Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Carnalia'
Kyungseo Lee & Hannah Lim
14th - 31st March 2024
PV Drinks Wednesday 13th March 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
ARTIST TALK between exhibiting artists and Ocki at Blue Shop Gallery
12-1pm Saturday 23rd March | Everyone welcome
RSVP essential hello@blueshopcottage.com
Gallery opening hours: Wednesday - Sunday | 11am - 6pm
Blue Shop Gallery presents our very first duo show at our new gallery space that opened in November 2022. ‘Carnalia’ is a duo show between two young artists based here in London. Kyungseo Lee depicts the body in paint as it drifts from figuration to abstraction with a twist of eroticism and self reflection. Constrastly Hannah Lim creates miniature delicate limbed vessels made from polymer clay and jesmonite, her beautiful family of legged snuff bottles seem to be temporarily holding their breath before, when the viewer’s back is turned, hopping off their artist crafted shelves.
Carnalia is a figurative show celebrating the relationship we have with our own identity, our own flesh, the space that we inhabit and all that inhabits us. Following International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day this duo show falls like a blanket after a time of reflection thinking about the modern role of women in our society and across the world. Hailing from Korea and Singapore respectively these two artists use the body to tell their individual stories. The name ‘Carnalia’ links to Carna, a name meaning ‘Goddess of Flesh’.
- Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery Director
KYUNGSEO LEE
Kyungseo Lee (b.1995) is an artist based in London. She earned her MA at the Royal College of Art in Painting (2023) and BA at Hongik University in Painting and Visual Communication Design (2020). Lee was selected as an artist in residence at Cité Internationale des Arts (France, 2016), and PADA Artist Residency (Portugal, 2023). Her works have been shown internationally including solo exhibition at LKIF Gallery (Korea, 2021), and a number of group exhibitions including shows with: OHSH Projects, Soho Revue and Blue Shop Gallery. She recently had a solo show in Europe, at Makasiini Contemporary (Finland, 2024).
Within her practice, Kyungseo Lee deals with the conflict in her own emotions and feelings towards the human experience, womanhood and female desire. The erotically charged images serve as a stressor to the viewer - one’s ambivalence on the topic of female ‘body image’ can additionally serve as an opportunity to question one’s own relationship with their body via the paintings of Lee. Grey areas in between the binaries of bodily celebration and objectification, right or wrong, good or evil have been a continuing topic and interest for the young painter. She’s experienced certain social circumstances such as the polarisation in Korea, especially in her generation, which is one of the main factors that influences her paintings, as well as her genuine curiosity and admiration in how each body, each human vessel, contains their own universe of values and experiences.
The figures in Kyungseo Lee’s paintings morph into abstraction from form to expression. Lee has been specifically working on the fluidity in her paintings. In order to achieve this, she chooses to pull back and restrain the brush by leaving the canvas empty in places, bringing the ambiguity to the fullest extent by letting the colours flow and merge themselves without removing the figure from the image. Worked with a loose painterly style, the figure soon dissolves into surface, mark and gesture.
HANNAH LIM
Hannah Lim (b.1998) is a London based artist working between sculpture, installation and drawing. She received her BA in sculpture from the University of Edinburgh and her MFA from The University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. She has recently had solo shows with Huxley-Parlour, Wilder Gallery, Alcova Milano, 9 French Place, Edinburgh Printmakers and Commonage Projects whilst also exhibiting in group shows with The Royal Scottish Academy, Bloomberg New Contemporaries and Christies. She was commissioned by Tate Collective to create a sculpture in the style of her ‘Snuff Bottle Series’ for Women’s History Month and recently opened a public sculpture project with Greenwich Peninsula for Lunar New Year. She is currently Pangolin London’s artist in residence and will open a solo show in the gallery’s Kings Cross space later in 2024. Hannah has exhibited internationally, including New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Milan, Tinos, Montreal, Toronto, Edinburgh, Virginia and Miami.
Hannah Lim’s practice has been a way for her to explore parts of her cultural identity. As a woman of mixed Singaporean and British heritage, her work explores the relationship between these two cultures, looking to how this has been reflected historically through furniture design, objects and architecture.
She became intrigued by the 18th-century design trend, Chinoiserie. A trend through which elements of Chinese design and culture were recreated and imitated in relation to European aesthetics and tastes. In her own work, she attempts to reclaim and re-imagine this practice in a more conscientious way. Her sculptures often draw inspiration from specific cultural styles or processes. Both ornamental and functional designs are blended together in my larger and smaller scale works.
Recently she’s become interested in Classical Chinese literature focussed in particular on enchanted creatures, objects, and mythical storytelling. Taking inspiration from texts including the ‘Classics of Mountains and Seas’ and Pu Songling’s ‘Tales of a Chinese Studio’, her often ornamental yet animistic sculptures and paintings take on a storytelling quality whilst also referencing my own journey of identity searching.
Alongside this she’s started to examine the ‘ornamental’ nature of my work, in doing so she was introduced to ‘Ornamentalism’, a feminist theory for East/South East Asian personhood developed by Anne Annlin Cheng. Cheng explores the historic portrayal of East/South East Asian femininity as something associated with ornamental language, aesthetics, objects, and technology. Through developing an understanding of Cheng’s ‘Ornamentalism’ she’s been able to examine the role of ‘ornament’ within her own work. For her, the over - ‘ornamentalisation’ or flamboyance of her work has become a way of pushing against fixed notions of identity and race that are often a point of confusion and struggle for those who come from mixed cultural backgrounds.
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