Spoken Garden

NEWCHILD presents a two-person exhibition bringing together British painter James Owens (b. 1995, Middlesbrough) and South Korean artist Yoo Geun-Taek (b. 1965, Asan). Separated by thirty years and distinct cultural and artistic traditions, the two artists share a contemplative approach to painting, finding poetry in the relationship between the human experience and its surroundings. Owens constructs imagined, pastoral worlds where figures dissolve into abundant vegetation and nature becomes a place of memory, uncertainty, and quiet transformation. Yoo, meanwhile, turns his attention to the rhythms of everyday life, transforming domestic interiors, urban landscapes, and familiar environments into meditations on time and perception. Their material languages are equally distinct: Owens builds atmospheric compositions through fluid layers of paint, shifting gestures, and delicate passages of abstraction, while Yoo works with traditional Korean ink, hanji paper, and oyster shell powder, creating richly textured surfaces through accumulation and repetition. Conceived as two independent presentations that gradually enter into dialogue, the exhibition reveals an unexpected kinship between their practices: two generations, two geographies, and two ways of seeing, connected by a shared sensitivity to the ordinary and the extraordinary within it.