Youyeon Chung (Senior Curator, OCI Museum of Art)
Introduction
Growing up with a love for comics and hip-hop, GR1(1) created his first graffiti work in 2000, during his teenage years in his hometown of Busan. From that moment, he set out on an adventure driven by a singular ambition: to leave his mark as widely as possible, in places as dangerous as possible. After graduating from university and taking a position at a newspaper in Chicago, he continued to sketch after work and roam the streets on weekends, continuing his graffiti practice. One episode he can now recall with a smile recounts the day he was arrested after trespassing into an abandoned factory and climbing along stair handrails all the way to the eighth floor to leave his mark. Yet, when recalling how tense and dangerous those moments truly were, such courage, however reckless it may appear, is difficult to romanticize. Even so, he did not give up graffiti. On the contrary, he gripped the spray can all the more tightly.
At times, the trajectory of GR1’s life may sound like a legend or a fable. Yet it is not a heroic tale, but rather a chronicle of the graffiti-inflected attitude he has consistently put into practice. This solo exhibition traces the point at which that attitude coalesces into a grammar, and where that grammar is articulated as visual art.
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Chapter 1. The Expansion of Graffiti
While GR1’s work is firmly rooted in graffiti, it does not remain confined to that identity. His practice is not limited to two-dimensional painting, but expands across a range of media and forms, moving fluidly through and across the boundaries of artistic genres.
After producing graffiti at an explosive pace across Korea, the United States, and other parts of Asia, he began around 2013 to undertake a series of large-scale graffiti projects in major cities throughout East Asia, each organized around a specific theme or narrative. Work from the streets, reconfigured through the grammar of painting, naturally transitions into the realm of fine art. Graffiti imbued with narrative no longer remains a spontaneous trace, but evolves into a formal language that structures the pictorial surface.
His 2019 solo exhibition at the SOMA Drawing Center marked his entry into the institutional art world in earnest. The pronounced sense of speed and the density that fills the pictorial surface in GR1’s paintings, together with the explosive, single-stroke gestures that stand in stark contrast to calm and refined brushwork, can be understood as the condensed result of momentum and energy accumulated through years of working with his entire body against massive walls. His work is also marked by a striking immediacy. Rather than conceptual art whose meaning is difficult to grasp readily, it operates in a manner that can register instantaneously, even when glimpsed in passing from a moving vehicle. This aspect is closely tied to the inherent qualities of graffiti itself. The same holds true at the material level. Rather than relying on traditional painterly materials, GR1 primarily works with spray paint and acrylic markers, materials that foreground the medium-specific characteristics of graffiti.
What is particularly noteworthy in his paintings is his method of production. While he works on canvas, a support traditionally used in painting, he subjects the surface to a distinct preparatory treatment before the work itself begins. He often applies acrylic mediums to create a rough, uneven texture on the surface of the canvas. This is an attempt to translate onto the painted surface the heterogeneous and coarse materiality of walls, the sites where graffiti is typically produced.
Graffiti artists each establish a distinctive style, which they repeatedly employ. GR1’s graffiti style is composed of sharp, jagged lines that erupt in rapid succession, radiating outward like lightning branching in all directions. These characteristics extend across his entire fine art practice. In painting, they appear in the form of triangles and polygons, while in sculpture they primarily take shape as horn-like structures. As visual forms derived from graffiti extend across different media, they give rise to a consistent formal grammar that runs through GR1’s work as a whole.
To emphasize this point once more, his paintings do not merely translate graffiti onto the pictorial surface. Rather, what his practice ultimately pursues is an expansive attitude that extends beyond the outward form and operational boundaries of graffiti to encompass its very subjects. Through this process, GR1 ensures that graffiti does not remain a mere image, but is instead transformed into a practical methodology. As a result, graffiti expands and evolves into a viable formal principle within contemporary art.
Chapter 2. GR1 Was Here
Stray Dogs
Grrr! offers a concentrated overview of GR1’s work, spanning from the moment he first began making graffiti to the present day. Barking Dogs (2025), the work that greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition, immediately imprints GR1’s identity. Reminiscent of Cerberus, the guardian of the gates of hell, these dogs visually embody the growling sound “grrr!” as in the exhibition title.
If Cerberus is the guardian of the gates of hell, then what is GR1 guarding? He likens figures from the streets to untamed stray dogs. This, however, is not a declaration of indiscriminate aggression. The stray dogs he gives form to are figures that growl not in order to destroy, but to protect and to reveal, confronting the violence of systems that divide the mainstream from the margins. The subjects that appear in his work are likewise those who linger at the edges of society, who disappear, are forgotten, or ultimately remain on the periphery, unseen and unacknowledged. In this way, GR1 consistently summons into his work those that have remained on the periphery. Throughout this process, a sense of solidarity with subcultures and marginalized beings functions as a central force driving his practice. By bringing them into the space of the artwork, he articulates a clear assertion of presence, declaring that they were undeniably here.
The fluorescent orange that repeatedly appears in his work likewise condenses this attitude. GR1 actively draws on the properties of safety orange, a high-visibility color commonly used in construction workwear, road signage, and safety or rescue equipment, to ensure immediate and unmistakable recognition even amid darkness and danger. Recognized before it is read and impossible to ignore, this intense orange hue functions in his work as a “visible voice.”
Record and Accumulation
Street graffiti is inherently ephemeral. It is erased and overwritten, repeating cycles of creation and disappearance. Therefore, GR1 maintains an obsessive attitude toward documentation, seeking to preserve every phase of his work, from its inception and process to its outcome, in both material and immaterial forms. Archiving photographic images of his graffiti by date is a fundamental part of his practice. He also preserves the traces left behind after each act of production, including empty spray cans and even the cloths used to wipe away pigment, treating the refuse generated in the process itself as an integral part of the record. This attitude has been sustained for more than two decades. The vast body of materials that he has meticulously recorded and collected over this time has naturally accumulated into an archive of monumental scale.
While preparing this exhibition with GR1, I was often surprised by his exceptional qualities. Among these moments, one work in particular has remained especially vivid in my memory. In 1999, when he first resolved to pursue graffiti, his very first sketch for a work consisted of the word “KOREA,” written in pen on a sheet of paper. GR1 has preserved the original sketch to this day, and in this exhibition presents a scanned version of it as a work in its own right.
Whether he recognized the importance of materials from an early age and intentionally archived them, or whether the sketch simply survived by chance, is something only GR1 himself can know. Yet the fact that he has preserved this early sketch to the present day, as if anticipating a future in which he would move between the street and the institution, serves as a symbolic testament to GR1’s unwavering commitment to record-keeping.
Because he has documented the process itself with such meticulous care, we are able to glimpse not only the countless graffiti works GR1 has left behind, but also the journeys leading to their creation and the traces of episodes accumulated through working alongside his peers. Archives 2000–2025 (2025), a photographic archive spanning a fifteen-meter-long wall, brings together in a single site the records of GR1’s graffiti practice from its inception to the present, including his first sketch (1999), his first graffiti work (2000), and the numerous projects he has carried out across cities around the world. It extends even to emblematic moments such as climbing stair railings in an abandoned factory in Chicago, unfolding over time as a vivid, unfiltered chronicle of GR1’s artistic life lived in and through graffiti.
Defrag–Walls, Cans (2025), which elevates the byproducts of graffiti into artworks, and Defrag–Stickers (2025), in which hundreds of tags and stickers by anonymous individuals are affixed to canvas, directly reveal the obsessive, collector-like dimension of GR1’s practice. These two works focus not on completed images, but on the remnants and traces left behind in the processes through which graffiti is produced and erased.
The 156 works that comprise Defrag-Walls, Cans incorporate spent spray cans and fragments of graffiti-covered walls collected from the street. In particular, the wall fragments are partially ground down, exposing the accumulated layers of pigment and, with them, the repeated acts of covering and overpainting that are intrinsic to graffiti. The layers of color, accumulated like strata of time, bring anonymous histories to the surface. Defrag-Stickers is a work that gathers traces of tagging, a practice within graffiti culture used to swiftly inscribe a pseudonym or an icon. Stickers reading “GR1 Was Here,” once affixed to various urban fixtures, along with tags left by innumerable anonymous individuals, have been removed and densely affixed to the canvas. These small marks, once passed by without a second glance, are here transformed into collective traces and accumulated records. Thus, GR1 bears witness to lives that were unmistakably here, through acts of recording and reactivating traces that would otherwise evaporate.
Chapter 3. They Were Here
Recording the Face: People, I Know and People, Like This
GR1 situates himself on the threshold between the mainstream and the margins, between the center and the periphery. From this liminal position, he has continually fixed his attention on those rendered invisible by dominant social norms. People, I Know (2014–2016) is a project in which GR1 rendered fellow artists from his immediate circle, particularly figures closely connected to subcultural scenes, as street art across the streets of major cities in East Asia. He documented all of these works through photography at the time.
Nearly a decade later, in 2025, GR1 returned to these figures in the form of canvas paintings titled People, Like This (2025). This time, the pictorial field is populated by individuals rooted in non mainstream cultural spheres, including tattoo artists, punk musicians, and cosplayers. Photographs taken between 2014 and 2016 are presented alongside paintings produced in 2025. The historical traces carried by the photographic works flow throughout the exhibition space, while the paintings, standing at its center, assert themselves with the solidity of alleyway walls. In this manner, GR1 calls these hidden faces back into view, bearing witness once more to the fact that they were here and that they remain here still.
City, Identity, and Narratives from the Margins: Osakascape-JUSTMEET
Since 2018, GR1 has been developing the Cityscape series, which interrogates the value of subcultural presences excluded by the city. Seoulscape marks the point of departure for this series, translating onto canvas the traces of graffiti left on back alleys and walls, and revealing the concealed underside of a city commonly perceived as glamorous. In Red Hong Kong (2023), an extension of the series, GR1 juxtaposes scenes from the democracy movement with Hong Kong’s alleyways, rendering the collisions produced by shifting balances and imbalances of power as a single urban landscape.
In Osakascape–JUSTMEET (2025), GR1 further narrows his gaze from the structure of the city to the narrative of an individual. The work centers on Shimomura Koichi (下村 宏一), a third-generation Zainichi Korean graffiti artist known by the name JUSTMEET, with whom GR1 has maintained a long-standing exchange since 2007. Osakascape–JUSTMEET is composed of two media: video and painting. In the video installation, a two-channel presentation interweaves a documentary—featuring episodes and interviews from JUSTMEET's journey to his grandfather's homeland, Jeju—with footage documenting his graffiti process on the island. The work confronts viewers with the identity of those who exist in the interstices of society, displaced from the center yet undeniably real. In the paintings, scenes of Osaka’s backstreets are juxtaposed with photographs from JUSTMEET’s childhood. These subtly misaligned images metaphorically articulate an individual identity that can never fully align with society.
Remnant Landscapes: NEW GARDEN
Sharp wooden forms fill the exhibition space. The pointed shapes that define GR1’s graffiti style, radiating outward like lightning, break free from the flat plane and proliferate into three dimensional structures. Across the floor, weeds painted onto pentagonal forms spread densely, leaving scarcely any space to step. Rising among them are hexagonal sculptures reaching heights of up to 250 centimeters, evoking the presence of ancient, tree-like trunks. Fabricated from cut plywood, the surfaces of these works are layered with images evocative of vandalism, including barbed wire, tagging, and forcefully sprayed drawings.
Particularly striking are the approximately sixty triangular pyramids dispersed throughout the exhibition space. Crafted from leftover plywood generated in the production of the pentagonal and hexagonal structures, these forms begin at the periphery and gradually come to occupy the space in its entirety. This landscape vividly demonstrates GR1’s artistic practice of persistently redirecting what once remained at the margins toward the center of perception.
Conclusion
GR1 now appears as an artist who has acquired the flexibility and resilience to move strategically between graffiti and fine art, between the street and the institution. Yet the first line of his extensive biography remains unchanged: ”First graffiti work on the street in 2000” This is less a statement intended to define his identity than a declaration of resolve, an enduring commitment to continue working through a graffiti-based mode of practice and attitude.
Returning once more to the exhibition title, Grrr! is not a simple cry of resistance. It is an act of inscribing presence, of leaving marks while knowing they will be erased, and of repeating gestures while knowing they may not be heard. It is a statement left in form rather than words, a visible voice that appears directly before our eyes.