Kumho Museum

Kumho Museum of Art is pleased to present the exhibition Yoo Hyunmi: Hybrid Reality, from August 1 to September 28, 2025. This exhibition offers a comprehensive survey of Yoo's multifaceted practice across media, genres, and themes, encompassing her artistic trajectory from the early 2000s to the present. Featuring photography, sculpture, and painting alongside poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and short film, the exhibition highlights Yoo's expansive and hybrid approach to visual and literary expression.

Since the early stages of her career, Yoo Hyunmi (b. 1964) has explored the intersections of heterogeneous genres and mediums—foregrounding the materiality and spatiality of sculpture, the realism of photography, and the expressive potential of painting. Her works embrace the tensions and frictions that emerge at the borders of disciplines, generating multilayered visual structures and complex narrative forms.
 

Yoo Hyunmi: Hybrid Reality​ brings together Yoo's representative bodies of work, tracing the evolution of her inquiries and recontextualizing her artistic accomplishments. Beginning with Still Life, a photographic series from the early 2000s that marked the starting point of her visual investigations, the exhibition moves through COSMOS, which evokes the structural logic of the universe through everyday materials, and The Man Turned into Painting, a short film combining process and performance. Also on view is Physical Numerics, a project inspired by literary texts that interprets numbers through philosophical and sculptural lenses, presented in both two-dimensional and installation formats. The exhibition culminates in Yoo's recent Ten Symbols of Longevity series, shown in dialogue with her earlier Good Luck series from 2011, further expanding the breadth and depth of her practice across time and media.

The exhibition title, Hybrid Reality, alludes to Yoo's distinctive visual language, where photographs resemble paintings and paintings mimic photographic realism—blurring the lines between reality and illusion. Through a transdisciplinary and open-ended approach, Yoo probes the interstices between image and substance, interior and exterior, fiction and reality. Her symbolically rich compositions construct surreal yet precise worlds that prompt reflection on the perceptual and philosophical dimensions of contemporary experience.
 

By mapping Yoo Hyunmi's artistic journey through hybrid forms and conceptual experimentation, Yoo Hyunmi: Hybrid Reality​ not only encapsulates the artist's cumulative achievements but also proposes a renewed way of seeing—one that invites viewers to engage with the generative space between genres, meanings, and sensations. As the boundaries of visual language dissolve, the exhibition opens up possibilities for new modes of perception, interpretation, and imaginative thought.

𝘠𝘰𝘰 𝘏𝘺𝘶𝘯𝘮𝘪: 𝘏𝘺𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺

𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟧. 𝟪. 𝟣 - 𝟫. 𝟤𝟪​​

Organized and presented by
Kumho Museum of Art

Supported by
Samhwa Paints Industrial Co., Ltd​

Opening Hours
Tue - Sun (Closed on Monday)
10:00 - 18:00 (Last Admission 17:30)

Admission Fees
Adult: KRW​ 7,000 

Student: KRW​ 6,000

Seniors/Military/Disabled and 1 protector /Youth(8-13), Firefighter​, Police officer​: KRW​ 5,000