About

We live each day gazing at a familiar world. Objects and landscapes that sit in the same places, the scenes of a repeating daily life — they dwell within our gaze for so long that they settle naturally into the known. But does familiarity truly mean we know something fully? Even when looking at the same subject, what we encounter shifts endlessly with time, memory, and experience. The familiar can always turn strange, and that strangeness often arises not from a change in the subject itself, but from a change in the gaze that beholds it. 《Strangeness Within the Familiar》 is an exhibition that looks at precisely this subtle gap between familiarity and strangeness. The objects and landscapes revealed on the canvas do not remain mere subjects of representation. Rather than viewing familiar phenomena as fixed entities, the artist explores the traces of time, memory, sensation, and narrative accumulated on their surfaces. The forms before our eyes read less as something complete than as a cross-section momentarily pushed to the surface by countless invisible layers. Here, light and color transcend their roles as formal elements that describe or define a subject. Light simultaneously reveals and blurs the boundaries of form; color, beyond the outward appearance of things, evokes traces of time and sensation. A canvas that begins with concrete form gradually moves beyond the limits of representation, leaving in its place an emotion and resonance that resist precise definition. What is seen becomes a passageway through which what cannot be seen is felt. The strangeness discovered in these works does not arise from an entirely new world. It emerges, rather, from within a world so familiar we had never looked closely at its interior. Familiar objects remain in the same place, yet the moment the gaze that beholds them shifts, those objects expand into presences that carry different times and stories. In that instant, strangeness is not placed on the opposite side of familiarity — it surfaces as another layer of sensation already latent within the familiar. In the end, this exhibition is a process of gazing at the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the familiar and the strange, form and the meaning beyond it. When we slow our gaze before a work and look again at something we once knew well, the world we believed we understood may approach us in a different light. Perhaps strangeness is not a distant, unknown realm, but something that has always existed within what we knew too well to truly see. May this exhibition become a time to look at the familiar world with fresh eyes, and to encounter the sensations and stories within it that have yet to be discovered. — Curator Kwon Do-eun —