The 88^th ARTCaffè hosted Junho Park and Hugo Ruyant.

We had a full house in the living room in Seoul, with an audience tuning in online from the US, China, Thailand, and South Korea.

Alternating in the talk, the two guest speakers illustrated their art practice, and discussed the result of their first-time collaboration in "Aujourd'hui est encore toujours," a duo exhibition opening in Seoul during the art week: the challenges they faced, the opportunities this project opened to both of them, and how their different cultures and backgrounds contributed to the show, resulting in an overall enriching experience.

Hugo started by sharing how this project came about, leading to his very first exhibition outside of Europe.

Both the initiative of the two curators and the topic proposed for the show ignited Hugo's interest right away: "When Minjin [Park] and Julia [Gai] presented me the idea for the curation of this show, I was very interested. Perception of time in painting is a very powerful subject - maybe the main subject of painting. As a French artist, I’m connecting in this exhibition with a Korean artist. We both experiment with the concept of Time our own way, with two very different scales. It is different, but to me, it’s the same."

To provide a full perspective on where his work and his interest in time come from, Hugo went back to the origin of his practice. He showed how, to him, time and his passion for art are deeply intertwined: "Time, for me, is very connected to my passion and to my work. The studio is a space, an island where time can be extended. Every day, you do exactly the same things, repeating the same gestures, making colors, and organizing them. Nevertheless, every day is different, and every day you can fail. Time in the studio forces me to accept failure and to be resilient."

As a child and a student, Hugo first came into art thanks to comics, making comics himself, editing his own books and fanzines, and looking for new ways or aesthetics to draw stories: "Comics were the very first space for me where I could play with time." That early fascination brought him to see his own paintings as key images and to think of each exhibition space as comic strip boxes: "A space next to the other that encapsulates a piece of time, a piece of identity."

About his personal relationship with time, Junho said that, to him, painting is a way of passing the time: "a mixture of what I am today with all debris from the past, and longing for better days. When I am making a painting, I am crystallizing the time."

For 15 years, since the age of 12, a nomadic life brought him to Beijing, Vancouver, New York, and then Boston. That experience helped him understand the differences between cultures. While studying art in New York, though, he discovered that artists from different eras are in fact all connected: "I began to see similarities in the east and the west. I was surprised to realize that to find beauty in a plane image with mark-making, we're in the end all heading towards the same place, with originality of marks. Despite all the differences in cultures, we’re sharing a similar aesthetic."

After introducing their perception of time, Hugo and Junho provided more insights about the series the duo exhibition is featuring.

The early origin of Hugo's series Alka traces back to his work Early, in which he aimed at representing the first hours of the day, when we lie between dream and reality. "In this contemporary still life, the aspirin dissolving into the glass appears to me as a very interesting subject to express time and to experiment with painting challenges."The intuition led to this ongoing series, whose title is a tribute to American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein."In my work, I'm looking for simple subjects that everybody can recognize. In this context, I am free to encapsulate abstraction and emotions. In the Alka paintings, a tablet is dissolving again and again into glasses. In the real world, the tablet disappears in a few seconds. By painting it, I can fix this fleeting action in time. The Alkas are a contemporary tribute to vanity painting. With these everyday objects, I can paint the beauty of ephemeral life."

The Stacked Suns series by Junho got inspired by an episode in his life, in which he was sitting still by a river, looking at the sun reflecting in the water: "I was deeply frustrated, staring at the sun for a long time as if I were begging for life. When I finally closed my eyes, I saw many afterimages of it, and I noticed that one sun was not enough for me to live on. So, I began to stack them. I needed more healing power and a source of energy to live on. I would say that my work isn’t necessarily to heal others. This is just how I navigate the world."

In this series, Junho emphasized a work in which he added hairs to his stacked suns: "This piece is about my imagination with hairs. Hairs grow to protect you, and as I was laying in bed, I imagined myself covered with hair completely from head to toe, because I was vulnerable and needed more protection for myself."