Exhibitions at the Atelier Hermès in 2022

2022
Exhibition view of Hwayeon Nam, "GABRIEL", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Hwayeon Nam, "GABRIEL", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Sungsil Ryu, "The Burning Love Song", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Sungsil Ryu, "The Burning Love Song", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Sungsil Ryu, "The Burning Love Song", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Laure Prouvost, "Deep Travel Ink.", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2016 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Exhibition view of Laure Prouvost, "Deep Travel Ink.", Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2016 © Sangtae Kim / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Located within the Maison Hermès in Seoul (Korea), Atelier Hermès is widely recognised for its programme of contemporary art exhibitions, orchestrated by artistic director Soyeon Ahn. With a strong emphasis on the contemporary Korean scene, Atelier Hermès also welcomes artists from other horizons, such as the French artist Laure Prouvost, whose solo show opens the 2022 season.

Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013, Laure Prouvost has made her mark on the international scene with her immersive, narrative installations that thrust the public into poetic, fictional worlds that blend humour and fantasy. This new exhibition is inhabited by strange characters and resonates with enigmatic messages staged as works of art in their own right. A fictional travel agency, Deep Travel Ink, serves as the point of entry into the artist’s imagination and lends its name to the exhibition as a whole.

An unknown family and a mysterious destination are the two recurring themes that structure this dive into a parallel reality alive with moving images. With humour and generosity, Laure Prouvost invites visitors to step into this subconscious world, where they are freed from the hegemonic regimes of money and information. Her fantastical works offer a host of different spaces open to interpretation, which lend themselves to poetic contemplation.

The subsequent exhibition at Atelier Hermès, “The Burning Love Song” by Sungsil Ryu, similarly deploys a fiction that is somehow truer than life. Sungsil Ryu is a Korean artist born in 1993, who was the 2021 laureate of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang, a prize dedicated to Korean art awarded by an international jury. The prize provided her with financial support and a production grant to pursue her satirical work on consumerist traditions in contemporary Korea. In “The Burning Love Song”, she reactivates her fictional character Dae Wang Lee, who heads up a funeral home for dogs. As they take part in a ceremony where entrepreneurial talent edges out grief, viewers come to understand the extent to which profit relies on the manipulation of human desires and weaknesses. Across a series of different mediums, the young artist uses a humorous approach to create parallel worlds where death, not without irony, reveals a hidden face of capitalist Korean society.

Next up is a dreamlike project by Korean artist Hwayeon Nam (b. Seoul, 1979). Comprising three new pieces, the exhibition “GABRIEL” invites us to reflect upon the passage of time through the figure of the archangel. A video that takes its name from that of the exhibition assembles a host of signs for events that have not yet taken place. This strangeness is presaged by a sound sculpture, Coda – a musical term designating the final passage of a piece –, which acts as an introduction. Henceforth, visitors are immersed in a non-linear, paradoxical temporality, potentially opening onto a parallel world through Window-Dream. This work offers the welcome possibility of an escape, while the curtains that frame it simultaneously call to mind an imagined chamber music, representations of the Annunciation, and situations of isolation endured by many during the pandemic. In this exhibition hanging between dream and reality, Hwayeon Nam offers a new perspective on the irreversible flow of time.

Disciplines
Visual arts
Lieu
Atelier Hermès
Séoul, Corée du Sud
South Korea
Laure Prouvost’s exhibition “Deep Travel Ink.” transports the public to a poetic, fictional world that blends humour and fantasy.
The 2021 laureate of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang, Korean artist Sungsil Ryu, presents “The Burning Love Song”, a new body of work created thanks to this prize.
With the exhibition “GABRIEL”, Hwayeon Nam offers a disconcerting perspective on the irreversible flow of time.

Information

  • Exhibition dates
    • Laure Prouvost, "Deep Travel Ink.", from 25/03/2022 to 05/06/2022
    • Sungsil Ryu, "The Burning Love Song", from 29/07/2022 to 02/10/2022
    • Hwayeon Nam, "GABRIEL", from 18/11/2022 to 29/01/2023
  • Practical information

    Maison Hermès Dosan Park B1F

    B1F 7, Dosan-daero 45-gil, Gangnam-gu, Séoul, Corée du Sud

    +82-2-3015-3248

    Free entrance

  • Curator

    Soyeon Ahn

See also