Eden
※Photos are for reference only.
Main Gallery Area Artist
Ophelia
※Photos are for reference only.
Zero
※Photos are for reference only.
※Photos are for reference only.
Artist Information
Photo by Takayuki Mishima
JongOk Ri
1991 Born in Tokyo
2017 Graduated from Korea University in Tokyo
2016 Chong Ri Ae, Jong YuGyong, Lee JongOk ”Zainichi, the present and the art II”, e itoeiko (Tokyo,Japan)
2016 “Current war painting exhibition”, TAV gallery (Tokyo,Japan)
2017 Group Show of Contemporary Artists 2017 ”o the other side of the boundaries”, TOKYO METROPOLITAN ART MUSEUM (Tokyo,Japan)
2018 “Ri Jong Ok: Myth #1”, eitoeiko (Tokyo,Japan)
JongOk Ri, with his background as a third-generation Korean living in Japan, continues to develop work based on his cross-disciplinary and comprehensive perspective towards nation and ethnicity. Graduated from Chosun University’s College of Art and Design, Li has captured realism in his artworks while maintaining a strong awareness of the painting as a surface for objects, further attempting to reveal through its back side an underlying concept of fixedness. Having developed works that utilize compositions from classical paintings and symbolic motifs to approach the context and structure of majority, in his recent practice, Li engages in a metafictional method of expression that transforms the relationship between reality and fiction into artworks.
Selector
Sociologist, Professor at Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
[Comment by Selector]
Jong Ok Ri’s works first caught my attention when I read an article and saw the photograph of the joint exhibition by Musashino Art University and Korea University that she participated as a student. Unfortunately, though, I wasn’t able to actually see her works that time. I later had the opportunity to see them in Tokyo, and this time it caught my breath. In the photograph, it had appeard to be a kind of “Super-Realism” painting. However, deep in the back of its flat image, Jong Ok Ri deliberately portrays social issues such as history in East Asia or racial and ethnic politics, using such subtle and sensitive brushworks through complicated layers. What is it that painting can do in the time when blinking screens surround us? --- Jong Ok Ri’s project could be one of the answers to the questioning.