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Yeo Un’s “Work74” (1974) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
A weathered window body hangs on the wall of the Images Seoul Museum of Artwork (Picture SeMA). However as a substitute of glass, scraps of newspapers and periodicals are packed right into a dense mound. Nude feminine our bodies torn from low-cost pulp magazines press in opposition to the faces of political figures; luxurious watch advertisements gleam beside grim headlines.
The photographs come throughout as each a mass grave and a landfill, a spot the place politics and consumerism rot collectively. In artist Yeo Un’s “Work 74,” this claustrophobic pile turns into a portrait of Nineteen Seventies Korea below Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule — an period when actuality was distorted into sensational fragments by the state-controlled print media.
In one other nook of the museum, the large letters “DMZ” glow softly. Solely upon stepping nearer does the true nature of this typography become visible: a mosaic of 180 portraits of anonymous U.S. troopers as soon as stationed in Korea with Korean ladies posed beside them.
Kim Yong-tae’s “DMZ,” brief for Demilitarized Zone, takes form from tons of of deserted pictures the artist collected from portrait studios close to U.S. army bases in Dongducheon and Uijeongbu in northern Gyeonggi Province, pictures that have been by no means claimed by those that sat for them.
By spelling out DMZ with these discarded portraits, Kim overlays essentially the most inflexible image of nationwide division with the unusual lives formed by it. The work reframes the army buffer zone not merely as a Chilly Warfare legacy separating the 2 Koreas, however as a human archive of lived experiences affected by its presence.
Kim Yong-tae’s “DMZ” / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
Works like these give a way of what animates Picture SeMA’s exhibition, “All That Images.” Its Korean title, translated to “All That Images Can Do,” speaks much more on to the present’s ambition, shifting the main focus from what pictures is to what it’s able to doing.
That includes 36 artists, many now thought to be heavyweights, the large-scale present brings collectively items which have used pictures and photographic imagery as an avant-garde mode of creation because the late Fifties. Tracing a long time of experimentation, it reveals how pictures has functioned as a power that opened new horizons of post-modernist expression within the nation.
Han Hee-jean, curator on the Images Seoul Museum of Artwork / Courtesy of SeMA
Han Hee-jean, the exhibition’s curator, underscores how very important the homegrown acts of inventive appropriation and reinvention have been to the formation of contemporary Korean artwork. What mattered was not the borrowing itself, however what artists did with what they borrowed.
“Working with mediums that got here in from overseas — pictures, printmaking, collage and even ‘Life’ magazines — artists confronted the darkish, abrasive realities of their occasions,” she instructed The Korea Occasions. “They bent these supplies into new types of expression and resistance. It was a superbly charged second.”
Easy imitation was by no means the objective. These provocateurs took imported kinds and visible languages and recontextualized them towards distinctly native issues: life below army dictatorship, the violence of breakneck industrialization and the lengthy wrestle for democratization.
Track Burn-soo’s “Take Cowl I — Human and Violence” (1973) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
One of many present’s conceptual beginning factors, Han defined, could be traced again to her grasp’s thesis on American artist Barbara Kruger, whose use of mass media imagery as a essential instrument prompted her to ask whether or not related methods had emerged independently in Korea.
“What I discovered have been artists who have been much more forward of their time than I had beforehand recognized. It was a real eureka second,” she mentioned.
“The deeper I seemed, the clearer it turned simply how radical their experiments have been. That led me to ask why — why this urgency, why these methods? I got here to comprehend that their experimental stance was their very own means of containing, and responding to, a interval of compressed modernization and profound sociopolitical instability.”
Kim Ku-lim’s “Artwork of Incomprehensibility” (1970) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
Set up of “All That Images” on the Images Seoul Museum of Artwork / Courtesy of SeMA
Works that unsettle and provoke fill “All That Images.”
Amongst them is “Hanging Stars” by nonagenarian Lee Seung-taek, whom curator Han describes as “an everlasting outsider.”
Lengthy earlier than Photoshop entered the artist’s toolkit, Lee was already establishing distinctly Korean worlds by way of photomontage. On this early piece, he layered pictures of conventional pink clay vessels onto {a photograph} of a distant mountain panorama, then rephotographed the composite to supply one unified picture. The result’s an uncanny scene by which earthen bowls seem to hover within the sky like stars.
Lee Seung-taek’s “Hanging Stars” (1962) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
Elsewhere, artists turned to newspapers as a web site of experiment and a charged medium by way of which to confront political actuality.
Underneath Park Chung-hee’s regime within the Nineteen Seventies, the press was systematically suppressed. Journalists at main dailies tried to withstand state interference by asserting editorial independence, however the authorities in the end dismissed 134 reporters. In 1974, authorities tightened the screws additional by pressuring advertisers, resulting in the notorious “clean advert” incident at Dong-A Ilbo, the place total promoting pages remained empty for seven months.
In opposition to this backdrop, Sung Neung-kyung staged a pointed act of resistance. In 1976, he carried out “Studying Newspaper,” the place he learn out loud the paper every single day and lower out the sections he had learn with a razor blade. His blaze to the printed web page turned the state’s coercive censorship.
In “Picture·Portray — Studying the Newspaper, Throwing Away the Newspaper,” Kim Yong-chul likewise turned his physique right into a language of dissent. Acting on the rooftop of a high-rise condominium constructing, he learn the Hankook Ilbo, crumpled it and forged it into the air.
Kim Yong-chul’s “Picture·Portray — Studying the Newspaper, Throwing Away the Newspaper” (1977) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
Chung Dong-suk, the one photographer included within the exhibition, brings a unique form of rigidity. Whereas working as a photojournalist within the early Nineteen Eighties, he recurrently handed the federal government publicity boards put in round Gwanghwamun, every labeled with the title of a province.
Sooner or later, he encountered the boards fully empty and instinctively pressed the shutter. The ensuing collection, “In Seoul,” captures the ambiance of the interval below army rule, outlined by pervasive management and enforced silence.
One picture captures two cops passing in entrance of the South Jeolla Province board, an unintended however potent reminder of the Might 18 Gwangju pro-democracy rebellion of 1980. Chung later utilized paint onto the printed {photograph} with a twig gun, a gesture that confronts the armed power’s violence in opposition to civilians. Suppressed for greater than 4 a long time, the work is being proven publicly for the primary time at this present.
“In some methods, these masters have been much more radical and avant-garde than many younger artists working in the present day,” Han mentioned.
“All That Images” runs by way of March 1 at Picture SeMA.
Lee Kyo-jun’s “Untitled” (1981) / Courtesy of the artist and SeMA
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