Must-see shows during Frieze and Kiaf Seoul 2023 (1)

Installation view of “Botched Art: The Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung” at Gallery Hyundai / Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai

By Park Han-sol

• Published Aug 31, 2023 3:05 PM KST
• Updated Aug 31, 2023 3:08 PM KST

By Park Han-sol

In tandem with the return of two leading art fairs ― Frieze and Kiaf Seoul ― at COEX in southern Seoul, Sept. 6, Korea will see a flurry of exhibition openings and late-night soirees at museums and galleries strewn across its capital city.

Art enthusiasts are encouraged to journey beyond the fair venues and immerse themselves in the creative fabric of Seoul ― with some perhaps getting a chance to travel all the way to the restricted border region near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to witness the artists' reimagining of the strip of land that divides the Korean Peninsula.

Here are selected shows that could be the icing on the cake of your art-filled excursion.

Artists reimagine DMZ, the world's last Cold War frontier

The DMZ, a 250-km-long and 4-km-wide strip that has divided the Korean Peninsula since the signing of the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, is a geographical paradox.

Fortified by barbed-wire fences, minefields and border patrols, the landscape serves as glaring proof of the political tensions between the two nations. But at the same time, the lack of human activity in the area has allowed wildlife to flourish, making it an ecosystem unlike any other.

The world's last Cold War frontier has inspired generations of artists, who have attempted to reexamine the war-ravaged swathes of green as a stage for cultural dialogue.

It is this artistic reinterpretation of the geopolitical boundaries of the 1950-53 Korean War that the exhibition, "DMZ: Checkpoint," spotlights in its presentation of 27 contemporary creatives.

The show is held across three venues in the restricted border region in Paju, Gyeonggi Province ― Dora Observatory, which looks out over the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea; Camp Greaves, a former U.S. military camp base; and Imjingak's Pyeonghwa Nuri Park.

“There exists a generational difference in terms of how artists view the DMZ,” said Kim Sun-jung, the show's curator and artistic director of the Real DMZ Project. “Because younger creators do not have direct experience with the war and the country's subsequent division, their perspective on the geopolitical frontier tends to be more abstract, with some focusing on the wonders of its nature.”

In Dora Observatory's courtyard stands Chung So-young's “Phantom Pain.” Attached to a sharply-cut stone is a stainless steel plate in the form of mountain ridges, reminiscent of those that can be observed in the nearby DMZ. “To me, these jagged mountain ranges looked like a landscape that has been torn apart,” the artist noted. To a creative like Chung, division remains a poignant yet abstract concept ― like phantom pain.

In “Vine: Between and Traces,” visual research band ikkibawiKrrr reimagines the DMZ as a panoramic, spectral graffiti of the region's native plants.

Such works remain in an intriguing conversation with pieces scattered across repurposed Quonset hut barracks and a gymnasium at Camp Greaves ― which are more direct in their reference to the country's state of division.

These include Lim Min-ouk's “Currahee ― Stand Alone,” a group of 33 military blanket paintings suspended in midair like parachutes; Suh Young-sun's “News and Affairs,” which offers a bird's eye view of the inter-Korean tension at fever pitch during the late 1990s in the aftermath of the North's missile launches and food crisis; and Che One-joon's photographic series that traces the microhistory of clubs in U.S. military camp towns.

In “Parallel Botany,” Zoh Kyung-jin and Cho Hye-ryeong use local plants that are called different names by South and North Korea as metaphors for the reality of the peninsula's division.

On the occasion of Frieze, special guided bus tours to the exhibition will be provided from Sept. 5 to 10. Visitors can also book group tours, which will run every Friday and Saturday until Sept. 23, via

DMZ Open Festival's website

.

Key living players of Korean experimental art spotlighted

The experimental art scene struck post-war Korea in the 1960s and 1970s like a meteorite.

During the tumultuous period of military dictatorship, state censorship and breakneck economic growth, the young, spirited creatives consciously went on a hunt to find their own language of resistance via an unconventional mix of visceral performances, temporary happenings, process-oriented installations, photography and video.

The retrospectives of two living key players of the scene ― Kim Ku-lim and Sung Neung-kyung ― in Seoul come at a time when the Guggenheim in New York is hosting the first North American museum exhibition dedicated to Korean experimental art, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s.”

“I have a feeling that this might be the last exhibition that I get to have while I am alive,” said 87-year-old Kim in a wheelchair at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), where his eponymous retrospective is held.

Granted, the show has not got off without any hiccups. The artist showed dissatisfaction with the fact that his iconic 1970 installation, “From Phenomenon to Traces” ― where he wrapped the museum building, then in Gyeongbok Palace, with rolls of white cotton cloth in an attempt to “mourn and bury the institution representing the outdated art world” ― could not be reproduced onsite due to administrative issues and time constraints.

Nevertheless, the exhibition provides a rare stage for the viewers to witness the decades-long creative evolution of the avant-garde provocateur beyond his tour de force, “The Meaning 1/24 Second” (1969), widely known as the first experimental film in the history of Korean cinema, through some 230 works and 60 pieces of archive materials.

Meanwhile, Sung's mini-retrospective, “Botched Art: The Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung,” at Gallery Hyundai trains its lens on the 79-year-old artist who has unyieldingly dedicated his creative life to practicing the marginal genre of conceptual art and performance since the 1970s. The fact that this is his third-ever gallery show speaks to how long he has been viewed as an outsider by Korea's commercial art world.

“In fine arts, materiality is interconnected with the work's estimated worth since it is the physical item that is being sold and purchased,” he said. “I wanted to eliminate such an aesthetic or material concern from my piece, and when I did that, all I was left with was art as an idea, a piece of information.”

Sung is best known for his magnum opus, “Newspaper: After 1st of June, 1974” (1974), where he cut out all blocks of printed text in the newspaper with a razor blade every day throughout the month of June 1974 during a group show at a museum, leaving only the blank margins, images and advertisements. The whole act was a tacit commentary on the authoritarian government as he crudely mimicked the process of state-led censorship of news media.

His related performance work, “Reading Newspapers,” will be reenacted on the night of Sept. 6 in Lightroom Seoul in the capital city's Gangdong District. But this time, he will be joined by 100 non-Korean participants, who will each peruse the paper in their own languages to show how the collective act of reading newspapers aloud can resonate with the global audience today.

A peek into Korea's next generation of promising artists

Several group exhibitions in Seoul offer a panoramic view of the contemporary Korean art scene through the boundary-pushing works of emerging creatives.

SongEun's “PANORAMA” invites 16 talents working across a wide range of mediums ― painting, sculpture, video, sound and performance ― to present an eclectic tapestry of today's Korean art.

Park Grim's Buddhist art-inspired “Shimhodo” series is an intriguing embodiment of his own marginalized identity in Korean society. “These paintings encapsulate my very being ― the fact that I am queer, that I wasn't born and raised in the greater Seoul area (unlike many of my fellow young artists) and that I practice Buddhist art, a non-mainstream genre even within Korean paintings,” he noted.

Park infuses his personal narrative into each piece, seeing himself as a tiger cub held by two graceful Bodhisattvas in “Shimhodo_Chosen” and paying tribute to parents of LGBTQ children ― including his own mother ― in “Shimhodo_Seraphic Shine.”

Ryu Sung-sil is an artist best known for her own made-up universe of kitschy characters and a convincing plot that steers into dark humor to comment on neoliberal Korean society's fixation with money-making schemes. In the video “Goodbye Cherry Jang,” she takes on the persona of an influencer and a pseudo-opinion leader who generates profits from conspiracy theories involving North Korea and sales of “citizenship to heaven,” eventually going as far as staging her own funeral performance.

For its group show, “off-site,” Art Sonje Center has transformed the normally inaccessible, off-limits spaces within the museum into an unusual stage for the sculptures of six rising artists and teams.

Visitors are encouraged to explore every nook and cranny of the building, from its mechanical rooms and stairways to its theater's backstage dressing room, to discover pieces that distinctly activate their surrounding space.

Hyun Nahm's sculptures, fashioned out of polyurethane, epoxy and cement, occupy the dingy mechanical rooms, as they are chained to a maze of rusty metal pipes and ducts. Backstage at the museum's theater stand Hyen Jung-yoon's silicone and resin installations with deformed and genderless bodies, each assuming a pose as if they are actors waiting for a play to begin.

Hakgojae Gallery places rising figurative artist Lee Woo-sung alongside abstractionist Ji Keun-wook to offer its vision of what the future of Korean art can be.

Lee is a painter who captures the here and now through uniquely stylized portraits of ordinary people. All of the subjects that appear in his works are his friends, family members and personal acquaintances, but as they are transferred onto canvas, they turn into poignant images of our time.

“As I continued drawing the faces around me, it hit me that I was trying to discover beauty in the everyday,” he said.

Ji's artistic aim may be similar in this sense, but he attempts to achieve this goal at a microscopic level. He visualizes light waves, particle motions and gravitational force ― which are invisible to the naked eye but remain an intimate part of our existence ― in an abstract field of colorful lines and curves. It takes over 60 hours for him to fill a 1.6-meter-wide canvas with thin lines of colored pencils, making the process a labor-intensive and almost meditative one.