Booth | C07
Venue | COEX, 513, Yeongdong-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Artists |
Tina Keng Gallery | Su Xiaobai, Sopheap Pich, Su Meng-Hung
TKG+ | Jane Lee, Jam Wu, Chiu Chen-Hung, Amol K. Patil
▋Preview ▋
09.03 (Wed.) 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
09.04 (Thurs.) 11:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
▋Public ▋
09.04 (Thurs.) 3:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m.
09.05 (Fri.) 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
09.06 (Sat.) 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.
Coordinates of the Unseen
From September 3 to 6, 2025, Tina Keng Gallery will join forces with TKG+ in a collaborative booth at this year’s Frieze Seoul, presenting works by Taiwanese artists Su Meng-Hung, Jam Wu, and Chiu Chen-Hung, Chinese artist Su Xiaobai, Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich, Singaporean artist Jane Lee, and Indian artist Amol K. Patil.
The exhibition adopts “Coordinates of the Unseen” as its overarching theme, signifying how each artist’s cultural background and distinct life experience bring to light topics and elements that are often neglected, repressed, or ineffable. These concerns do not manifest in overt ways but instead emerge through indirect, refracted, or reconstructed forms. In a contemporary society increasingly fixated on appearances, the “visible” has become the default measure of value and truth. However, what truly shapes our cognition, memory, and emotional life often lies beyond the visual threshold—fractures in history, voids in language, and traces of emotion. Through the perspectives of the artists, “Coordinates of the Unseen” seeks to map these subtle yet potent undercurrents and emotional terrains that shape the reality we inhabit.
The works not only probe into space, memory, and structures of power, but also question the very act of seeing. Through layered imagery, unfinished narratives, and the encoding and translation of materials, the artists mark out new "coordinates" within existing histories and realities—challenging the visual frameworks imposed by dominant narratives. Among the participating artists, some attend to silenced voices and hidden images—gently invoking personal and collective memories that have never been fully “seen.” Others explore how identity and symbols mutate and dislocate through bodily experience and the everyday, prompting a reconsideration of presence and immediacy.
"Coordinates" represent a mode of positioning—but also a metaphor for power structures. The unseen coordinates symbolize experiences excluded from dominant discourse: unnamed, unacknowledged, and institutionally invisible. These intangible elements should not be mistaken for absence; rather, they form the critical threads of our lived reality.
About the Artists |
Su Xiaobai reinterprets the traditional East Asian medium of lacquer through a contemporary lens. In his process—comprising brushwork, pouring, soaking, washing, and wiping—the lacquer may be allowed to pause or flow freely, transforming across curved wooden and ceramic-tile structures into works imbued with a sense of time and material tension. These works resonate with the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, where the innate visual texture of lacquer reveals a warm, luminous glow. This quality evokes cultural legacies found in porcelain, lacquerware, and ink painting, transcending material form and definition to render a cross-cultural contemporary classic—a dialogue between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary art.
Though devoid of overtly Eastern symbols or motifs, Su’s works are unmistakably infused with a deep Chinese cultural sensibility. His restraint in form and focused engagement with chromatic fields reflect both the historical gravitas of lacquer and its layered material depth. Through the slow construction of monochromatic surfaces over time, color seeps beyond the visual into the spiritual realm, awakening within viewers a resonance with cultural memory and collective unconscious.
Singaporean artist Jane Lee redefines the relationships between frame, canvas, and paint. Employing non-traditional techniques and leveraging the physical weight of paint itself, she deconstructs and reconstructs familiar materials and methods. Her work breaks away from the conventional logic of painting as image representation, instead transforming it into a dynamic event—one that engages with materiality, space, the body, and time.
In Lee’s practice, paint becomes an active material presence. No longer a mere vehicle for color, it infiltrates, compresses, and distorts the structure of the canvas. The canvas, in turn, is no longer a passive, flat surface bearing an image; it becomes a reactive, organic entity—one that crumples, collapses, and drapes in response to the pressure and flow of paint. This approach, where paint sculpts the canvas, shifts the viewer’s experience from the purely visual to one imbued with spatial and tactile intensity.
Often straddling the line between painting and sculpture, Lee’s works challenge not only the boundaries of painterly media but also the very relationship between the artwork and the viewer—redefining what it means to encounter and engage with a painting.
Nature and Cambodian cultural heritage are central to Sopheap Pich’s artistic practice, serving as vital links to his identity and sources of inspiration. Drawing from the Khmer culture of Southeast Asia, his work evokes the humid atmosphere of rain-soaked tropical forests and utilizes locally abundant materials such as bamboo, rattan, burlap, mineral pigments, and metal. Through abstract constructions, Pich weaves a poetic language that intertwines nature, history, and identity.
Rather than replicating cultural symbols of the past, his work distills experiences that traverse time and perception. The materials themselves—imbued with memory, traces of labor, and geographic specificity—become vessels of meaning. Through them, Pich reconstructs a resilient yet profound cultural narrative, one that speaks to both personal and collective experience, grounded in place yet open to universal resonance.
Spanning painting, silkscreen printmaking, installation, and sculpture, Su Meng-Hung reinterprets traditional Chinese bird-and-flower imagery by transforming it into cultural codes that resonate within contemporary contexts. His practice goes beyond appropriation or pop-inflected parody; instead, it points to the deeper connotations of literati taste and symbolism embedded within these motifs. Su is not merely reproducing images—he interrogates the aesthetic, cultural, and power structures they carry, and how these are recontextualized in the present.
Through techniques such as layering, displacement, mirroring, and obscuration, he alters the visual field to give seemingly familiar cultural symbols a new texture. Rejecting nostalgic sentimentality and resisting the flattening of Eastern motifs into surface-level consumption, Su approaches cultural memory and visual language with a cool precision. His work conceals what appears visible, embedding tradition within a new visual lexicon that challenges viewers to reconsider the meanings of images they may take for granted.
Rooted in the traditional craft of paper cutting, Jam Wu draws inspiration from Minnan culture, Indigenous texts, and East Asian mythology, focusing particularly on representations of women and matriarchal narratives throughout human history. From sourcing paper, cutting and weaving it by hand, to dyeing each piece, every stage of his process reflects not only refined craftsmanship but also the transmission of cultural practice—serving as both a form of heritage and a channel for the artist’s spirit.
In Wu’s hands, paper cutting transcends its folkloric origins to become a powerful language for engaging with history and articulating female experience. He reimagines and reshapes mythological figures from Indigenous matrilineal traditions, repositioning them within contemporary visual discourse. This is not merely a formal reinvention but a deliberate narrative strategy—one that responds, through delicate and resilient handwork, to structural erasure and the absence of historical subjects.
By using paper cutting as a medium, Wu is not simply cutting images—he is cutting through time, identity, and memory, allowing intangible histories and emotions to emerge slowly from the layered folds of paper.
Drawing from memories of his native environment, Chiu Chen-Hung uses cement and putty—materials ubiquitous in both urban and rural Taiwanese architecture—as the foundation for his work. With a hand plane, he carves plant silhouettes cast by light and shadow into these surfaces, creating fragments of scenery akin to views glimpsed through window grilles. This process becomes a way of excavating and reconstructing memory.
Cement, omnipresent in Taiwan’s built environment, is not only a structural base but also a silent recorder of time and use. Chiu treats it as a "stratum of memory"—one that can be carved open to reveal hidden layers of history and emotion. As viewers approach his work, subtle shifts in texture and pattern begin to emerge: shadows flutter across walls; plants appear as if filtered through the frame of a window. Through repeated carving gestures, Chiu transforms a cold, rigid material into one that feels soft and sensitive, crafting a poetic space that reflects on ideas of home, time, and looking.
Through entangled torsos and contorted limbs, Amol K. Patil reveals the quiet elegy of India’s marginalized communities—crowded bodies struggling to survive within the densely packed urban landscape. Using the fine textures of pen-and-ink drawing, he renders roughened skin shaped by relentless labor, capturing both the physical toll and the emotional weight borne by those in the lower strata of society.
The human figures in Patil’s works serve as metaphors for the working class, while also confronting deeper systemic issues embedded in Indian cities—caste, class, and labor. His art becomes a form of visual resistance, shedding light on the often-invisible lives of the urban poor, and turning their stories into a poignant, corporeal language.
