Twenty-four shows, four regions, a visit in Gwangju

The Ha Jung-woong Young Artists Invitation, this reading writes, began in honour of honorary director Ha Jung-woong’s patronage, and to find and foster young artists with a distinctive practice. The first show was in 2001; 24 exhibitions have followed, and 123 young artists have met the public through it.

This edition, they add, was divided into four regions — Gyeonggi and Gangwon; Gyeongsang, Daegu and Busan; Chungcheong, Jeonbuk, Jeju and Daejeon; Gwangju and Jeonnam — with artists recommended by public museums in each, then reviewed and finally selected, a process they say added fairness and depth. The writer visited the Gwangju Museum of Art. The date and hour of the visit are left blank in this reading, as OO, and are not filled in here.

A title taken from Hegel, between reality and reason

The 24th invitation is titled Light 2024: . The phrase, they write, takes its cue from a line in the preface to the German philosopher Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”

They read this not as a claim that every reality is rational, but as the thought that only what is truly reasonable and rational can take its place and grow in reality. The artists, they say, made work from that idea. The show, for the writer, opens a way of looking at the present as somewhere on the boundary between reality and reason.

Four young artists, and what each puts into the room

Kang Min-gi, Park Ho-eun, Jang Jae-min, and Yun Jun-yeong, this reading writes, each probe reality from a different angle and puts personal anxiety and social contradiction into the work. Kang explores structural problems in contemporary society and gives them the form of nets and fish traps, a metaphor, they say, for capitalist absurdity, the contradictions of a social system, and the web of human relations and desire.

Park, whom this reading calls “she,” looks straight at pain and anxiety she has felt, and puts into an installation the will to get past those feelings. The piece, they write, was made through a process of thought as deep as meditation, and lighting that causes an optical illusion offers a way out of a fixed way of seeing. Jang paints barren nature and bleak places, not only as landscapes reproduced but as psychological ones. Yun explores the underside of reality from another angle; this reading does not name a medium for that work.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. This reading, a student visit to Light 2024: Between Reality and Reason, the 24th Ha Jung-woong Young Artists Invitation at the Gwangju Museum of Art, with a title drawn from Hegel and four named artists.

Last updated: 15 November 2026