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P21 Presents Unapologetic, a Group Exhibition Featuring Nine Women Artists
P21 presents Unapologetic, a group exhibition featuring nine women artists, as its first exhibition of 2026. The exhibition explores the contemporary female body and emotion, labor and identity through a wide range of media, including painting and sculpture. Drawing from personal experiences and private narratives, the participating artists candidly foreground sensation, play, and self-absorption that have often remained marginal for women.
The posture of the “good” moral subject long demanded of women has fostered an internalization of self-censorship, rendering pleasure, desire, and the expression of excessive emotion objects of sustained suspicion. The works presented in this exhibition move beyond such normative controls, foregrounding forms of female self-indulgence, emotional excess, and repetition that have long been suppressed. Here, women no longer appear as subjects that must be explained or justified; instead, they emerge as beings who position themselves as the source of their own satisfaction. The participating artists resist reducing feminine existence to standards of morality or productivity, instead recalling women as human animals endowed with flesh and sensation. The self-absorption and self-affirmation evident in their works function as sensory practices for affirming life in its entirety, underscoring pleasure and freedom as fundamental forces that sustain existence.
Installation view of Unapologetic, Photo by Yongbaek Lee This critical perspective unfolds gradually through the spatial composition and circulation of the exhibition, beginning the moment one approaches the gallery. From outside the exhibition space, viewers encounter an agitated crowd visible through the glass façade. Created by Shin Min, whose practice has translated emotions of anger, tension, and threat into images that are at once sharp and ironic, the work signals the exhibition’s underlying tone even before entry. Gestures of mandated kindness and solidarity reveal their latent cynicism and fatigue through exaggerated forms and distorted bodies. Along the path toward the entrance, the viewer encounters the back of another sculptural figure, staging the beginning of the exhibition as a carefully composed scene.
Upon entering the gallery, Myung-Joo Kim’s sculptural busts first draw the eye, condensing subdued emotions through material traces that flow down the surface. Along one wall, paintings and three-dimensional works unfold in dense succession. In Monica Kim Garza’s canvases, figures linger in states of idleness—reading books or drinking beverages. Their relaxed postures and rough pictorial surfaces ease visual tension, conveying the sensory experience of bodies fully immersed in their environments. This atmosphere flows seamlessly into the paintings of Sofia Mitsola.
Installation view of Unapologetic, Photo by Yongbaek Lee Works that visualize interiority through repetition and immersion follow. Na Kim constructs a continuum of forms through serially generated portraits, not to designate a specific individual but to build a stream of imagery that exists only within sustained imagination. Wu Jiaru likewise loosens control through painting practices grounded in spontaneity and automatism, treating the act of painting itself as a pathway to liberation. In Eunsae Lee’s works, which confront the viewer with striking intensity even from a distance, vital forces prior to control overflow beyond the picture plane. Anna Jung Seo reconstructs scenes captured in London through literary imagination, transforming the city into a stage where exaggeration and metaphor intersect. On the opposite side of the space, Minjeong An’s work is presented along the wall, reconfiguring her experiences of a postpartum care center following childbirth into signs and structures, translating personal memory into an analytical visual language.
Unapologetic reveals, through diverse media and visual languages, the multilayered processes by which women’s experiences, bodies, emotions, labor, and identities are formed and defined. Casting off the moral standards imposed on women and another form of self-censorship embodied in political correctness, the exhibition revisits the question of the right to fully enjoy and desire one’s given life. It declares that feminine subjects can exist through their own sensations and desires without the approval of others, offering a proposition to affirm life excessively—yet abundantly.
Installation view of Unapologetic, Photo by Yongbaek Lee Venue
66 Hoenamu-ro, Yongsan-gu, SeoulArtists
Minjeong An, Monica Kim Garza, Myung-Joo Kim, Na Kim, Eunsae Lee, Sofia Mitsola, Anna Jung Seo, Shin Min, Wu JiaruExhibition Dates
16 January – 27 February, 2026Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Friday | 11 AM – 6 PM, Saturday | 12 PM – 6 PMWebsite
https://p21.krInstagram
https://www.instagram.com/p21.kr/Contact
info@p21.kr(Text and images courtesy of P21)
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P21 Presents Gonna Build a Mountain and Daydream, a Solo Exhibition by So Young Park
Poster credit: P21 P21 presents Gonna Build a Mountain and Daydream, a solo exhibition by So Young Park, opening on October 10. Her second solo exhibition with the gallery features twelve new works, including a large-scale installation, alongside smaller canvases. Through a visual language rooted in impulse and sensation, the exhibition evokes a longing for worlds beyond immediate experience.
Rather than following narrative or figuration, Park reveals the emergence of images through aesthetic collisions and layered surfaces. Vivid colors, spontaneous gestures, and a distinctive formal vocabulary coalesce into compositions where organic curves and geometric shapes intertwine. These scenes do not represent a singular landscape, but stir feelings of the familiar and the strange, like echoes of memory. While mythical creatures or sublime terrains such as mermaids, dragons, or Machu Picchu are never directly depicted, their presence is suggested through chromatic and formal associations, inviting projections from the viewer’s imagination.
So Young Park, Kashmir, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, 91 x 72.7 cm The images move fluidly between form and formlessness, becoming metaphors for intangible emotions—water, air, and clouds— that defy clear definition. Some areas suggest a yearning for an unreachable world or an irretrievable past, while scattered geometric and fragmented shapes allude to temporality, emotional detachment, and fatigue with the constructed order of civilization. These contrasting visual languages generate internal tension yet extend the pictorial space through juxtaposed color and texture.
Park merges traditional oil painting with contemporary materials, using metallic pigments and spray techniques to achieve tonal richness and compositional harmony. Her unique palette—at times reminiscent of traditional Korean hanbok—functions as a sensory device that facilitates emotional movement and diffusion. Her process balances control and spontaneity: deliberate structure is overlaid with physical interventions such as splattering and layering, capturing emotional shifts and the unpredictable flow of material.
So Young Park, Millions of Horizons, 2025, Mixed media on canvas, Dimensions variable Gonna Build a Mountain and Daydream proposes an imaginative act of surrender—a release from logic and unreachable expectations. Through layered brushstrokes and chromatic friction, Park scatters particles of emotion that resist verbal translation, encouraging viewers to playfully engage with them. Her work suggests a quiet but resilient mode of survival—one that preserves interior movement amid the constraints of modern life.
Venue
66 Hoenamu-ro, Yongsan-gu, SeoulArtist
So Young ParkExhibition Dates
October 10 – November 9, 2025Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Friday | 11 AM – 6 PM
Saturday | 12 – 6 PMWebsite
https://p21.kr/Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/p21.kr/Contact
info@p21.krAbout Artist
So Young Park (b. 1971) explores the process of image formation through bold color palettes, simplified forms, and spontaneous gestures. Her layered compositions—interweaving organic curves and geometric structures—move freely between figuration and abstraction, memory and imagination, evoking unconscious sensations in the viewer. By combining traditional oil painting techniques with contemporary materials, her work experiments with the materiality and visuality of painting, offering a sensory bridge between emotion and perception that resists linguistic translation.
She graduated from Universität der Künste Berlin led by Professor Daniel Richter. Recent solo exhibitions include P21, Seoul (2023); Frontviews, Berlin (2022); Project Space Sarubia, Seoul (2021); Hapjungjigu, Seoul (2018); Till Richter Museum, Germany (2017); and Gallery E105, Germany (2011). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at PODIUM, Hong Kong (2024); Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany (2024); Chapter NY, New York (2024); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2023); Uferhallen, Berlin (2022); Art Space 3, Seoul (2019); Bethanien, Berlin (2019); El Segundo Museum of Art, USA (2016).
Her works are held in major public and private collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Art Bank, El Segundo Museum of Art, the Robin and Alfredo Trento Collection, and the Segler-Uleer Collection in Germany.
About Gallery
Established in September 2017 in Itaewon, Seoul, P21 has been dedicated to showcasing 21st-century contemporary art by meticulously selecting both established and promising emerging artists. The gallery initially operated in two independent spaces, P1 and P2, each encouraging artworks that reflect the contrasting characteristics of these spaces and providing opportunities for artists to realize new ideas inspired by the gallery environment.
In February 2024, P21 moved to a new location just 100 meters from the original space. This new space marks not only a physical relocation but also the beginning of a new chapter, presenting a wider range of in-depth exhibitions and continuing to enhance its international presence through active collaboration with domestic and international institutions and participation in major international art fairs. Additionally, P21 seeks to introduce ambitious projects by renowned international artists to the domestic audience, aiming to build a balanced and dynamic program.
(Text and images courtesy of P21)
