Grafflex

Life and work

Grafflex is a South Korean artist and designer born in 1982. He came out of graffiti and street art and built a practice that sits deliberately across categories: painting, art toys, character design and graphic design, with no firm border between the commissioned work and the gallery work. Gallery STAN in Seoul, which represents him, describes an artist formed in childhood by American and Japanese comics, games and design, who takes images absorbed unconsciously from mass media and reinterprets them in a style of his own. Elements of Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Astro Boy and Super Mario are pulled apart and recombined on his surfaces. The thick black line of cartoon and animation is his main instrument: he reduces a subject to a few defining features and lets flat colour and geometry carry the rest. Recurring motifs, above all eyes, tears and hands, hold fixed meanings in his vocabulary, and his gallery makes the point that the pictures only become fully readable once a viewer knows what those signs stand for.

Exhibitions

He has shown steadily in Seoul since the early twenty tens. Solo exhibitions include Insight at Gallery Page in 2012, Ten to Twelve at Everyday Mooonday Gallery in 2013 and Realation at the same gallery in 2014, Bold Factory at Avenuel Arthall in 2017, a two person show with Hamdoha at Gallery SKLO in 2018, and in 2019 both Insert Coin at Gallery STAN and Hidden Planet at Dohing Art. Hidden Planet travelled to Secret Fresh in Manila in 2020. Group showing has been wider: A Better View at ABV Gallery in Atlanta in 2019, and a long run of fairs including Art Busan, KIAF, Urban Break, One Art Taipei and Art Shenzhen, with KIAF+ at SETEC in Seoul in 2022.

Collaborations

Brand work is not a sideline here but part of the same output. He was the first artist in Korea to collaborate with BearBrick, and has worked with Nike, Converse, New Era, YG Bear and Amoeba Culture, the Korean hip hop label for which he has acted as art director. That history matters at valuation, because it means a great deal of material circulates under the name that is production merchandise rather than studio work.

Disciplines and how they differ

Three registers reach the market. At the top sit the unique canvases, small and square, which his Paris gallery LYNART STORE offers at thirty eight centimetres square and in one case at sixty. Below them sit the art toys and figures, issued in numbered runs, a field in which he is one of the more influential Korean names. At the base sits the licensed merchandise from the brand collaborations, which is not an edition at all. The LLB lot, Space, acrylic on canvas, sits in the first register.

What a specialist examines

Establish the support first, because acrylic on canvas and a printed or moulded object are different markets. On the canvases look for the signature and any inscription on the reverse, and photograph the back in full. On the figures the box, the numbering and any publisher documentation carry much of the value, and a figure separated from its box loses a large part of it. Because so much brand material exists, a piece with no signature, no number and no paperwork should be treated as merchandise until something establishes otherwise. Sizes in centimetres, and the year as written by the artist, settle most questions quickly.