Curator Tobias Berger talks about Korean contemporary art scene in 4 questions

SOUTH KOREA CONTEMPORARY ART INTERVIEW CURATOR

Art Radar Asia recently spoke with German-born curator Tobias Berger, who currently holds the position of Chief Curator at the Nam June Paik Art Center, about the Center’s exhibition “The Penguin that goes to the Mountain“. During this interview, Berger also revealed a few of his observations on living and working in the Korean art environment.

Korean art has always been in the shadow of Japanese and Chinese artistic success, often “dismissed as a mere conduit between the two mega cultures.” This may be because few of the local magazines, exhibition catalogues and other art texts produced on Korean contemporary art are available in English. As Berger states, “There are none. They’re all in Korean. There’s nothing really good in English.” And while the local art scene is perhaps not on par with what can be experienced in these neighbouring countries, Berger notes that the art that is being produced in Korea is of a very high quality, due to good art schools, a diversity of art spaces, talented pioneers and governmental support.

'Shamoralta Shamoratha' (2007) by Inbai Kim was shown at "Korean Eye: Moon Generation" in 2009. Korean Eye was founded in 2009 as a way to support emerging Korean artists by providing international exhibition opportunities.

As a European who formerly lived and worked in the Hong Kong art scene, how do you find the South Korean art scene compares?

“The Seoul art scene is probably the most sophisticated art scene in Asia. It has really good independent spaces, good commercial galleries, interesting art schools and good museums. It has this whole pyramid of different art spaces, exhibition possibilities, and it has a lot of really good and wonderful artists. That level of depth and the level of different kinds of art spaces is incomparable. Certainly in Beijing [you] have galleries, but you don’t have any independent spaces, and in Tokyo it’s also very different.”

How do you keep up to date with the Korean art scene?

That is a problem because it’s all in Korean and it’s very difficult to keep up [with]. I mean, you just go to the 10-15 [art] spaces once a month … and you talk to your friends and your colleagues that go to the big exhibitions…. You just have to look at how it is. There was a [recent] survey show called “Bright Future” but it only had twelve artists.

Tell us about the art school system in Korea? How does it differ from other places?

It’s the most sophisticated [system] because it had some good pioneers [and] a lot of governmental help. [South Korea] has some good art schools and it has a lot of good artists that have studied overseas and come back. This allowed a lot of critical discourse and [there were] a lot of magazines. That allowed the art scene to grow well and in the right way.

Korean art is becoming popular with international collectors. “Korean Eye“, for example, was shown at The Saatchi Gallery in London earlier this year. Can you tell us why you think this is happening now?

“Here in South Korea you don’t feel that there’s much happening. The Korean scene is nothing compared to what’s happening in China…. On the one side, these shows, where this is popular or that is popular, don’t really mean a thing. There is a lot of good art in South Korea and the quality of the art is really on a high level, because art education has been good for 15-20 years. A lot of people are educated in Europe and America and have very good support and certainly output good quality art…. I mean, you don’t want to buy or you don’t want to show an artist because he’s Korean, you want to show an artist because he’s a good artist.”

JAS/KN/HH

Related topics: Korean artists, interviews, Tobias Berger, curators

Related posts:

• Follow “The Penguin” to the mountain – Tobias Berger on the NJPAC Show – August, 2010 – in an earlier interview we speak with Berger about curating for NJPAC’s “The Penguin”
• Writer Steven Pettifor talks about the old and the new in Thai contemporary art – Art Radar Interview – August, 2010 – an interview with Steven Pettifor about the Thai contemporary art scene
• Busan Biennale pushes for new discoveries in contemporary Asian art  – artist list – August, 2010 – a short summary of the Busan Biennial, includes a list of participants
• Korean National Museum of Contemporary  Art Young Korean Artists retrospective spans 30 years – May, 2010 – an informative primer on this exhibition
• Collector Ciclitira, founder of Korean Eye, makes big plans for Korean art – June 2009 – a summary of a podcast from Arttactic about the Korean contemporary art
  

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Lee Ufan-dedicated museum opens on Japanese island – The Japan Times

JAPANESE KOREAN ARTIST MUSEUM OPENINGS MODERNISM

An article by The Japan Times covers the opening of a brand new art museum in Japan dedicated to the Korean-born artist Lee Ufan. The article features an extensive interview in which the artist reminisces on his youth in a Japanese-occupied Korea and his early years as an artist in Japan.

Located on the island of Naoshima in the Seto Inland Sea, the Lee Ufan Museum is part of the Benesse Art Site, which has been listed as one of Japan’s must-see tourist destinations. In the article, Lee explains why the museum is unconventionally half underground:

Lee Ufan's painting 'From Line (1974) is on display at the newly-created Lee Ufan Museum in Japan.

For some people, it won’t look like a museum. Some people might think it’s a mosque, or a grave. That’s fine. I wanted it to feel far removed from everyday life.

The article also discusses Lee’s unique role in the Japanese art scene. Being both a resident of Japan and an outsider, due to his status as a Korean-born Japanese artist, he has interesting insights into the history of Japan and Korea and the art scene in Japan.

His aesthetic style consists mostly of simple constructions and has often been compared to Asian philosophy by Western critics. He says that he is indebted to the Western Modernist tradition for his simple style more than the traditional Asian aesthetic. Despite being influenced by Modernist art, he asks viewers to find a deeper meaning in the process of looking at art:

These days, when we think of art, we immediately think of it being something that you look at. But it is actually only in the Modern period that this act of looking has been given such emphasis. Before then, there was more to it: myths, religion, social issues. People would know these stories and they would read them into the art. In other words, the act of appreciating art was completed in the mind.

One way in which he is thoroughly Asian, he says, is his belief in the strong connection between individuals and the universe, a concept which he explores in his paintings:

After all, Asia has a monsoon climate, so there is a lot of rain. There’s always things rotting and new life sprouting and, in the past, this gave rise to strong tendencies toward animistic beliefs. Asians are more likely to see themselves as living with nature, with the rest of the universe.

The museum will hold many of Lee Ufan’s canvases and sculptures, created since he began his artistic career in the 1970s.

Read the full article here.

MM/KN

Related Topics: museums, Korean artists, Japanese artists, Japanese venues

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First Hong Kong solo for Korean sculptor artist Lee Jae-Hyo

HONG KONG KOREAN SCULPTURE ART EXHIBITIONS

Work by internationally renowned Korean sculptor, Lee Jae-Hyo, will soon be on show in Hong Kong for the first time. In a new exhibition, “From the Third Hand of the Creator”, to be held at Hong Kong’s Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery from 31 July until 20 August this year, the gallery will present thirty pieces of representative works from Lee Jae-Hyo, including work from his “Wood” and “Nail” series.

Lee Jae-Hyo

Born in Hapchen, South Korea, in 1965, Lee Jae-Hyo graduated from Hong-ik University with a Bachelor degree in Plastic Art. Working with wood, nails, steel and stone as his primary media, Lee focuses his attention on exploring nature’s structural construction. The works are made from a process consisting of dedicated design and complex composing, sculpturing, grinding and refining. The wood pieces are assembled into curves, with which various futurist forms in hyper-modernist style are drawn. Each piece is still embroidered with growth rings. His method has been applauded for exuding a strong personal character and opening up a distinctive direction within contemporary Korean art.

New York-based art writer Jonathan Goodman describes the artist’s work in Sculpture Magazine:

Allowing the materials to speak to him, he builds self-contained worlds that mysteriously communicate with their outer surroundings. One of his most striking images is a photograph of a boat-like structure placed in the midst of a stream whose banks are covered with trees. Clearly a manmade sculpture put out into nature, the work contrasts with and succumbs to its surroundings. In the photograph, self-sufficiency is enhanced by the object’s position in a beautiful scene; the poetics of the sculpture lean on an environment that frames its polished surfaces, conferring a further dignity on a form in keeping with its forested setting.

Lee’s works are created through the assembly of a large number of units of the ingredient, and therefore become the respective images of the individual units. In their overall structures and forms, minimalist geometric lines can be found, rich in hyper-modernist imagination.

Lee’s art is built upon a typical oriental spirit – in the pursuit of unity and a harmonious co-existence between him and the universe, Lee attempts to demonstrate how humanity can continue to develop civilization with grace, on the basis of a mutual respect between the man-made and natural worlds.

Lee Jae-Hyo

Lee Jae-Hyo has exhibited widely: in Korea, Japan, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has won many awards, including the Grand Prize of Osaka Triennial (1998), Young Artist of the Day, presented by the Ministry of Culture of Korea (1998) and the Prize of Excellence in the 2008 Olympic Landscape Sculpture Contest. His artwork is collected by a number of prominent Asian, European, American and Pacific museums, hotels and universities.

“From the Third Hand of the Creator” will be on show at Hong Kong’s Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery from 31 July until 20 August this year.

JAS/KN/KCE

Related Topics: Korean artists, sculpture, gallery shows

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• 13 Korean artists in survey at Singapore Museum to March 2009 – IHT – December 2008 – names and explains a number of important Korean artists

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Four Asian artists nominated for NYC PULSE Awards

EMERGING ASIAN ARTISTS –  ART PRIZES

 

Four Asian artists were nominated for Pulse Awards at the PULSE art fair  which took place in New York City and Miami between 4-7 March 2010: Shun Duk Kang from Korea, Hiroshige Furuhaka from Japan, Farsad Labbauf from Iran and Sopheap Pich from Cambodia.

Though none of these four artists won either the PULSE award or the People’s Choice award, the fair gave them extensive exposure (they each won their own booths) and point to their status as emerging names in the global scene.

Shin Duk Kang, Heaven and Earth, 2008

Shin Duk Kang, a South Korean artist, is represented by Seoul’s Galerie Pici. She creates installation art that reflect the limits of her material while evoking nature in her work. She also makes prints, which utilize geometric forms to continue exploring the subject of nature.

Hiroshige Fukuhara, The Night Became Starless, 2008

Ai Kowada Gallery 9 represents Hiroshige Fukuhara, who specialises in drawings with graphite and black gesso on wood. Viewers are drawn to the simplicity of his works, as well as the subtle addition of graphite, which makes his black-on-black drawings shimmer from certain angles. Before PULSE, he was featured in PS1’s 2001 show “BUZZ CLUB: News from Japan.”

Farsad Labbauf, Joseph, 2007

Iranian artist Farsad Labbauf combines figurative painting with Iranian calligraphy to create a unified image, regardless of the content of the words or pictures within that image. He refers to his Persian heritage as his inspiration, especially its carpet-making tradition: that unrelated elements were able to come together in linear patterns to create a whole. He concludes that his work is “often an attempt for the union of the internal.”

Sopheap Pich, Cycle, 2005

Sopheap Pich is a Cambodian artist represented by Tyler Rollins Fine Art of New York. His work mostly consists of sculptures of bamboo and rattan that evoke both biomorphic figures and his childhood during the Khmer Rogue period. He has become a major figure in the Cambodian contemporary art scene.

AL/KCE

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13 Korean artists in survey at Singapore Museum to March 2009 – IHT

Yim Tae-kyu ‘Fly Away Home’

KOREAN ART SINGAPORE

Singapore Art Museum 8 November 2008 – 15 March 2009

Over the past six decades, Korea has witnessed enormous economic and social changes that artists have responded to with a diverse range of approaches, as they grappled with tensions between tradition and modernism, and issues of industrialization and urbanization. Two main ideological movements have emerged, one trying to transcend tradition, and the other trying to rediscover it, yet both have one common quest: finding a strong cultural identity.The exhibition, “Transcendence: Modernity and Beyond in Korean Art,” at the Singapore Art Museum, examines the development of Korean art from the 1950s to the present as seen through the works of 13 artists.

“From a broad perspective, modern Korean art may be seen to be oscillating between two seemingly divergent approaches. On one hand, there seems to be an effort to transcend traditional forms; yet, on the other, many artists have been attempting to rediscover the spirit of traditional art,” said Suenne Megan Tan, one of the two curators of the exhibition, “The idea is really to give visitors a good taste of Korean art over the last 50 years.”

Section 1: 1950s Korean Modernism

The show, which runs until March 15, has three broadly themed sections. The first part looks at the origins of Korean Modernism in the 1950s and focuses on three major artists: Park Seo Bo, Lee Ufan and Kim Tschang Yeul. “They’re generally regarded as key artists that have helped move Korean art into modernity,” Tan said.

Informel period

After the Korean War (1950-1953), artists started to seek new ways of expression, while reflecting on the scars of the war. “I think poverty was really the origin of creation for many artists right after the civil war,” Park said recently through an interpreter while in town for the opening of the show. “There was no food, no job opportunity, everything had gone back to ashes; all conventional values and ideas were laid naked and bare. I had to raise questions.”

Between 1957 and 1965, Park was one of the leading forces behind the Korean Informel movement, the first major abstract movement in Korea to challenge the established Japanese-mediated, French Impressionism style (Korea was under Japanese rule between 1910-1940). Informel works often used rough brushwork and mixed media on a large-scale canvas with strong color in an abstract style. Yet, although artists were looking at ways to experiment, they also sought to adapt abstract principles and include some Korean iconography in their works, noted Choi Eun Ju, guest curator for the show and branch director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Deoksugung in Seoul.

 Monochronism

Park was also a key player in another important Korean art movement, Monochromism, which he defined as the synthesis between the traditional Korean spirit and contemporary art. Proponents of this 1970s movement, which included Lee Ufan, emphasized the color white, a color often associated with the “spirit” of the Korean people.

Today, Park’s works are characterized by the use of soaked Korean mulberry paper mixed with glue, which he then manipulates on the canvas with constant strokes using a small wooden tool to create small, equidistantly spaced paper ridges. Through the repetitive, rhythmic force on the canvas, the artist says he is striving to reach “something absolute.”

“For me, painting has become a mere tool and method to cleanse and purify myself,” the 77-year-old artist said, likening his work to chanting in a temple.

Although they have different backgrounds – Park was trained in Korea, Lee in Japan and Kim in Europe and the United States – all three have imbued their works with Korean sensibilities, aesthetics and philosophy, Tan pointed out. Kim, who is best known for the translucent water drops on his paintings, has introduced Chinese characters in his work, an intrinsic part of Korean culture because of the neighboring country’s influence on Korea over the centuries.

Section 2: 1970s- 1980s

The second part of the exhibition looks at the generation of artists who emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and who started to incorporate everyday objects into their canvas and to work in a more figurative style.

One of them, Kim Kang Yong, has become known as “the brick artist” because of his use of sand on canvases to depict bricks in various permutations.

“My work is very much about the industrialization of our society,” Kim said. “I first started using grains of sand and bricks as a reflection on individuality and the role of individuals in nation-building. But today, I’m using the motif more as an aesthetic tool.” Sometimes the bricks are arranged in a grid-like format, conveying the beauty of order; in others, they tumble toward the viewers, conveying turbulence.

Several of the other artists shown in this section, such as Lee Yong Deok, Cheong Kwang Ho and Lee Lee Nam, have been stretching the notion of the painting medium. Lee Young Deok, for example, first sculpts a figure then creates a cast of it and uses that mold as his final art work, thus offering the viewer a “negative” of his sculpture. Cheong Kwang Ho uses thin copper wire to create three-dimensional, see-through sculptures that have a certain weightlessness to them as though drawn in the air. Using video, Lee Lee Nam gives viewers of his “moving paintings” an opportunity to reflect on the passing of time and to question what is real. Using traditional Chinese landscapes in digital format, he “transforms” them, slowly changing the landscape – modern skyscrapers appear and disappear amid a traditional mountain landscape, or snow starts to fall.

Section 3: 1990s

The remainder of the show focuses on Korean art of the 1990s, which has largely been a reaction to the modernism of the ’70s and ’80s, showing a greater concern with the social function of art. “The contemporary generation goes beyond visual aesthetics and pushing the boundaries of the medium; rather, their art reflects their social concerns for the individual, the marginalized, as well as the tensions that exist within society,” Tan said.

Yim Tae Kyu, for example, started his “marginal man” series in 2002 as solitary melancholic figures that have evolved into a more optimistic and colorful series based on childhood imagery. “I first started with black and white works, looking at people alienated from society. But I then began to see that these people have dreams, hopes, aspirations. I felt marginalized because I was an artist, but I also started to have my own dreams; that’s when I started using color,” said Yim, who recently moved to Beijing: “I think the Beijing art scene is very experimental right now; I want to feel the vibes.”

Tan said that in the 1990s art took on a public function. “In the case of an artist like Kang Ik Joong,” she said, “art is used as an important tool in fostering connectivity across geographical boundaries and cultures.”

Kang has described himself as a collector of people’s dreams, translating those onto miniature canvases, providing “windows” into the hopes and dreams of the people he meets.

International Herald Tribune

Ten must see Korean artists including MoMA artist Jung Yeondoo in Hong Kong show – The Standard

KOREAN ART

Diverse works by 10 Korean contemporary artists including MOMA acquired artist Jung Yeon Doo are now on display for the exhibition To Have or To Be, organized by the Korea Foundation at Hong Kong Visual Arts until 4 December 2008.
“Korean artists are more abstract than the Chinese or Japanese,” said curator Choi Eun Ju, director of the National Museum of Art in Deoksugung. “Chinese artists tend to be cynical, the Japanese like to reflect their pop culture, while the Koreans do art for art’s sake to reflect their own feeling.”

Take Hong Soo Yeun for example, whose work features abstract shapes on a red canvas. “To me, image or figure doesn’t mean anything. My piece is called Casting Call because it’s up to the interpretation of the audience,” she said.

There are two works by Yee Sook Yung, one featuring four similar paintings of female shamans holding herbs and white vases. A similar theme is explored in Translated Vases, which Yee pieces together pieces of broken vases with gold paint.

“She wants her work to have a healing function, as everything she draws symbolizes longevity. The sculpture illustrates the possibility of rejects being reborn into beautiful things,” says Choi.

Meanwhile, surrealist Jung Yeon Doo uses edited photos to show the contradiction between dreams and reality. “Jung helps the characters in his work to fulfill their dreams by putting them into a picture he created. But he leaves traces of the fake combination behind to remind us of the difference between fantasy and reality,” said Choi. (Read original story in The Standard )

The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has recently acquired the media work “Documentary Nostalgia” by Korean artist Jung Yeon-doo. He becomes the second Korean whose work has been purchased by the world-renowned museum, following former Nam June Paik, a performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art. Read more

More stories on Korean art, recent art reports from Hong Kong, more images on website Jung Yeon Doo

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Asian artists on show in Liverpool Biennial September to November 2008

EVENT BIENNIAL LIVERPOOL

Celebrating 10 years of commissioning ambitious and challenging new work by leading international artists, the 5th edition of Liverpool Biennial’s International exhibition MADE UP runs from 20 September to 30 November 2008.

Artists from Asia include:

Khalil Rabah

Khalil Rabah (Palestine 1961)

Using narratives that hover between fiction and reality, Palestinian Khalil Rabah’s installations, objects, videos, actions and interventions articulate the effects of war on Palestinian society, its economy and identity.

His ongoing Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, for instance, which has had manifestations in Athens, Istanbul, Amsterdam and elsewhere, playfully interrogates history as an accumulation of fact and artifice. This fictionalised museum also questions the notion of archiving and the idea of the museum itself as a repository of objects and construction of collective knowledge. Similarly, in constructing a London office for the United States of Palestine Airlines in 2007, or planting olive trees – uprooted from their original home in Palestine – outside the United Nations in Geneva in 1995, Rabah provocatively plays out ownership of the past and reclamation of a future currently denied.

Yayoi Kusama (Japan 1929)

Working across a broad range of media, Kusama is perhaps best known for her compulsive repetition of a recurring vocabulary of forms – polka dots, or phallic tubers, for example – often rendered on bright yellow or red backgrounds.

U-Ram Choe (Korea 1970)

Kinetic sculpture maker U-Ram Choe’s work is a fanciful dialogue of aesthetics and machinery, and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement.

Guy Ben-Ner (Israel 1969)

Low-tech, but ingeniously inventive, Guy Ben-Ner’s videos often centre on home and family, exploring, exposing and exploiting the relationship he has with his children.

Atelier Bow Wow (Japan) and Ai Weiwei (China) are also on show.

See (in new window)

• Liverpool Biennial website
• more news about contemporary Korean art
• more posts about Japanese art
• latest video art news

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