MUNICH JEWELLERY WEEK - MÜNCHEN SCHMUCK 2024
KOREA
28 FEBRUARY - 3 MARCH, 2024

Munich Jewellery Week is an annual, independent, artist-run contemporary jewellery initiative that takes place in the city of Munich every March.

The success of the event, which grows exponentially every year, is in thanks to the spirit of collaboration by jewellery artists and designers from all over the world: students, emerging, mid-career and established art jewellers alike come to present their jewellery on their own terms, and in their own unique ways.

MJW has gained a reputation for being the most important event for the field worldwide, and the number one source for new talent in the field via the most experimental and innovative jewellery presentations one can find.

<IMAGINARY GARDEN> HELENA LEHTINEN
FINLAND
1 NOVEMBER - 14 NOVEMBER, 2023

Walking in the imaginary garden.
Trying to catch the smells and colors . What is real and which I just imagine.
Dreams and reality gets mixed and create new gardens. My gardens.

<MIRROR OF ENVY> EUNMI CHUN
KOREA
24 MAY - 6 JUNE, 2023

The artist has been making brooches of stainless steel and silver for her latest series " Mirror of envy" using a cool, slick aesthetic for their design. Chun explores the psychosocial function of jewellery in this series of works. As a bearer of symbolic meaning, jewellery points to the social standing of an individual and contributes to that person’s identity formation. In Mirror of envy the artist addresses the discrepancy between self-perception and perception and raises questions about the constructedness of individual self-concepts. The contradictory needs on which fashion is based also apply to jewellery: the aim is, on the one hand, to be recognised and appreciated by a social group and, on the other, to set oneself apart from it through individuality. The size of the brooches is modelled on the generous dimensions of striking statement pieces which people wear to
underscore a glamourous and self-confident appearance. Typically, however, the aesthetic self-perception eludes visual perception while wearing jewellery: »The brain associates ornamentation on the head, neck, torso and back with the corporeal self as markings of the body’s outer boundary; in this sense, the ornamentation is construed as part of the self and not experienced with the senses. In a mirror, man or woman first see themselves as an other, before inferring that they are the person in question«.iv Chun takes up this idea by conceiving the mirror brooches in such a way that the curved surfaces distort the image of the person who looks at him or herself in the mirror. The fractal mirror image instead reflects the ambivalence between subjective and objective perception, between desire and reality.
By Lotte Dinse

MAGIC NIGHT IN DAYLIGHT!
SWEDEN
15 JUNE - 29 JUNE, 2022

Every year in Sweden, on the Friday that falls between June 19 and June 25, folks celebrate the start of a unique national holiday kicking off the beginning of the country’s unusually long 5-month summer. It’s a night festival characterized by bright lights, large pillars decorated with beautiful green grass and colorful flowers, and no shortage of great food, music and dancing with friends and family. This summer - GalleryO is proud to announce a special exhibition where we invite four distinguished Swedish contemporary jewelry artists to share their work with the people of Korea. We aim to create a safe place for the pandemic- exhausted Korean audience to interact freely with the artists’ work, in effect taking the same energy from the Magic Night in Daylight and recreating it in Seoul.

<MIND · TEARS> DONGCHUN LEE
KOREA
26 MAY - 8 JUNE, 2021

Mind · Tears

Tears soothe sorrow, heal wounds, and control anger. 
Tears calm joy. 
Tears release surplus feelings and purify the mind.

I gather tears in my heart again today. 
When emotions fill my heart, I empty it with tears.

<JOURNEY OF VERA SIEMUND> VERA SIEMUND
GERMANY
6 NOVEMBER - 26 NOVEMBER, 2020

As I never before showed work at Korea, except at the Cheongju Craft Biennale in 2013, I decided to show a kind of summary of my work, a selection of round 15 years including newly-made necklaces. All pieces have in common my way of quoting shapes and topics from long ago, items of art history and daily life which I regard worth to be remembered.
While I was very much interested in classicism a couple of years, more recent work quotes from the gothic architecture. Apart from high arts I also consider more trivial designs to be quite attractive as Wilhelminian balconies or the lamps from the seventies. I try to capture its’ associative and narrative power.

Vera Siemund
Von-Ancklen-Straße 12
21029 Hamburg