'Water Lily and Chandelier': From Monet to Ai Weiwei at MMCA

Ai Weiwei's "Black Chandelier" (2017-21) is on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon in Gyeonggi Province as part of its latest exhibition, titled "Water Lily and Chandelier" in Korean and "Highlights of MMCA Global Art Collection" in English. Yonhap

Occasionally in Korea, museums present their exhibitions under two entirely different titles — one in the native tongue, the other in English — instead of having them simply mirror each other in translation.

Such is the case with the new show at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (MMCA) in Gyeonggi Province.

Its English title, “Highlights of MMCA Global Art Collection,” does its job with plainspoken clarity: a survey of 44 works by 33 international masters from the museum’s holdings, etched with familiar names like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Niki de Saint Phalle.

The Korean version, however, strikes another chord altogether. Translating to “Water Lily and Chandelier,” at once evocative and layered, it is less a description than an invitation, its spare words hiding more stories than they first let on.

Claude Monet's "The Water-Lily Pond" (1917-20) / Courtesy of MMCA

The title itself derives from two key works that bookend the exhibition: “The Water-Lily Pond” by celebrated Impressionist Monet and “Black Chandelier” by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.

Monet’s water lilies, painted in his lush Giverny garden in 1920, capture the French master’s ceaseless experimentation with the fleeting effects of light, even as cataracts clouded his vision in the final years of his life.

A century later, Ai’s glass-and-metal chandelier confronts light in an entirely different manner. Stripped of its original function of illumination and painted in light-absorbing black, it becomes a darkly poetic emblem of censorship. Its composition of skulls, organs and river crabs — aquatic creatures whose Chinese name, “hexie,” is a homophone for a Communist Party slogan — makes its message unmistakably clear.

The show invites visitors to freely draw such connections across pieces spanning disparate times and geographies.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Andree in Yellow Turban and Red Skirt (Reading)" (1917-18) / Courtesy of MMCA

Conceptual giant Duchamp’s “Box in a Valise (From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy)” is a traveling bag containing roughly 60 miniature replicas of his ready-mades and paintings, functioning as a portable gallery that can be opened anywhere, at any time.

This musing on originality and reproduction, central to Duchamp’s oeuvre, resonates in dialogue with other artists who have transformed reproducible images from mass media into singular art, such as John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger.

Elsewhere in the gallery, portraits rendered in strikingly different styles spark unexpected conversations: Warhol’s 1985 silk-screen “Self-Portrait”; Chuck Close’s “Alex Reduction Black” (1993), a hyperrealistic screen print of fellow painter Alex Katz; and contemporary Chinese master Zeng Fanzhi’s 21st-century oil portraits of a hollow-eyed man and a woman, poised as if about to dissolve into smoke.

Two "Portrait" (2007) pieces by contemporary Chinese master Zeng Fanzhi are on display at MMCA Gwacheon. The works entered the museum's collection last year after they were acquired through the country's new "art in lieu of tax" system. Yonhap

However, beyond the glitz of these blockbuster names, the exhibition also tells another story.

Almost half of the 44 pieces on display come from the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s donated collection in 2021, along with those acquired last year through the new “art in lieu of tax” system, in which culturally significant artworks can be offered as nonmonetary payment for inheritance tax.

This reliance on donations and art-for-tax payments underscores the MMCA’s chronically limited acquisition budget, capped at 4.7 billion won ($3.35 million) — an amount that is far from enough to compete in the high-priced international market while also striving to build a robust domestic collection.

Currently, of the museum’s nearly 12,000-piece holdings, only 1,043 are by foreign artists, representing a mere 8.7 percent of the total collection.

“Highlights of MMCA Global Art Collection,” which opens Thursday, runs through Jan. 3, 2027.

Installation view of "Highlights of MMCA Global Art Collection" at MMCA Gwacheon / Courtesy of MMCA