November 2024 overview
Goheung Art Center is hosting a special exhibition to commemorate the centenial of the birth of one of Korea's most legendary modern painters Chun Kyung-Ja. Known as "The Painter of Women and Flowers", Chun is in her own right one of the most free-spirited and cosmopolitan female artists the world has ever known.
Born in a military family, she was attending school dressed as a boy when her teacher discovered her talent. When her family tried to marry her against her will, she left Korea for Tokyo where she enrolled in an art school.
Despite the curriculum's focus on Fauvism and Cubism, Chun Kyung-Ja felt more at home in the delicate style of Japanese paintings. Later in her life, she travelled extensively around the world and painted the faces and personalities of many women from different cultural backgrounds in a style that betrayed Cubist and Fauvist influences.
The vivid colours, bold lines and front-facing compositions reveal women whose spirit is unapologetic. Chun's body of work consists not only of female portraits but also landscapes and daily life scenes. Yet it is her female characters that stand out the most as being untameable, fiercely dedicated to living life on their own terms decades before such women were glamourised in Western culture.
Chun Kyung-Ja has won several national awards and during the Vietnam War was selected as one of several state painters sent to the country to paint pictures of the War. She has written essays and travel diaries as well.
"The Value of Diversity" is a group exhibition which explores the benefits of having different viewpoints, modes of living and personalities within a society. It aims to show not only the diversity in our world but also the diversity of reactions to the dissimilar.
"Tik Tok" by Min Sun-Ju takes an innovative and modernised look at Buddhism, a trend within contemporary Korean religion that is gaining a momentum recently. The artist tries to break down the distance between higher beings and realms and ordinary life in order to bring closer the Divine and the Human. Instead of the solemn transcedental figure of Buddha to which we are accustomed, Min Sun-Ju presents us with a much more informal Buddha who co-exists with disco balls and leisurely cats. The intention is to blend Zen and Hedonism in a way that makes lofty religious concepts look like something familiar even to the most un-religious person.
The title of the exhibition is not arbitrary and has not been chosen to ride on the fame of the famous app. The meaning is deeper. In TikTok (the app), we experience reality as a sequence of unrelated moments. Reality is a procession of singular moments which may or may not be connected. The stream of perception is there but each perceived unit (short TikTok video) is in itself a result of many other elements that have comed into play. Buddhism sees the nature of reality in a similar way - as a procession of moments that come into being and dissolve shortly after all the time. Nothing remains, nothing piles up. All is impermanent, except maybe perception.
Two exhibitions - "Heritage Code" by Seo Sooyoung and "Heart of the Heart" by Kim Sun - shed light on the beauty and meaning of ancient ceramics. The Moon Jar ("Heart of the Heart" by Kim Sun) is one of Korea's most notable and best loved cultural symbols because it combines the Zen philosophy of Buddhism, the colour of the Hanji paper and the purity of Confucian literati mentality. The roundedness of its shape is reminiscent of hte Moon's fullness and abundance overflowing with motherly care and nourishment. In "Heritage Code", Seo Sooyoung explores ceramics more broadly as a cultural item with its own distinctive place in the lives of Korean people from time immemorial.
ALL november 2024 shows
