New images exhibit examines Korean avant-garde artwork

 
The Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA) will open a brand new exhibition on Wednesday, inspecting the function images performed in shaping Korea’s avant-garde modern artwork scene.
 
Titled “All that Photography,” the exhibition runs via March 1 and options some 200 images or photography-based artworks in addition to round 100 archival paperwork created between the Sixties and 2010s by 36 Korean artists. All works are sourced from Photo SeMA’s personal holdings, the Seoul Museum of Art and the collaborating artists.
 
 
Photo SeMA — Korea’s solely public museum devoted completely to images — opened in late May in Dobong District, northern Seoul. Since then, it has welcomed roughly 180,000 guests, in accordance with the establishment.
 

 
Now unveiling its third fixed-term exhibition, the museum revisits the trajectory of Korean modern artwork via the lens of images.
 
“Photography played a crucial role in transforming Korea’s contemporary art scene throughout the 1960s and 1970s,” Photo SeMA General Director Choi Eun-ju stated throughout a press preview on Tuesday. “Many contemporary artists of the time picked up cameras and experimented with photography as a medium — pushing boundaries and pioneering new directions for Korean art.”
 

 
Organized chronologically throughout 4 exhibition halls, the present explores numerous photographic approaches together with photomontage, photogravure, picture serigraphy (silkscreen printing) and picture essay.
 
“Alongside dansaekhwa — or conceptual monochrome abstraction — a more radical avant-garde movement emerged,” stated curator Han Hee-jean. “Artists challenged the established generation, confronted political and social realities and sought new experimental forms. Photography became a crucial tool of critique as much as a mode of expression.”
 
A central theme of the exhibition is how Korean artists absorbed worldwide artwork actions but in the end developed uniquely Korean visible languages reflecting the nation’s turbulent sociopolitical surroundings.
  
One of probably the most putting works is Chung Dong-suk’s six-frame black-and-white gelatin silver print collection “At Seoul” (1982), revealed publicly for the primary time. The pictures doc authorities propaganda billboards round Gwanghwamun through the early Eighties.
 

 
The boards checklist cities and provinces throughout Korea — from Gangwon to Jeju — but each show floor beneath stays clean. The vacancy suggests erased messaging and restrained public discourse, symbolizing the enforced silence underneath the navy regime. In one body, a police officer walks in entrance of a board marked South Jeolla, a picture that evokes the trauma of the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Uprising. The collection visualizes the pervasive worry and psychological burden borne by residents who had been pressured into silence.
 
The work was initially slated for exhibition in 1983, however on account of extreme state censorship, it was by no means proven. 


Mass media — notably newspapers — additionally served as a important supply for a lot of artists featured within the present, via which the artists questioned authority, data and reality.
 
In Kim Geon-hee’s “Eol-deol-deol-deol” (1980), as an illustration, the artist overlays a girl from an ice-cream commercial onto a newspaper report overlaying the fabricated trial ruling towards pro-democracy chief Kim Dae-jung. The repeated onomatopoeic phrase — that means “trembling” — turns into a visible metaphor for worry and numbness underneath authoritarian management.
 

 
The exhibition traces the early historical past of artwork images in Korea as effectively. One instance is Lee Seung-taek’s early photomontage “Hanging Bowl” (1962), by which the artist affixes {a photograph} of a purple clay bowl atop a panorama print and rephotographs the composition. The bowl seems suspended within the sky, destabilizing the boundary between documentation and creativeness.
 
“Photo SeMA will continue to explore photography not only as a fine-art medium but also as a cultural, social and historical document,” Choi stated. “The visual languages developed by Korean artists from the 1960s to today — as seen in this exhibition — will serve as a foundation for future research, programming and exhibitions.”
 

BY LEE JIAN [[email protected]]