This March, the journey across Korea's galleries and museums will take us from the visual heights of colourful neo pop to the quiet lows of ink landscapes and Dansekhwa.
Sejong Center for the Arts hosts a special exhibition of Mark Patsfall (1949), the chief designer and technician who assisted Paik Nam Jun in the production of his works in Cincinnati. The collaboration lasted over a decade between 1983 and the late 1990s. The exhibition presents more than 300 items of various forms, including research sketches, installation drawings, photographs, and videos, as well as 20 prints produced during the same period, revealing the planning process for Paik's work.
Nam June Paik is famous for his "TV sculptures" which expanded the concept of sculpture by using TV sets as a physical building material. This exhibition is significant in that it introduces for the first time in Seoul a vast amount of archival materials related to the artist and his creative process.
Galerie Gaia hosts Lee Sara's "Welcome to Wonderland", a show which invites us to the past and the future simultaneously. Lee's "Wonderland" is at once a futuristic utopia and a nostalgic return to the innocent colourfulness of by-gone childhoods. The artist wants to gift the visitors not just a trip down memory line but an emotional return to happier and simpler times; a sort of cleansing from the complexities and sorrows of busy modern life.
Lee Husin's "Melacholia" explores the same topic of nostalgia but visually goes in the exact opposite direction. Dark colours and clean, flowy lines burden us with the heaviness of things we were not able to hold on to.
His new "Portrait" series depicts human emotions through distorted faces and eyes thereby emphasizing surreal and uncomfortable feelings. Most of the emotions in human life are transmitted through the eyes, but in Lee's works, the eyes betray awkwardness and unusual angles. Distorted eye placements equal distorted view of reality or perhaps a distorted reality - at any rate a misallignment between the character and the surrounding environment.
Park Jun Kyu's solo exhibition at Gallery Imazoo captures the moments that exist unchanged in the infinite flow of time - moments and places that contain volumes of history.
His photographs lock in the deep stories of nature and space through time. This exhibition, set against the backdrop of the sea and the earth, is not just a record of landscapes, but a contemplation of things that do change and do not change with the passage of time, and the relationship between them.
"The Art of Meditation" by Aekyong Gu builds on this stillness by removing recognisable objects and plunging us into Abstraction. In a world that moves so fast, what does not change, reveals itself to be the essence.
The pursuit of essence is the desire for contact with the source. The use of Hanji paper and hardened layers of paint applied repetitively further strengthen the impression of timelessness and the strenght to withstand the storms of life. "The Art of Meditation" is a bow to tradition as the container of timeless messages which have come to us from another dimension.
Moon Bong Seon's solo exhibition at Gallery Gong leads us even further into the world of Abstraction. The artist longs for the quiet peacefulness of mountains and rivers, invites us to join the sages in their contemplative meditations on Creation. Observing Nature, internalising its flow and energy and then pouring out the vision - this is how the artist arrives at his works and how he invites us to appreciate not only his art but life in general.
See all shows from March 2025 and 2025 in general here.