In Between State

What does it mean to see? Vision is often the first sense through which we encounter the world, arriving before language and preceding explanation. Yet the understanding it offers is not necessarily intellectual or analytical. Rather, it emerges through embodied perception—a sensory experience that settles within us before it can be articulated. **_In Between State_** brings together the works of Armando Chant and Sungmin Park, two artists whose practices explore the act of perception itself and the ways in which images are continually dismantled and reconstituted through material and sensory processes. Although distinct in form and approach, both artists engage in a sustained investigation of transformation. Their works emerge through repeated acts of construction and dissolution, challenging fixed images and opening them to new possibilities of meaning and experience. Armando Chant begins by isolating fragments from photographic scenes and reconfiguring them into unfamiliar spatial and temporal landscapes. The diverse materials and techniques employed throughout his practice extend beyond formal experimentation; they function as agents in the creation of new sensory worlds. On the canvas, disparate materials encounter one another in a delicate balance of tension and harmony, generating surfaces that oscillate between image and sensation. In Chant’s embroidered works, hand-stitched threads traverse linen surfaces through repetitive gestures, tracing time and space through the body. The tactile quality of these works transforms physical labor into visual experience. Similarly, his use of staining techniques introduces a sense of diffusion and permeability. Unlike embroidery, which sharpens and defines the image, dyed surfaces blur visual certainty, encouraging multiple modes of seeing. Through cycles of marking and erasure, construction and collapse, clarity and obscurity, Chant’s paintings move beyond what is immediately visible, revealing latent images and perceptual possibilities. The resulting works are accumulations of duration and spontaneity, control and chance, materiality and sensation. Sungmin Park’s paintings, by contrast, emphasize the flatness and abstraction of the pictorial surface. Yet beneath their refined appearance lie densely layered accumulations of matter, memory, and perception. Motifs that appeared explicitly in earlier works—such as ceramics and ice—have gradually undergone transformation, becoming abstract visual structures rather than recognizable objects. The meticulously rendered textures of ceramic surfaces and the intersecting vertical and horizontal brushstrokes simultaneously evoke material presence and establish compositional order. Fields of color both define and transgress boundaries, reflecting the mutable nature of ceramic and ice while generating rhythms of absorption and reflection across the canvas. Layers of urethane and resin, applied with deliberate intention, produce matte or glossy surfaces that further emphasize states of fluidity and transformation. In Park’s work, the more intensely a subject is articulated, the more it dissolves into abstraction, creating a productive tension between representation and non-representation. The works of both artists are therefore less concerned with fixed structures than with ongoing processes. Rather than presenting completed forms, they inhabit states of continual becoming. Traces left upon the surface resist resolution into singular images, oscillating instead between emergence and disappearance, concentration and dispersion. As viewers navigate these shifting conditions, painting unfolds not as a static image but as an ever-expanding perceptual landscape. The exhibition title, “In Between State”, reflects this condition and invites reflection on how we experience and understand the world. Here, the notion of “between” signifies the spaces that separate and connect representation and abstraction, materiality and immateriality, memory and sensation. “State” refers not to a fixed condition but to a dynamic field in which forms, perceptions, and meanings intersect and evolve. Perhaps seeing is not an act of fully comprehending or naming what stands before us. Perhaps it is an act of remaining within the continual flow of perception itself. In this space, painting ceases to function merely as a medium of representation and instead becomes a site where the world is encountered through sensation. Following the subtle resonances and lingering vibrations that arise there, “ **_In Between State_** “ opens a space for imagining new ways of relating to the world around us. Text l Sohee Lim (BHAK Curator)