PARADE
2024.04.09 - 2024.05.24
Space Fountain hosts a collaborative exhibition between Jay Flow and SPIV, two artists representing the flow of Korean art rooted from urban culture, titled "PARADE." The two artists, who have led Korean street art and urban contemporary art, show their different identities, techniques, and characters in this exhibition. The gallery space is reborn as a vast street, and a variety of characters march, unified in this parade. Jay Flow shows his signature theme, NEIGHBORHOOD, with spray and marker, and SPIV creats abstract figure forms with various color plates, portraying their artistic identities as they move towards their destination. The paintings of the two artists, each with their own beginnings, come across each other and blend into one at where differences are transformed into harmony and unity.
This exhibition offers a glimpse into the artistic worlds of Jay Flow and SPIV, who are at the forefront of visual culture in Korea, through their collaborative works, breaking the boundaries between graffiti and traditional painting, and creating a new scenery. Street art, which began in the late 1970s with graffiti artists anonymously leaving names on city walls, has become a cultural phenomenon, representing various artistic energies, including urban marginalized communities. Jay Flow and SPIV have created unique symbols and characters against the backdrop of a commercially covered city to express their identities and have developed a new visual language to communicate freely and bond with the public. Through their "PARADE," this exhibition breaks down the dichotomies between traditional art and urban contemporary art, gallery and street, human and technology, of our society. In our society being increasingly polarized by economic logic and political issues, our collective ‘PARADE’ will provide a meaningful opportunity to acknowledge "difference" and seek a new value of "coexistence."
Artist
JAY FLOW
임동주
Growing up in the midst of Korea's street culture, Jay Flow has been relentlessly creating graffiti, graphic design, painting, and installation for more than 20 years, showing his unique style. His work, based on his identity as a graffiti writer, mixes materials such as spray paint, markers, and acrylic paints to express various aspects of our society in a playful and free manner. The main motif of the exhibition, "NEIGHBORHOOD," is a series of simplified cartoonish figures that evoke a utopian society where everyone could live in harmony with strong bonds. The group of figures expressed in the freestyle of graffiti, created in a rough and fast manner, conveys a powerful energy that goes beyond the previously established tradition and breaks the boundary between street art and white cube art.
WORKS
Artist
SPIV
전지훈
Creating intensely colored iconography based on the explosive energy of Seoul, Spive has been pioneering new areas of Korean urban art based on graffiti since 1999. He is also a member of the Worldwide Crew (B.A.M/H.A.M) and has exhibited his works around the world. Beyond tags and masterpieces, the artist actively utilizes psychedelic colors to create powerful characters reminiscent of monsters to achieve diverse, rich paintings. In this exhibition, the artist creates large and small figures with bold color plates to portray a dynamic scenery of the viewers’ real world, parading together to celebrate life and sometimes to flee from dangers that they encounter in life. Like the flowers and characters in the painting, each parader is different, yet nevertheless equally beautiful.
WORKS
