Here Be Dragons

Mushu is a dragon. Haku is a dragon. Falkor is also a dragon.

They are dragons owning their territories of belonging, unlike the ones that beared existence in the phrase "HC SVNT DRACONES" on the Hunt-Lenox Globe dating from 1504.

The three international artists who ventured into different territories within their artistic journey in Finland are the mythical beasts roaming the unexplored. Like the (non-existing) dragons, the artists have been mapping the uncharted minds, whether by tracing the kin, clip-and-pasting the intuitive or vandalizing the preset. Sometimes to draw a more intricate map of the known land, and at other times, to discover their own new realm.

Here Be Dragons is a group exhibition of three artists: Minjee Hwang Kim, Yu Chuan Wang, and Shia Conlon, co-organized by Chih Tung Lin and Minjee Hwang Kim.

Minjee Hwang Kim's work has been supported by Taike.

Participating artists

Minjee Hwang Kim (b.1991, South Korea) is a painter based in Helsinki, Finland. She makes paintings and cutouts focusing on the idea of fate widespread in her native Korean culture, questioning: “Do we have control over our thoughts and actions, and who we are as beings?” Minjee's often symbolic images explore the iconography she grew up with, between Buddhist household and missionary education, looking into how these images and interpretations have shaped the perceptions of the world around.

Shia Conlon (b. 1990, Ireland) is an artist working predominantly with lens based media. Their work is an attempt at examining power structures and how they might oppress a body. In their practice those structures take the shape of gender, sexuality, religion, the family, and the state. Many of their pieces act as a form in which to explore the rewriting of trauma and to find a new way of language. So often trauma takes away the inability to articulate, and memories become obscured. The act of speaking, making a language, post-trauma, is political. Their work has been written about in The New York Times, i-D, Dazed and Confused and Huffington Post UK & US.

Yu Chuan Wang (b.1993, Taiwan) often works with installation, sculpture and painting. His works reflect the experience as a Taiwanese searching for identity within main stream culture. With influence of graffiti, Hip pop and club culture he develops his own way to communicate through images, ready-made objects and paints.

Chih Tung Lin (b.1995, Taiwan) is currently studying at Praxis Exhibition Studies program, University of the Arts Helsinki. With her previous training in the field of Psychology, she sees art from inside of humanity, between layers of internal and socio-relationships. Lin works with illustration, installation and performing arts as an artist, and approaches the institutional features of a curator’s agency through sarcasm and mimesis when in the curatorial position. An ongoing project series titled Free Personal Attention is an example of a combination of curation, performance and play within Lin’s praxis.