Residency Dates: July 22-August 18, 2022
Studio H Canada is thrilled to welcome ZORYU, an emerging painter, sculptor, and performance artist from Seoul, South Korea.
The name Zoryu 造類 is a combination of two components 造 and 類 (each sounds like zo and ryu in Korean), the former means “to sculpt”, and the later means “bunch”. So the name Zoryu can infer both meanings “a bunch of sculptures” and “Sculpture-type”.
Lee Yong Deok, academic advisor at SNU sculpture
About the art: the artist speaks a lot in respect of usage of media and tools. The movements such
as shaping and curving into the stones with chisels or daubing gouache paint flat on wet canvases are unignorable happenings and are very intimate to the artist’s existence. This is because the conditions most directly related to the moment of Zoryu ‘being working’, so to being exist are media and tools.
In this residency, I would like to adjust and prepare detailed settings of my painting style so that it can fit the theme for the next exhibition.
About Artist
Zoryu adores the role “sculptor” as an individual with the ability of creation. The artist had a nostalgia for the times when sculpting and painting were considered a dignified labor force and were hailed as god’s ability. By adhering to the extinct and anachronistic language of art, Zoryu examines the meaning and dignity of regression in the epochs, and at the same time scoffs at both the rapids and regression. In these kinds of processes, the artist sets the theme of the works by discovering the contradictions, stereotypes, or disagreements of the times.
Group Exhibitions
2017 LA Modern Art Exhibition, JB Gallery, Los Angeles
2021 Gyene-Jeonshi, SAPY, Seoul
2021 SNU graduate exhibition, SNU, Seoul
2022 Saminjeon, Gangneung City Hotel, Gangneung
In the undergraduate graduation exhibition, Zoryu dealt with the two artistic impulses mentioned from Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, the encounter between Dionysus and Apollon. Pieces using classic mediums such as stone sculptures, terracotta colorata, and paintings were featured.
At a recent exhibition at a hotel in Gangneung (city of South Korea), Zoryu made a protest with two other artists against the hotel’s executives consisted of artist-insulting entrepreneurs, who were actually members of the city’s vicious conservative party.
This fall, Zoryu is having a solo exhibition in Tokyo, featuring paintings of people called “Okama”s working there, in a modernist portrait style of the 19th century. The intent is to capture sexual minorities onto canvases and reveal discrimination category from unofficial to official.
The next artist joining Studio H Canada International Residency is Clementine Wright from Boise Idaho, USA from August 14-28, 2022. Stay Tuned for more information about this artist.
Artists of all media and disciplines are welcome to apply to Studio H Canada International Art Residency – please check out the link here to apply.
Check out previous posts about artists here.