OMI GALLERY presents INVISIBLE LINES: SHANGHAI, a curatorial dialogue between artists whose work questions boundaries that often seem fixed: the distance between art and audience, human vulnerability and spiritual aspiration, the appearance and substance of materials, and the relationship between expressive imagery and lived emotion. This editorial feature highlights four artists—Jung Bocsu, Choi Sehak, Kim Seungyeon, and Rim Chiaradia—rather than listing every artist or artwork shown at the fair.

The “invisible line” is not simply a line drawn on a surface. It is the often-unspoken relationship between body and mind, the sacred and the everyday, inherited techniques and contemporary experimentation, and artistic intention and the viewer’s experience.

Jung Bocsu | The body and the authority of painting

Jung Bocsu has long explored human nature through figures that resist idealized beauty. Twisted bodies, exaggerated limbs, and exposed anatomy bring desire, fear, instinct, and vulnerability into view. The human body becomes a map of inner contradictions rather than an object of detached admiration.

His floor-painting practice, developed from 1979, transforms the expected position of a painting. Instead of hanging beyond reach, the painted surface lies beneath the audience. Visitors are invited to walk over it: the act of looking becomes a physical encounter, and the audience enters the work’s unfolding life.

At West Bund, Floor Painting (1983) and Floor Painting – The Saints (2026) create a striking dialogue. The earlier work depicts darker human figures marked by worldly desire and repeated action. The newer painting, explained by the artist in relation to sacred figures such as Buddha and Jesus, uses lighter colors and omits or reduces sexual organs, hands, and feet. These formal distinctions contrast the world of instinct with an imagined state beyond ordinary desire.

The crucial paradox is that both works remain on the floor. Jung is not asking viewers to reject religious belief; he is challenging conventions of artistic authority, including the expectation that art must be elevated, protected, and viewed from a distance. Painting, installation, and bodily participation converge in an experience that tests the boundary between art and everyday life.

Choi Sehak | Human fragility and the search for meaning

Choi Sehak’s mixed-media practice uses familiar but charged symbols—figures, masks, worn objects, and spiritual imagery—to consider sacrifice, moral uncertainty, suffering, and the human need for meaning. An image of a slender figure reaching toward a Buddhist figure within a wooden frame, supplied by the gallery, presents a vivid distance between earthly vulnerability and spiritual aspiration. The gesture of reaching creates a psychological tension between what can be touched and what remains beyond reach.

Across the practice, seemingly ordinary images can become metaphors for responsibility and self-expenditure. Rather than prescribing a single interpretation, Choi leaves viewers with questions about how people endure uncertainty and continue to seek hope. The image is offered as a representative example of the artist’s practice; its exact title will be confirmed separately for publication.

Kim Seungyeon | The softness of paper, the solidity of porcelain

Kim Seungyeon’s ceramic works draw on the sensory associations of Korean hanji paper and ink painting. Rounded vessel forms, including works in the Paper Pattern series, carry surfaces that seem fibrous, weathered, and softly washed with tonal color. Yet the medium is ceramic: what looks pliable is materially firm.

In the blue-gray vessel photographed for this press release, fine fissure-like textures and shifting tonal density make the surface appear almost like a landscape of absorbed ink. The object asks viewers to reconsider the distinction between paper and clay, image and object, tradition and new material expression. Its impact lies not only in the vessel’s silhouette but in the close, slow act of looking.

Rim Chiaradia | Florescer and the energy of becoming

Rim Chiaradia brings saturated color, sweeping outlines, and a visual freedom associated with street art and tattoo-inspired imagery into contemporary painting. His forms are layered rather than quietly contained; lines carry the eye across the canvas and give flowers, figures, and other motifs a heightened emotional presence.

The Florescer series takes its name from the Portuguese word for blooming or flourishing. In the floral work provided by the artist, vivid yellow, blue, and pink blossoms press against one another, their energetic contours creating a sense of growth and movement. The flowers are not presented as a restrained botanical study; they become a charged field of life, feeling, and renewal. An additional artist-supplied reference identifies a work as Arte Amor A3 (2026), 60 × 70 cm, within the Florescer series.

These images are included as examples of Rim’s wider practice. They are not represented here as confirmed works physically installed at West Bund. The fair artwork list separately includes Rim’s One love (2026).

A curatorial dialogue across difference

These artists do not share a single medium or visual style. Jung repositions the viewer in relation to painting; Choi considers vulnerability and transcendence; Kim transforms the sensory associations of one material through another; and Rim makes emotion and vitality visible through expressive color and line. The project finds its coherence not in sameness but in the connections that emerge across difference.

Venue
2C16, West Bund International Convention and Exhibition Center

Artists
Jung Bocsu, Choi Sehak, Kim Seungyeon, Rim Chiaradia

Exhibition Dates
10 Nov – 15 Nov 2026

Website
https://omigallery.com

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/omigallery.official

Contact
info@omigallery.com

About OMI GALLERY

Based in Seoul, OMI GALLERY develops curated exhibitions and international projects that bring distinctive artistic voices into dialogue across generations, cultures, and media. Art into Life, Life into Art.

About Artists

Jung Bocsu
Painting, body, and audience
Jung Bocsu explores human nature through exposed, unconventional representations of the body. His floor paintings allow viewers to walk across the painted canvas, reconsidering the status of painting and the audience’s place in the artwork. The West Bund presentation juxtaposes Floor Painting (1983) with Floor Painting – The Saints (2026).

Choi Sehak
Symbolic narratives of vulnerability
Choi Sehak creates mixed-media works that reflect on sacrifice, anxiety, spiritual longing, and the difficult choices of human life. His imagery brings familiar objects and human figures into ambiguous relationships, encouraging reflection rather than offering a fixed answer.

Kim Seungyeon
Paper-like sensibility in ceramic form
Kim Seungyeon’s ceramic practice evokes the texture of hanji paper and the tonal softness of ink. Through the contrast between apparent softness and the solidity of porcelain, the Paper Pattern works connect inherited Korean material sensibilities with contemporary experimentation.

Rim Chiaradia
Expressive vitality and Florescer
Rim Chiaradia uses forceful contours and vivid color to explore movement, emotional energy, and expressive freedom. His Florescer series suggests blooming and growth through dynamic floral forms. The artist-supplied floral images illustrate the broader practice; the artwork list also records One love (2026).

(Text and images courtesy of OMI GALLERY)