ALIVE, ALIVE, OH!

Ora-Ora is pleased to present a solo show of new works by Korean artist Yi Yi Jeong-Eun, to take place in its Tai Kwun gallery in Hong Kong from 2 November to 10 December, 2023. The exhibition is titled: Alive, Alive, Oh! This is Yi Yi Jeong-Eun’s debut solo exhibition in Hong Kong, and first solo showing with Ora-Ora.

Speaking of Yi Yi Jeong-Eun’s new solo show, CEO and co-founder of Ora-Ora Dr. Henrietta Tsui-Leung said: “Yi Yi Jeong-eun gives painting a new dimension. She is mindfully seeing her world in a new and radical way, so that we begin to see our own world through her eyes. The horizon becomes full of freshness, colour and renewed optimism.”

Yi Yi Jeong-Eun’s artworks are imbued with the colourful energy of the scenery around her, and seek to radiate the joys, glories and transience of the natural world rather than seeking refuge in pure figurative description.

With words adopted from the Irish folk song Molly Malone, Alive, Alive, Oh! rings out with an embrace of being. As the artist expounds: “Nature is an object and location that allows me to most keenly sense the fact that I am one of the changing things… I realize that I too am alive when I watch clouds sail across the sky.”

A celebration of the beauty of nature shines forth from her paintings, which are soaked in the hope-inspiring tones of summer, a stage of radiance under a horizon of sun and rainbows. Nature lies at the heart of the artist’s practice and in understanding her own artistic evolution. As she describes it: “While I am a human being, nature helps me realize that I am also a living animal.”

The artist will be showing more than 15 brand-new oil on canvas works. These include There, On Being Alive, Flowers_202349 (2023) which creates delicious oblongs of emerald grass against a raspberry floral background. This combination of wet-on-wet rapidity and carefulness of outline is echoed in There, Rainbow in the Sunset (2023), in which the artist presents two painterly styles in the same work, provoking a dramatic internal tension on the canvas.

The artist’s first solo show with Ora-Ora follows her debut with Ora-Ora at Kiaf in Seoul in 2023. The artist has a strong following in South Korea, and this show marks an important step in her rapidly expanding international profile.