Korean-born, London-based Jukhee Kwon is a rising new artist who's making a name for herself with these monumental sculptures that look as if pages of books are desperately trying to escape. One of her newest pieces was just displayed at a Korean contemporary art group show in Paris. The multi-level sculpture resembled a cascading waterfall shooting down the middle of a spiral staircase.
This past June, Kwon put on her first solo show, called Being, in London at La Scatola Gallery. Easily one off her most impressive pieces was a sculpture that resembled a gargantuan tree. Hanging from the ceiling, it asked its viewers to think about the destruction and re-creation of nature through art – how a book could go back to its original form – from tree to book, from book to tree.
Kwon destroys books in order to order to give them a new lease on life. Each sculpture is constructed by meticulously cutting hundreds of pages and then arranging them to form new objects.
As La Scatola Gallery states, “The artist notes a personal and cultural narrative within her work, which came after the act of making; a feeling of freedom from restraint perhaps, or a living-through of her own migratory experience illustrated in the books themselves. Kwon creates through the destructive process, transforming both the object itself and its relation to the viewer; her work is inspired by artist John Latham, who used ideas of disintegration and the book, notably changing the form of Greenberg's Art and Culture by asking his students to chew the pages to result in a distilled liquid version.”
You can see some of our favorite pieces, below.
Jukhee Kwon's website
Photos via [La Scatola Gallery], [Jotta], [Jukhee Kwon's website]
