Gallery Hyundai is pleased to present Body of work, a solo exhibition of Shin Sung Hy (1948–2009), at its New York Project Space. Throughout his career, Shin enlivened various material qualities of the essential ingredients of painting—canvas, support, and paint—in pursuit of ontological questions regarding illusion and representation, two- and three-dimensionality, and the artist’s own body. Furthermore, as an émigré who relocated to Paris in the 1980s, he signals the historical Korean diaspora alongside the Korean Avant-garde and emerging talents as one of the three branches of Korean art that have defined the gallery’s historic trajectory, which this global outpost promises to amplify.

Shin Sung Hy’s practice can be categorized into four distinct periods: the “monochrome hyper-realistic painting” series, jute paintings (1974–1982), “collaged paperwork” series, collage (1983–1992), “sewn-canvas” series, couturage (1993–1997), and “knotted-canvas” series, nouage (1997–2009). This exhibition focuses on his couturage and nouage from the 1990s and 2000s where Shin conjured sculptural qualities by cutting colored canvas into pieces and knotting or sewing them back onto its support, creating porous structures that interweave the two- and three-dimensional, positive and negative space.

In 2014, Blum & Poe organized From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction followed by an exhibition entering Dansaekhwa and American Minimalist works into dialogue, and a duo exhibition Chung Sang-hwa & Shin Sung-hy in 2018, catalyzing the entry of Shin’s iconic nouage series into art historical discourse. Through this exhibition, Gallery Hyundai seeks to further conversations on his avant-garde endeavors across a half-century from 1970 until his passing—an emblem of the global history of painting itself—and the continuing influence of his timeless works.