All that pictures might do — and did — in Korea’s trendy artwork

A weathered window body hangs on the wall of the Photography Seoul Museum of Art (Photo SeMA). But as a substitute of glass, scraps of newspapers and periodicals are packed right into a dense mound. Nude feminine our bodies torn from low cost pulp magazines press in opposition to the faces of political figures; luxurious watch advertisements gleam beside grim headlines.

The photographs come throughout as each a mass grave and a landfill, a spot the place politics and consumerism rot collectively. In artist Yeo Un’s “Work 74,” this claustrophobic pile turns into a portrait of Nineteen Seventies Korea underneath Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule — an period when actuality was distorted into sensational fragments by the state-controlled print media.

In one other nook of the museum, the enormous letters “DMZ” glow softly. Only upon stepping nearer does the true nature of this typography become visible: a mosaic of 180 portraits of anonymous U.S. troopers as soon as stationed in Korea with Korean ladies posed beside them.

Kim Yong-tae’s “DMZ,” quick for Demilitarized Zone, takes form from a whole lot of deserted pictures the artist collected from portrait studios close to U.S. navy bases in Dongducheon and Uijeongbu in northern Gyeonggi Province, photographs that have been by no means claimed by those that sat for them.

By spelling out DMZ with these discarded portraits, Kim overlays probably the most inflexible image of nationwide division with the abnormal lives formed by it. The work reframes the navy buffer zone not merely as a Cold War legacy separating the 2 Koreas, however as a human archive of lived experiences affected by its presence.

Works like these give a way of what animates Photo SeMA’s exhibition, “All That Photography.” Its Korean title, translated to “All That Photography Can Do,” speaks much more on to the present’s ambition, shifting the main focus from what pictures is to what it’s able to doing.

Featuring 36 artists, many now considered heavyweights, the large-scale present brings collectively items which have used pictures and photographic imagery as an avant-garde mode of creation for the reason that late Fifties. Tracing a long time of experimentation, it reveals how pictures has functioned as a drive that opened new horizons of post-modernist expression within the nation.

Han Hee-jean, the exhibition’s curator, underscores how important the homegrown acts of artistic appropriation and reinvention have been to the formation of contemporary Korean artwork. What mattered was not the borrowing itself, however what artists did with what they borrowed.

“Working with mediums that came in from abroad — photography, printmaking, collage and even ‘Life’ magazines — artists confronted the dark, abrasive realities of their times,” she instructed The Korea Times. “They bent those materials into new forms of expression and resistance. It was a beautifully charged moment.”

Simple imitation was by no means the purpose. These provocateurs took imported types and visible languages and recontextualized them towards distinctly native considerations: life underneath navy dictatorship, the violence of breakneck industrialization and the lengthy wrestle for democratization.

One of the present’s conceptual beginning factors, Han defined, may be traced again to her grasp’s thesis on American artist Barbara Kruger, whose use of mass media imagery as a crucial instrument prompted her to ask whether or not related methods had emerged independently in Korea.

“What I found were artists who were far more ahead of their time than I had previously known. It was a genuine eureka moment,” she stated.

“The deeper I looked, the clearer it became just how radical their experiments were. That led me to ask why — why this urgency, why these strategies? I came to realize that their experimental stance was their own way of containing, and responding to, a period of compressed modernization and profound sociopolitical instability.”

Works that unsettle and provoke fill “All That Photography.”

Among them is “Hanging Stars” by nonagenarian Lee Seung-taek, whom curator Han describes as “an eternal outsider.”

Long earlier than Photoshop entered the artist’s toolkit, Lee was already setting up distinctly Korean worlds via photomontage. In this early piece, he layered photographs of conventional crimson clay vessels onto {a photograph} of a distant mountain panorama, then rephotographed the composite to supply one unified picture. The result’s an uncanny scene wherein earthen bowls seem to hover within the sky like stars.

Elsewhere, artists turned to newspapers as a website of experiment and a charged medium via which to confront political actuality.

Under Park Chung-hee’s regime within the Nineteen Seventies, the press was systematically suppressed. Journalists at main dailies tried to withstand state interference by asserting editorial independence, however the authorities finally dismissed 134 reporters. In 1974, authorities tightened the screws additional by pressuring advertisers, resulting in the notorious “blank ad” incident at Dong-A Ilbo, the place complete promoting pages remained empty for seven months.

Against this backdrop, Sung Neung-kyung staged a pointed act of resistance. In 1976, he carried out “Reading Newspaper,” the place he learn out loud the paper each day and minimize out the sections he had learn with a razor blade. His blaze to the printed web page grew to become the state’s coercive censorship.

In “Photo·Painting — Reading the Newspaper, Throwing Away the Newspaper,” Kim Yong-chul likewise turned his physique right into a language of dissent. Performing on the rooftop of a high-rise condo constructing, he learn the Hankook Ilbo, crumpled it and solid it into the air.

Chung Dong-suk, the one photographer included within the exhibition, brings a unique type of stress. While working as a photojournalist within the early Nineteen Eighties, he recurrently handed the federal government publicity boards put in round Gwanghwamun, every labeled with the identify of a province.

One day, he encountered the boards utterly empty and instinctively pressed the shutter. The ensuing collection, “In Seoul,” captures the ambiance of the interval underneath navy rule, outlined by pervasive management and enforced silence.

One picture captures two cops passing in entrance of the South Jeolla Province board, an unintended however potent reminder of the May 18 Gwangju pro-democracy rebellion of 1980. Chung later utilized paint onto the printed {photograph} with a twig gun, a gesture that confronts the armed drive’s violence in opposition to civilians. Suppressed for greater than 4 a long time, the work is being proven publicly for the primary time at this present.

“In some ways, these masters were even more radical and avant-garde than many young artists working today,” Han stated.

“All That Photography” runs via March 1 at Photo SeMA.