14 Jan 2015 to 29 Jan 2015

The Blyth Gallery will present new works by five artists from the Royal College of Art: Hyojin Kim, Yuting Ong, Duncan Pare, Jinyong Park and Kyung Hwa Shon. The title of the exhibition, ‘You never look at me from the place which I see you’, is derived from Jacques Lacan’s theory of light and line as its points of departure. The phrase signifies the relationship of crisscrossing between the eye and the gaze in a field of vision. The exhibition rests in such a space between the initial coding of the visual and the presentation of the artwork by the artist. Between these two points there is a process of testing, where ideas are allowed to be bent over upon themselves and given the space to grow in directions that were not first conceived by the artist.

Lines are being drawn in many directions but they are lines that are not simply emanating from a visible source but from the deepest recess of not being able to see. These lines have different velocities, thus some of the lines appear to proceed directly through space whereas others have a curved trajectory. These works all have partial tracings of such lines, visibilities and points that are without illumination. It is not as if discourse is altogether hidden from this operation of tracing but rather it stutters in and out of recognition. Painting appears to be that thin tissue of visibility that exists between light and discourse but in ways that can only be described as chaotic. This is why painting can never be a form of knowledge because it knows nothing of the lines that appear only to draw self-effacing consistency. The quote from Lacan alludes to the fact that the relationship of the self and other is constitutionally a-symetrical, thrown or radically de-centred. We live with an apprehension of this, it informs our very relationship to spatial depth but it pursues each as an unease in the art that we pursue. Simply speaking there is always the presentation of a knot that cannot be undone and yet narratives might be evoked in order to place a skin over such knots. Franz Kafka wrote “We Photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting eyes.” Perhaps Kafka is setting up a dynamic for us to understand the very striation of the aesthetic principle. We simply cannot draw straight lines, then calculate the angles or vectors and then proceed as if the world is a ready-at-hand mode of coherence.


– Hyojin Kim (1988* S. Korea) lives and works in Seoul and London. The artist focuses on every moment she is aware of the gaze she subjects others to and is subjected to herself. Particularly, she portrays innumerable appointed relationships and drifted characters, through the process of transferring photographs to paintings.

– Yu Ting Ong (1990* Singapore) lives and works in London. Her works reflect upon an inner desire to interrupt the ceaseless and violent flow of figurative imagery that perpetuates our everyday life, one that is founded upon capitalist and visual culture. They produce moments of reflection; illogical, resting upon rhythm that lead not to ‘song’.

– Duncan Paré (1974* England) lives and works in London and Copenhagen. His work deals with the shifting relations between paintings, objects and other image forms. Presently his work is an examination of systems of creativity under constraint that find affordance and articulation. 

– Jinyong Park (1990* S. Korea) lives and works in London. Her work performs a perceptual opacity which is indicated and remains as its trace of impossibility. She works within simplicity and repetition to drain such complicated connotations. Her recent work deals with different modes of paper, exploring its potentials as an object.

– Kyung Hwa Shon (1983* S. Korea) lives and works in Seoul and London. Shon has studied internationally at the Royal College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hong-Ik University, and École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Shon was a Starr scholar at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Her current project has focused on the relationships between an identity of city and imagination. The city as a field of excavation provides rediscovery of psychological heteromorphic identification, the presence of invisible substance, fantastic visual experiences from the moments of glitch. Shon has shown her work internationally at the Seoul Olympics Museum of Art, Dyson Gallery at the Royal College of Art, Royal Academy of Arts, the Korean Cultural Service, and New York, the Korean Cultural Centre in UK, and so on.