of each painting is about reflection and what happens when light enters a cave and hits the water,” Choi Soo Jung, 47, said. “The upper part of the painting is the reflection, but the two images reflect each other but stand alone. The blurriness of the painting is intentional, like light reflected in water.”
Her use of embroidery is rooted in highlighting the small things that might not get noticed in a large painting, she said, or even in a dark cave with minimal light.
“For example, I created moss on a stone with embroidery to make it more tactile,” she explained. “I regard embroidery as important as drawing. It creates complexity and depth.”
For the South Korean artist Hoh Woo Jung, his “Resonance” series is about celebrating how simple lines can have their own complexity and depth. His “Resonance 1” and “Movement 52,” both oil and pencil on canvas, will be shown in Miami, and he hopes to synchronize a connection between what can appear as simple lines, drawn meticulously with a pencil, to dozens of other small lines.
“My main material is pencil, which is very delicate and thin, and when I painted those pieces with lines and curves and colors, I was thinking about images that can be connected and extended beyond the frame of the canvas,” Jung, 37, explained. “Each piece has evolved to create another piece. The lines go beyond the painting into infinity.”
That infinity, Jung said, is about creating possibilities for what happens outside of the drawings. He sees a kinship in these works with “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
“I felt Dylan Thomas was expressing some kind of tension,” he said. “In my work, I use a very fragile pencil to create a thin line over and over until they make an entire shape. Its dedication is about holding onto something, which is also a sort of tension. It feels similar to the spirit of this poem.”
That spirit is what drew Art Basel Miami Beach to accepting Gallery Baton’s idea for its debut at the art fair.
“It’s such a beautiful and thoughtful proposal, because you can place yourself or the world inside that context,” said Bridget Finn, director of Art Basel Miami Beach, in a recent phone interview. “It’s an incredible and timely proposal, and I think it’s going to resonate beautifully at our fair.”
The concept was very much what Jeon wanted to explore for the fair.
“The selected artworks for Art Basel Miami Beach form a network of images that represent the artists’ interpretations of the many facets of the environment that surround us,” Jeon said. “We want visitors to be immersed in an exhibition where they recognize the world they live in and reflect on our many environmental challenges.”
The centerpiece of Gallery Baton’s booth will be “Seeding,” a wooden sculpture about 6.5 feet long, painted in acrylic, by the Japanese artist Yuichi Hirako. The work was also chosen for the fair’s Meridians platform for large-scale works. A color-splashed smorgasbord of birds, plants, animals and a few humanlike and treelike images sit aboard a boat, seemingly bound for somewhere.
“I want to symbolize that this boat may be our last hope: a vessel filled with a few characters and animals,” Hirako, 42, said by email. “It’s our world condensed into a small space. It’s whimsical and cartoonish, yet, like Dylan Thomas’s poem, the future for those aboard is very uncertain. We’re not sure if they’re going gently on their journey.”
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