ONE AND J. Gallery presents The Second Skin, a group exhibition on view from March 20 to April 30, 2025, featuring five Korean artists—Choong Hyun Roh, Dongwook Suh, Dongi Lee, Suejin Chung, and Sooyeon Hong—whose practices explore painting as a site for the formation and transformation of identity. The exhibition interrogates the relationship between the self and surface, suggesting that painting can act not only as a medium of expression but also as a porous membrane shaped by both inner narrative and social context.
The title, The Second Skin, reflects a conceptual framework in which painting becomes an extension of the artist’s own body—a surface that holds, protects, and discloses identity. As skin both conceals and reveals, the painted canvas operates in similar ways, embodying the tensions between vulnerability and agency. This notion is elaborated through the diverse yet interwoven practices of the five participants, who blur the lines between introspection and cultural positioning.
Rather than subordinating artistic individuality to a prescribed cultural reading, the exhibition highlights how personal experience, memory, and perception form their own interpretive systems. Each artist develops a visual language that both resists and reflects broader frameworks of identity politics, national narratives, and aesthetic expectation.
Choong Hyun Roh constructs atmospheric paintings rooted in urban topographies, where traces of memory and everyday space coalesce into scenes dense with social and emotional resonance. Dongwook Suh’s work pivots between figuration and abstraction, experimenting with painterly form to map the inner psyche against external structures. In contrast, Dongi Lee extends his long-standing engagement with the Pop Art idiom to challenge the rigidity of cultural identity through his recurring character Atomaus—an avatar that collapses the boundaries between East and West, fine art and pop culture.
Suejin Chung adopts a linguistic and semiotic approach, exploring how the formal elements of painting—color, rhythm, and symbol—generate mutable fields of meaning. Her work invites the viewer to engage with the instability of image and text as sites of interpretation. Meanwhile, Sooyeon Hong explores painting’s sensory dimension, composing environments that encourage embodied viewing. Her layered surfaces, rich in chromatic tension, allow for emotional immersion and meditative stillness.
What unites the exhibition is not style, but sensitivity: to material, memory, and the construction of the self. While each artist articulates a distinct perspective, their works converge to propose that painting is not a closed system, but a space where identities are not merely displayed but assembled and renegotiated.
Founded in 2005, ONE AND J. Gallery has long been committed to fostering contemporary Korean art both domestically and abroad. With a roster that includes established names like Seo Dong Wook and Kang Hong Gu, and a commitment to emerging voices through its +1 program, the gallery continues to shape the discourse of Korean contemporary painting. The Second Skin, it presents a timely and nuanced reflection on how individuality can be reimagined through form, context, and material presence.
ONE AND J. Gallery presents The Second Skin, a group exhibition on view from March 20 to April 30, 2025, featuring five Korean artists—Choong Hyun Roh, Dongwook Suh, Dongi Lee, Suejin Chung, and Sooyeon Hong—whose practices explore painting as a site for the formation and transformation of identity. The exhibition interrogates the relationship between the self and surface, suggesting that painting can act not only as a medium of expression but also as a porous membrane shaped by both inner narrative and social context.
The title, The Second Skin, reflects a conceptual framework in which painting becomes an extension of the artist’s own body—a surface that holds, protects, and discloses identity. As skin both conceals and reveals, the painted canvas operates in similar ways, embodying the tensions between vulnerability and agency. This notion is elaborated through the diverse yet interwoven practices of the five participants, who blur the lines between introspection and cultural positioning.
Rather than subordinating artistic individuality to a prescribed cultural reading, the exhibition highlights how personal experience, memory, and perception form their own interpretive systems. Each artist develops a visual language that both resists and reflects broader frameworks of identity politics, national narratives, and aesthetic expectation.
Choong Hyun Roh constructs atmospheric paintings rooted in urban topographies, where traces of memory and everyday space coalesce into scenes dense with social and emotional resonance. Dongwook Suh’s work pivots between figuration and abstraction, experimenting with painterly form to map the inner psyche against external structures. In contrast, Dongi Lee extends his long-standing engagement with the Pop Art idiom to challenge the rigidity of cultural identity through his recurring character Atomaus—an avatar that collapses the boundaries between East and West, fine art and pop culture.
Suejin Chung adopts a linguistic and semiotic approach, exploring how the formal elements of painting—color, rhythm, and symbol—generate mutable fields of meaning. Her work invites the viewer to engage with the instability of image and text as sites of interpretation. Meanwhile, Sooyeon Hong explores painting’s sensory dimension, composing environments that encourage embodied viewing. Her layered surfaces, rich in chromatic tension, allow for emotional immersion and meditative stillness.
What unites the exhibition is not style, but sensitivity: to material, memory, and the construction of the self. While each artist articulates a distinct perspective, their works converge to propose that painting is not a closed system, but a space where identities are not merely displayed but assembled and renegotiated.
Founded in 2005, ONE AND J. Gallery has long been committed to fostering contemporary Korean art both domestically and abroad. With a roster that includes established names like Seo Dong Wook and Kang Hong Gu, and a commitment to emerging voices through its +1 program, the gallery continues to shape the discourse of Korean contemporary painting. The Second Skin, it presents a timely and nuanced reflection on how individuality can be reimagined through form, context, and material presence.
