Four contemporary artists from Gwangju, South Korea have brought their work to Ulaanbaatar this week, filling the Mongol Art Gallery with a collection of paintings that range from lush, dreamlike abstraction to spare, unsettling figuration.
“Art Gwangju Connect,” running from July 24 to 30 at the Mongol Art Gallery, brings together Kim Jongkyoung, Yu Jaewon, Yun Seongmin and Cho Suna, four artists based in the South Korean city long recognised as one of the country’s cultural centres.
The show’s visual range is immediately apparent. One large canvas built around a deep violet ground presents a stylised, branching tree strung with round, eye-like seed pods in mossy green, each centred with a dark pupil-like dot, alternating with pale, elongated white forms that read as buds or blossoms caught mid-opening. Fine white speckling drifts across the purple field like snowfall or scattered starlight, giving the whole composition a nocturnal, almost hallucinatory quality, somewhere between botanical study and folk pattern.
That sense of the uncanny carries through to Yu Jaewon’s “Boiled Egg,” a modestly scaled work in gouache and coloured pencil on canvas. Rendered almost entirely in grey and pale line work, a solitary, doll-like child figure stands before a pair of drawn-back yellow-green curtains, cradling a small stuffed animal against their chest. The figure’s blank, wide-set eyes and stiff posture sit in quiet tension with a single note of colour: bright red boots planted on the ground. The effect is theatrical, as though the curtains have just opened on something too intimate and too strange to be a stage.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, a large colour-field painting strips things back entirely, layering deep magenta and crimson into a horizon-like composition, its surface built from broad, confident bands of pigment that suggest a landscape without describing one. Nearby, a portrait rendered in a deliberately naive, almost mask-like style depicts a face with pale yellow brows and wide, unblinking eyes, one hand raised to hold a sprig of small white flowers against a dark red garment. The flattened features and saturated palette give the painting a folk-art directness, warm and faintly melancholic at once.
Together, the works on view resist any single reading of what “contemporary Gwangju art” looks like. Abstraction sits beside careful figuration, botanical motifs beside psychologically charged portraiture, muted palettes beside saturated ones. What unites them is a shared willingness to let colour and form carry emotional weight without explanation, an approach that gives Ulaanbaatar audiences an unusually intimate first encounter with the Gwangju scene.
