Daegyeong Ilbo | Daegu Art Factory’s First 2026 Special Exhibition: 8 Artists Unfold ‘Korea Hip’ Through Diverse Media
According to Daegyeong Ilbo, Daegu Art Factory will hold its first 2026 special exhibition, 'KOREA HIP!', from March 4 to April 19. Kim Hyun Jung takes part with her 'Naesoong Stories' series depicting the informal daily lives of figures in hanbok, alongside seven other artists — Kwak Gi-ppeum, Kim Seon-jae, Kim Eun-jin, Bae Mun-kyung, Jang Woo-seok, Jo Se-min, and Han Hyo-jin.
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Daegu Art Factory, operated by the Culture and Arts Division of the Daegu Culture and Arts Foundation, will hold its first exhibition of 2026, the special exhibition 'KOREA HIP!', from March 4 to April 19.
Prepared as this year's first special exhibition, 'KOREA HIP!' was planned to view the 'K-trend' — represented by Korea's K-pop, fashion, digital content, and street culture — not as a mere consumer trend, but as an artistic and cultural flow in which art and everyday culture from the past are newly formed within today's sensibility.
This exhibition was designed to present, through works that combine traditional aesthetics with modern and contemporary visual culture and contemporary digital/street sensibilities, the process by which 'hipness' forms in Korean society and is reproduced as art — revealing, within the exhibition experience, the circular structure in which familiar cultural images are recreated with a new sensibility and expand into the culture of the future.
The eight participating artists are Kwak Gi-ppeum, Kim Seon-jae, Kim Eun-jin, Kim Hyun Jung, Bae Mun-kyung, Jang Woo-seok, Jo Se-min, and Han Hyo-jin, who present works that contemporarily reconstruct Korea's everyday life, imagery, and urban sensibility through diverse media including painting, installation, objects, and video. Each expands the keyword 'Korea Hip' through their own working method and sensibility.
Artist Kwak Gi-ppeum shapes sentences from perishable materials such as incense paste, wax, and thermochromic pigment, experimenting with the moment when 'language to be read' transforms into 'sensation to be seen and touched' through the process of the text burning, dissolving, and disintegrating. Artist Kim Seon-jae builds a virtual-reality world called 'Over World,' reminiscent of games and animation, and unfolds it into paintings and sculptures in physical space.
Artist Kim Eun-jin draws the sheen of mother-of-pearl into the materiality of painting, creating three-dimensional landscapes where crowds of human figures and imagined beings intermingle, while artist Kim Hyun Jung, on the theme of 'Naesoong,' expresses the informal, everyday side of figures in hanbok — inspired by notions of elegance and secrecy — through her 'Naesoong Stories' series. Using her signature hanji-collage technique, she renders a 21st-century genre painting that spans East and West, tradition and modernity.
Artist Bae Mun-kyung realizes folk-painting and Ten Longevity Symbols imagery as three-dimensional installations combined with projection mapping to create an immersive space where 'A Strange Folk Painting Tale' flows through time and seasons, while artist Jang Woo-seok leaves records of walking through and observing a region directly, in painting, photography, and video, composing them into miniature relief installations to express the structure of contemporary crowds and relationships in his work.
Artist Jo Se-min builds a playful virtual space with totemic, animistic objects that transform pop characters and traditional Northeast Asian imagery, blurring boundaries of judgment such as good/evil and beauty/ugliness, and presenting a sense of escape from life's contradictions. Artist Han Hyo-jin introduces, through photography and video, the rhythm of old age and the landscape of connection — proving the present through the body, beyond Korean society's control and prejudice — via Korea's 'colatheque' dance culture.
A variety of programs will also run during the exhibition period, including fusion performances blending tradition and modernity and hands-on programs with the participating artists. Details are available on the websites of Daegu Art Factory and Suchang Cheongchun Mansion.
Foundation Culture and Arts Division Director Bang Seong-taek said, "Through this special exhibition 'KOREA HIP!' at Daegu Art Factory, we hope citizens will take great interest in and participate in an exhibition that offers new inspiration for daily life through works that render Korea's traditional culture in a contemporary way."