ASIA NOW PARIS 2023

Kornfeld Galerie Berlin is proud to present the works of artists Tammam Azzam (1980 in Damascus, Syria), Rao Fu (1978 in Beijing, China), Rusudan Khizanishvili (1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia), Tamara Kvesitadze (1968 in Tbilisi, Georgia), and Youjin Yi (*1980 in Gangneung, South Korea) for Asia Now 2023.

Tammam Azzam

Tammam Azzam (*1980 Syria) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received his artistic training from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus. Following the Syrian Civil War, he relocated to Dubai where he began working in digital photomontages. In 2016 Azzam moved to Germany, with a residency at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Delmenhorst. There and later in Berlin the artist began exploring a new technique in paper-collage alongside his paintings. His fragmented compositions highlight the physical remnants of conflict and showcase the importance to rebuild and create from destruction.
His compositions ask questions, but they do not provide answers. Particularly, they ask about the "Conditio Humana," the general human condition whose destructive and disruptive forces bring suering and despair into the world, but which, with its wonderful creations, also always gives us cause for hope. This tragedy, but also this power to give hope, is the focus of Tammam Azzam's works, which create a whole new ensemple from fragments.
On closer inspection, the many small scraps of paper seem to tell their own story, jumping from one piece of paper to the next. We notice the cracks and gaps between them and see that they are separated and broken or tattered. But if we take a step back, they join together to form fascinating painterly compositions of small and tiny paper scraps, which the artist has previously painted with acrylic.

Rao Fu

Rao Fu (*1978 China) lives and works in Dresden, Germany. He has had numerous international solo and group exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. Fu has also partaken in renowned art fairs such as Art Basel in Hong Kong, Art Taipei, Art021 Shanghai, and Asia Now between others.
Rao Fu follows the Chinese method of using color to enhance the atmospheric. No concrete landscapes can be assigned to Fu's depiction. They are rather felt zones of security in which he embeds his pictorial vocabulary. But the manner in which the artist combines what he has seen, imagined, and dreamed in comparison with images from art history betrays precision work. He shows us that the distant is not distant, but rather quite local and present. His paintings are less about cultural dierence than about the debate on cultural hybridity. Part of the artist’s process are appropriating things through adaptation and generating new knowledge through innovation. In some paintings the adaptive force is stronger than in others.
There is a lot in these pictures: baroque world theater, romantic longing, and figures scaled down in the Chinese way of thinking, shuddering in front of an overwhelming natural backdrop. There are always two roots that feed his thinking and feeling - one Chinese and one European.
(Christoph Tannert)

Rusudan Khizanishvili

Rusudan Khizanishvili (*1979 Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. Deeply influenced by the duality of spirit and soul as it was expressed in medieval art, her paintings create a cathedral of dynamic tension that springs from the artistic imagination. Questions of the self, connections to biology, cultural myths, and the female body are the subject of constant inquiry for Khizanishvili. She invites viewers into multi layered portals of distorted figures and animals who act as symbolic door handles between cultures, nations, times and identities.
She earned her two BFAs in painting at the J. Nikoladze Art School and the Tbilisi State Academy of Art. In 2004, Khizanishvili received her MA in film studies from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Over the past 15 years Rusudan Khizanishvili has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions across all of Europe, the US and Asia including at the Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi, the Literary Museum of Georgia, the Mark Rothko Foundation, the New Image Art Gallery, Art Busan, KIAF Seoul, Untitled Miami, Seojung Art and Art021 Shanghai. In 2015, Khizanishvili represented Georgia alongside five other artists at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. Her works are in the collection of the Georgian National Museum, the private collection of Stefan Simchowitz, LA, and the Breus Foundation, Moscow.

Youjin Yi

Youjin Yi (*1980 South Korea) lives and works in Munich, Germany. She studied at Sejong University in Seoul before studying for a Masters with Günther Förg at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, graduating in 2011, with a 2008 stint as a guest student of Leiko Ikemura at Berlin's Universität der Künste.
In her multifaceted artistic language, Youjin Yi unites objective references and abstract, painterly structures. Her works depict landscape spaces occupied by people, animals, objects or hybrids. Seemingly dematerialized they fuse with their environment, emerge or take shape. The motifs want to challenge, want to be deciphered and yet often remain in the realm of fantasy.
Regarding the artist’s technique, she combines lines and surfaces in the paintings; acrylic, oil, oil pastel, and graphite meet free background. Youjin Yi sometimes paints and draws directly on canvas, but much more often on paper, which she works on lying on the floor. She then glues traditional Korean paper, worked in several layers, onto wood or canvas. In technique as well as materiality, she brings together horizons of experience from the West as well as from the East, from Germany as well as from South Korea. This leads to a very unique mysteriousness that captivates the viewer.
(Evelyn Vogel)

Tamara Kvesitadze

Tamara Kvesitadze (*1968 Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. The artist follows a deep emotional current within all her sculptures and installations. Her artistic practice focuses on the tension between the human and its world, with the body always being at the centre of her exploration. Her way of understanding the body is ambiguous and always in flux. Violence and sexuality converge with faces, masks and fragmented bodies symbolizing the inner turmoil of the modern individual including its feelings, its pursuit of happiness and fulfilment, its fears and hopes. Her sculptures are dynamic and often with a deliberately unfinished quality to them. Significantly influenced by Giacometti, Piero della Francesca as well as by Arte Povera she combines the latest technical possibilities with activating traditions of her own country. West antique culture and mythology come together with surrealism and Georgian history.
Kvesitadze has achieved international appeal through her work with kinetic sculptures, making movement the essence of her creativity. She exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale, representing Georgia with a solo presentation in 2011 after having been featured in a group show in 2007. She has public installations in Europe, Georgia and Asia, her work can be found in major public and private collections in Europe, USA and Asia, and in 2019 she was profiled by the BBC World Service program ’In the Studio’.