Haru. K, Yumiko Yoneda, Myungkeun Koh, Hyunjoung Lee, Lee Chae: Suchness: Already Within
OPENING RECEPTION:
26 APRIL (SUNDAY), 2026 | 4.00 - 6.00 PM
Namuso Gallery is pleased to announce Suchness: Already Within, a group exhibition bringing together five artists across works on paper, photography, oil on canvas, and installation. The exhibition features Haru K, Yumiko Yoneda, HyunJoung Lee, MyungKeun Koh, and Lee Chae. The title draws on tathatā, a concept from Buddhist thought: the immediate, irreducible presence of things as they are. It serves as a framework for five distinct practices united by a shared quality of attention.
There is a quality of attention that precedes interpretation - a moment before meaning settles, when a thing simply is what it is. Suchness: Already Within departs from this idea, bringing together five artists whose practices, each in their own way, are acts of sustained looking.
The works gathered here share no single style, tradition, or medium. Haru K enlarges the intimate and compresses the vast - food and landscape folded into one another on Korean hanji paper, where the everyday becomes surreal and the monumental becomes tender. HyunJoung Lee works on the same material in a different register: she disintegrates mulberry paper in water, rebuilds its surface by hand, then draws line after line in black ink and Korean pigment, each mark tracing a day, a breath, a path not yet finished. MyungKeun Koh photographs the surfaces of buildings - walls, windows, the weathered textures of urban life - then laminates those images onto transparent plexiglass and welds them into three-dimensional structures. What results are objects simultaneously solid and spectral: a building you can see through, an image that casts a shadow. Lee Chae applies oil to canvas and removes it, applies and removes again, until the surface holds not a picture but a record - of pressure, of time, of what painting looks like when it refuses to arrive. Yumiko Yoneda shapes plaster and clay into forms that tend, always, toward the sphere: smooth, white, almost featureless, catching light as though for the first time.
These works do not remain at the level of ‘nature’ understood merely as the representation of landscape or scenery. They are practices that enact something natural - the logic of accumulation, transformation, and dissolution, of transparency and opacity, of cycles that have no clear beginning or end. Together they propose that attention itself is a form, and that what we call nature might be less a subject than a way of being present to things. Suchness: Already Within brings these five sensibilities together without dissolving their differences. The encounter is quiet, but it is not passive.
