The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art holds a 6-months long exhibition on Korean geometric abstraction. The show takes stock of the development of the tradition until the present day and highlights the contemporary artists working to advance the style forward. The exhibition looks into the different external influences that have impacted the genre and how the different generations of artists have left their unique mark on the tradition.
Kim Dae-Yeol's "The Language of Ink Wash" is an expression of "Zen thinking" and Enlightenment (in the Buddhist sense of the word). The artist combines brush and ink to transmit visions obtained through intuition; insights obtained from beyond the realm of logic and reasoning. At the same time, the emotional world of intuition is captured and revealed through the simple rational activity of applying brush strokes. Rather than representing objective material reality, ink and wash paintings reveal intuition and the internal mental processes of the artist thereby reflecting and giving visbility to one of the core concepts of Buddhism - the importance of our mind and thoughts and their power to shape our reality.
Lee Sang-Eun's "Void" is on show at Art Park until November 28th and examines the accumulative layering of time. The artist works with a variety of media including collage, painting, digital print, and video, and utilised them to show different aspects of this layering. The concept of "time" is key for her work. The present moment exists as an accumulation of past experiences and present thoughts, intuitions and feelings. The present is when all of all comes together layer one on top of the other.
Jo Hye-Ri's "Back to the Origin" is an interesting attempt at expressing music through painting. The squares represent the different beats and the colouring refers to the lenght and pitch of the sound. The artists invites the audience to listen to the music by reading the painting.
Yoon Jeong-Mee's "Reading Incheon in Modern and Contemporary Fiction through Photography" adopts an approach similar to Jo Hye-Ri's "Back to the Origin". The show includes staged photographs depicting key scenes from Inchoen-related novels. Impressive scenes from novels dedicated to Incheon are enacted to give materiality and visible body to the stories of the city. The artist's internal processes convert the text into a photograph and produce an exhibition at the intersection of contemporary Korean art and modern Korean literature.
Jeon Kang-Hee's "Flaneur Seoul" borrows the Impressionist term to depict life in contemporary Seoul. The city is a capital of South Korea with a population of over 12 million people. As such, it is a crossing point of many destinies, personalities, dreams, emotions, goals and destinies and it is this phenomenon that the artist has tried to capture and exress in her artworks.
Lee Ungno's "Winds from the East - Winds from the West" is a large-scale exhibition examining the artist's legacy which the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art is organising with the support of Lee Unno Museum and several other European and American museums. The goal is to present the largest-ever gathering of Lee Ungno works (including unpublished works) and explore his technique and style as well their evolution across time.