SPACE 776
NEW YORK, USA

Space 776

The newest gallery in the Lower East Side art scene in New York, Space 776 has been creating a space for a wide range of artists whose medium of work stretches from live multimedia performances to traditional oil painting. Founded in May 2013 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Space 776 has accommodated local and international artists taking the work to international art fairs. Space 776 opened a space in Seoul in 2019 to introduce New York-based artists to the Asian market.

Space 776 will present a duo show featuring paintings by Japanese artist Shuto Okayasu and South Korean artist Jongmin Joy Kim. The gallery has hosted Okayasu for two solo shows and exhibited Joy’s work at VOLTA Basel in 2019

The themes that each of Kim’s works contains are not just pleasant ones. It is common in our society now, and it may be a rather heavy story. Excessive interest in others, ethically strict standards, and individual thinking limited by collective intelligence seem to be sickening our minds now. The artist thinks that we can have a little leisurely mind by interpreting the many social issues that we are going through, the emotional judgments caused by excessive immersion. Jongmin Joy Kim (b. 1991) is a self-taught, mixed media painter based in New York City. He was born in a small town in a southern province in South Korea and moved to Manhattan in 2014. He started to draw cartoons to entertain his friends in his early years, developing and changing his styles extensively.

Jongmin Joy Kim, Untitled, 2021, oil and acrylic paint on canvas, 182.88 x 152.4 cm

Shuto Okayasu (b.1990, Saitama, Japan) is a painter, photographer, and illustrator. He studied Graphic Design at Tokyo Zokei University. Since moving to New York in 2015, Okayasu has worked in both photo-realistic and surrealistic styles, incorporating elements of Japanese painting and cartoons. Heavily influenced by cut and paste and sampling cultures of Hip Hop and Rap, Okayasu paints patchworks of his perception that transports viewers to a dreamlike world.

In his work, Shuto intertwines reality and fantasy and explores how perception and imagination play into our daily experiences. His paintings emphasize the bizarre and alluring elements of the mundane. He often incorporates stylistic elements of abstract painting, Japanese painting, and cartoons into his work. This inconsistency lends itself to a feeling of unpredictability, capturing the strange and beautiful miscellany of the cultural world.