Cha Kye-nam Solo Exhibition: One Day, Perhaps…

About this event

August 20 (Thursday) to October 10 (Saturday), 2026 Gallery Sejul Cha Kye-nam's work has always started with materials, but its end did not stay there. Fiber, sisal hemp, Hanji (traditional Korean paper), and ink. The materials chosen by the artist were soft and flexible, sometimes easily torn or scattered. However, Cha Kye-nam repeatedly dyed, twisted, and layered these fragile materials, leading them into a solid world. in her work, material becomes form, form becomes time, and time remains a space of silence. In her early fiber art, Cha Kye-nam expanded the possibilities of fiber into a sculptural dimension by dyeing and compressing sisal hemp. Thread and fiber were no longer decorative elements on a plane. They stood on their own, occupied space, and became structures that confronted the viewer's body. This process of a soft material acquiring a solid presence is an important starting point for understanding her artistic world. Silence in her work is not mere quietness, but a space where the accumulation of time and thought resides, and black is read not as a color of termination but as a depth harboring generation and possibility. The structures and surfaces created by repeated actions go beyond form to create a space where life and death, presence and absence, and being and non-being coexist. This attitude has continued in her work with Hanji and ink since the 2000s. The artist wrote phrases she held in her heart with ink on Hanji, then cut the paper and twisted it like thread. The letters lose their form but do not completely disappear. They remain as traces of dots and lines, becoming another landscape on the surface. The act of attaching these threads one by one is not just a production method, but a process of asceticism that accumulates time through repetition. The artist described this as controlling the desire to draw and focusing on the action itself in a state of selflessness (musim). The surfaces created by black and white look like landscapes or layers of memory. Within them, we face a quiet tension between the visible and invisible, the disappearing and the remaining. This exhibition is not just a retrospective of the artist's life. Rather, it is a place to examine how her work acquires new meaning in today's time, and viewers experience the artist's accumulated time and space beyond just appreciation. In the words "One day, perhaps," there is a sense of an arrival that has not yet ended. One day, perhaps, we will ask again in front of Cha Kye-nam's work: What disappears, and what remains? How does silence become form? What is reborn within the black? "How does the invisible exist?" At this point, we aim to shed new light on the meaning of artist Cha Kye-nam's artistic work.

Location

Jongno-gu Gallery Sejul

Weather

• Today(Tue)🌧️Rain · 22° ~ 26° · 60% chance of rain
• Sep 2(Wed)☁️Cloudy · 22° ~ 28° · 30% chance of rain
• Sep 3(Thu)☀️Clear · 20° ~ 29° · 30% chance of rain

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