[News Culture] In Ryu Kyung-ha’s paintings, travel is less about arriving somewhere new than learning to see familiar places differently.
Her solo exhibition, ‘A Gentle Journey,’ opening at Superior Gallery on Aug. 26, centers on the artist’s ongoing “Traveling Penguin” series. Through a small penguin moving across hills, coastlines and open fields, Ryu invites viewers to slow down and rediscover the warmth held within ordinary days.
The penguin is imagined as a creature forced to leave Antarctica by climate change, setting out through unfamiliar landscapes in search of rest and refuge. Yet it never rushes toward a destination. It pauses on soft hills, looks out across the sea and lingers beneath quiet skies.
For Ryu, that journey is not simply a movement from one place to another. It is a process of encountering change, finding new sensations and making room for reflection. Following the penguin from behind, viewers may find their own memories resurfacing—small moments, overlooked scenery and feelings that had faded into the rhythm of daily life.
Nature fills Ryu’s canvases: rounded hills, expansive water, tranquil fields and pale skies. Her bright palette softens these scenes into warm, lyrical landscapes, while her storybook-like imagery recasts real-world experience through memory and imagination.
The sea, observed closely since childhood, remains one of the artist’s defining sources of inspiration. Ryu watches how light and color shift with the season, hour and weather, then filters those impressions through emotion rather than reproducing them literally.
Layers of paint are built up and pared back, allowing her to balance weight, brightness and texture while preserving the changing temperature of each landscape.
In ‘A Gentle Journey,’ the penguin’s route becomes a quiet proposition: even a landscape we think we know may hold a new feeling. Travel, Ryu suggests, can mean walking a familiar street, noticing a change in the season or stopping long enough to take in the sky.
The imagined worlds in Ryu’s paintings remain rooted in recognizably human memories of fields, water, hills and sky. The penguin’s curious silhouette brings a note of tenderness to those scenes, carrying a reminder that rest and consolation can be found in the smallest pauses.
Rather than foregrounding dramatic journeys or grand events, ‘A Gentle Journey’ turns its attention to what familiarity can hide: the light on a daily route, the seasonal change in a familiar sky and the emotions that linger unnoticed in ordinary time.
Ryu Kyung-ha’s ‘A Gentle Journey’ runs from Aug. 26 through Sept. 17 at Superior Gallery.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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