Kumho Museum

𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱 𝗔𝗥𝗞𝗢 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗽

𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟧. 𝟣𝟤. 𝟣𝟤 - 𝟤𝟢𝟤𝟨. 𝟣. 𝟣𝟢

3F   Kim Jin Hee​《​욕망이라는 이름의 욕망 Desire in the Name of Desire》​​

2F   Kim Ju Hwan​《​바르도: 두 집 사이 Bardo: Between Two Universes》​​
1F   Kim Hee Ra​《​거대한 것들의 가소로움이여 The Triviality of Giants》​​​
B1F  Gu Jieun​《​뉴제비타운 New Swallow Town》​​​​ 

Kumho Museum of Art presents 2025 ARKO Leap from December 12, 2025, to January 10, 2026. The exhibition is part of the Arts Council Korea(hereinafter called “ARKO”)'s 2025 Regional Arts advancement support program and brings to Seoul a group of artists recommended by fourteen regional arts and culture foundations across the country. A total of seventeen artists will show their work across three venues—Kumho Museum of Art, Ilmin Museum of Art, and Hakgojae Art Center. At Kumho Museum of Art, solo exhibitions will be presented by Gu Jieun (Ulsan), Kim Ju Hwan (Gangwon), Kim Jin Hee (Gyeongnam), and Kim Hee Ra (Daejeon).
 

2025 ARKO Leap highlights the vision and potential of artists working outside metropolitan centers, offering them a platform for new momentum and encouraging artistic exchange across regions. With this exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art aims to connect these artists with curators, critics, and audiences, opening up new contexts for their work and broadening its reach. When practices rooted in specific regions are shared on a public stage in Seoul, the result is more than a simple introduction. It becomes a meaningful moment in which their work, discourse, and exhibition histories can be considered within the wider landscape of contemporary art.

This exhibition extends Kumho Museum of Art's long-standing commitment to supporting artists working outside major metropolitan centers. Since 1989, the museum has hosted the annual exhibition Today's Regional Artists, providing a platform for artists who had often remained on the institutional periphery and supporting the creative foundations of regional art practices. These efforts sought to counterbalance Seoul's centralized art system and to foreground the distinct contexts and aesthetic values shaped within regional environments. Today, however, the divide between the center and the regions has shifted to the point that their differences are no longer easily defined. Artists, too, are no longer confined by a narrow sense of locality, engaging instead with a wide range of subjects and media. In this changing landscape, “region” should be understood not as a fixed geographic category but as a site of perception—a place from which artists encounter, interpret, and experience the world.

Building on this understanding, 2025 ARKO Leap carries forward the earlier Today's Regional Artists exhibitions' aim of redressing imbalance, while moving toward an artistic ecosystem that is cyclical and reciprocal—one that does not presume a hierarchy between center and region. With this exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art seeks to reconsider the contemporary meaning of regional art and to broaden the field of artistic exchange across past, present, and future as an institution that mediates the production, circulation, criticism, and institutional support of regional artistic practices.

This exhibition, presented throughout the entire Kumho Museum of Art, features four solo shows by Gu Jieun, Kim Ju Hwan, Kim Jin Hee, and Kim Hee Ra. Gu Jieun (b. 1986) presents a media installation grounded in her long-term research tracing shifts in the habitats of swallows, a bioindicator species for climate change, across multiple cities. Her work imagines future ecological environments in which human and nonhuman beings coexist. Kim Ju Hwan (b. 1974) explores the tension between nature's primordial vitality and the human desire to control it. Through installations marked by stark black-and-white contrasts, he reveals the interplay between moment and duration, emergence and disappearance. Kim Jin Hee (b. 1971) regards the city as a landscape shaped by condensed human desire. Her paintings render inner images where anxiety and aspiration intersect amid vertical structures and high-rise forms. Kim Hee Ra (b. 1970) uses textiles, thread, and everyday objects in her installations to reflect on women's lives and social roles. With both wit and subtlety, she exposes the power dynamics and hierarchies concealed beneath seemingly solid worlds.