Forum highlights contemporary art

Kate Lim, director of Art Platform Asia

By Kwon Mee-yoo

Art Platform Asia (APA) will hold its first international forum centering on Asian contemporary art trends at the JCC Culture Center, in downtown Seoul, April 29.

"APA aims to generate insightful discussions essential to understanding the evolving course of Asian contemporary art and its inherent attributes," said Kate Lim, founder and director of APA.

Lim said the forum is part of APA's effort to formulate a persuasive explanation of Asian artists and their works for the global audience.

Titled "Fracturing Conceptual Art: The Asian Turn," the forum will offer a persuasive explanation of Dansaekhwa, an artistic movement that emerged in Korea in the 1970s focusing on monochrome non-figurative paintings.

Charles Merewether, former director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Singapore, will talk about “Culture of Materials: Recasting Modernism,” while Berlin-based artist and theorist Fre Ilgen will discuss “Art: For the Professionals or For the Art Viewers? Necessary Involvement of the Mind/Body.” Shuyin Yang, associate director of Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Singapore, will present “Tactile Abstraction: Developments in Southeast Asian Art” and Yun Hyeong-ju, a curator at the Gaain Gallery, will talk about “Artistic Exploration of Korean Artists: Now and Beyond.” APA director Lim will discuss the “Legacy of Artistic Fracture in Korea: Reinterpreting Dansaekhwa.”

Lim said the development of Asian contemporary art took place within a short frame of time and its interactions with Western art were vital, adding that the discourse of Asian contemporary art holds a rich and complex interplay between the West and the East.

"The Asian art community was challenged to learn Western art tendencies and digest its philosophies, and the gravest challenge has been to create art that is not derivative of the West, but genuinely authentic. In comparison, the Western art world didn't have this kind of pressure as they were always at the center, disseminating their art tendencies and discourses to the rest of the world," Lim said.

Understanding and establishing Asian art discourse is inevitable in the development of Dansaekhwa. Lim thinks the reign of conceptual art advocated by the West resulted in a disregard of materiality in Asian art, which is related to the artist's concern for choosing not to solely deliver an individual expression or particular intention in the work.

"The characteristic of Dansaekhwa is the manual involvement of the artist's hand and the intensive physical manufacturing process. All the Dansaekhwa artists were intimately engaged with their chosen medium throughout the work process," Lim said. "No one thought that the methodology of Dansaekhwa artists stood apart from the Conceptual Art practice, suggesting a radically different perspective of art-making."

She is glad that many people have become aware of Dansaekhwa which has earned global recognition, but thinks artistic discourse should back up the movement. "We should sensitively pay attention to discourse on Dansaekhwa, which will be recorded and disseminated as an art-historical movement for posterity. Countless art lovers will encounter that record on Dansaekhwa from now on. What kind of story do we allow to be written in art essays and books? The story of Dansaekhwa shouldn't just be about a response to the political reality of 1970s Korea as some critics have wrongly asserted. It never was. A more complex picture, a more rich explanation of Dansaekhwa has to be created," the director said.

The APA plans to publish the presentations at the forum in an edited volume of essays within this year. "And if possible, we will organize an exhibition based on the topic in the near future," Lim added.

For more information about the forum, contact gy.lee.apa@gmail.com.