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1/6/2005

Seoul: until now!

Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen

CHANG Jia / CHO Duck-Hyun / CHOI Jeong-Hwa / CHUNG Seoyoung / FlyingCity / gimhongsok / Emil GOH / GWON O-Sang / HAM Kyungah / JUNG Yeondoo / KIM Beom / KIM Sora / KIM Young Jin / LEE SooKyung / NAM Zie / NOH Sang-Kyoon / OH Inhwan / PARK Chan-Kyong / PARK June Bum / PARK MeeNa / PARK Yong Seok / RHII Jewyo (with JIN Mi-Hyun & KANG Sung-Eun) / thisisnotaloveletter (cur. CHOI Binna) / YOO Hyunmi / YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

City of Seoul is one of the world's largest cities. It is fast, vast and confusing, and full of contradictory impressions. It is not exactly a beautiful city. In fact, many times quite to the contrary. It takes some time to uncover the qualities of Seoul. It is a maze with many detours and short cuts, where conformity is interrupted around every corner. The same could be said about the contemporary art scene in Seoul. Just like the city itself, its developments have been rapid. Mostly the contemporary art scene begun to evolve only after the process of democratization had started in the late 1980's. From the early 90's and on, Korean artists were already emerging on the international scene. The exchange with the art world outside of Seoul has been in a constant flux in recent years, making the city the probably most dynamic art scene in East Asia today.

SEOUL: UNTIL NOW! is an exhibition that focuses on these developments of a particular city, as a scene and as a site. It follows the art scene in Seoul from the early 90's but has its focus on the present, at the same time as it allows the city itself to be mirrored through the art.

SEOUL: UNTIL NOW! uncovers layers not easily seen in the city, through projects made by artists. History, architecture, city planning, youth culture, social aspects as well as gender and identity issues are present, while urban realities are used and examined from various approaches. Documentary methods and material are used and twisted in highly personal ways, while the city and its contemporary realities have passed through a number of spatial, formal and metaphorical considerations.

Only a few of these artists featured in this exhibition have previously been introduced to the Danish audience, though CHOI Jeong-Hwa, JUNG Yeondoo, KIM Beom, Gimhongsok, KIM Sora and RHII Jewyo all are participants at the Venice Biennale 2005.

At the main pedestrian street in Copenhagen (Strøget), you might be lucky enough to be accompanied by an ”Umbrella Taxi”, a performance work by Emil GOH. The umbrella taxi drivers will accompany the walkers to any nearby destination, for instance Charlottenborg. On the façade of Charlottenborg, you encounter a large installation by CHOI Jeong-Hwa. He works with the decoratice surface of the city, like commercial banners and cheap plastic objects, of the kind you find in any street market in Seoul.

The hidden world of ballroom dance, a disregarded activity in Korea, is turned into a positive imagery by JUNG Yeondoo, who has worked with the fantasies and dreams of ordinary Koreans in a series of recent works. At Charlottenborg, he is creating his own vision of a dance hall, with wallpapers covered by his own photos of dancers, and the room filled with gentle dance music. The artists group flyingCity presents a psychogeography of the city in a large selection of works on the mezzanine floor of Charlottenborg, examining both the city's appearance, its development and how it is experienced by the people and themselves.

KIM Sora makes an environmental sculpture, with plants and abandoned furniture from Strøget Charlottenborg, as well as the famous Danish Charlottenborg lamp that is normaly used in the exhibition rooms. In her work the economy of all human exchange is central. She invents new ways to approach aspects of value, at the same time as she emphasizes the interaction with the audience.

In a huge colour field wall painting, PARK MeeNa has explored the particular colours of Copenhagen, using the colours of Danish standard paint charts. The gay identity, still a strong taboo in Korea, is exposed and explored by OH Inhwan, in performative works as well as his new floor painting with insence, also made particularly for Copenhagen. Gimhongsok works with the mixed identities of people, giving his own twist to megalomaniac and nationalist attitudes present in Korea as well as elsewhere. He is using projectors, DVD monitors etc. in his works, just as many of the other artists are using electronic equipement.

PARK Yong-Seok works with the signs of recent modernisation in the city. Likewise, RHII Jewyo and her collaborators KANG Sung-Eun and JIN Mi-Hyun work with the visual and physical experience of the city by mimicking and playing around with the ordinary street objects they find in a old residential area in the central Seoul. thisisnotaloveletter(the project curated by Choi binna)approaches the commercial flyer by artistic means in her project thisisnotaloveletter. A much more serene approach you find in NOH Sang-Kyoon, whose sequine paintings and sculptures refer to both traditional and modern aesthetics of Korea, while reworking the visual signs of both Christianity and Buddhism. YOO Hyunmi produces transparent and glossy sculptural objects, referring both to puzzles and to windows, and with a strong relation to the urban visuality.

Recent and historical moments are reproduced and re-examined in the photo-based paintings of CHO Duck Hyun. The existential situation being a woman and artist is violently rendered by CHANG Jia, while the geopolitical vacuum between the North and the South is presented by PARK Chan-Kyong, who documents sets in film studios and military camps in both Koreas showing images of Seoul based on fantasy and memories. Another aspect of memory is explored by KIM Youngjin in a mechanized swing projection, where four generations of women call out for their mothers.

The nonsensical and absurd sides of televised infotainment is explored in KIM Beom's hilarious video installation 'Untitled (News)'. By disrupting the normal scales and relationships between objects, CHUNG Seoyoung builds up sculptural installations where a poetics of space is paired with linguistic playfulness. GWON O-Sang's photographs and photographic sculptures paste together a fragmented reality, distorted and strange. In PARK June Bum's videoworks reality is shrunk to a toy perspective, allowing the artist's hand to rule the building sites and streets of Seoul. LEE SooKyung creates urban and science fiction narratives in projects like her 'Artist's Uniforms' and 'Unidentified Seoul Object'. A strong interest in cyborgs and the relationship between the human body and the machine is present in the works of NAM Zie. HAM Kyungah brings us back to realism, by creating narratives when following people wearing yellow clothes in different Asian cities. YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES work aggressively with text and music, in their web based flash animation, where humor and insults are mixed in a strange poetic brew.

SEOUL: UNTIL NOW! is the first attempt to give a coherent view of the developments in one of the worlds more recent contemporary art scenes. The two curators Jiyoon Lee and Pontus Kyander combine their different viewpoints in their approach at the Seoul art scene.

Image: Emil Goh, woongje / Woo Heung Je., 2005, Photograph, 370mm x 1500mm. From the series ”MyCy”

Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall
Nyhavn 2. DK 1051 Copenhagen Denmark
Open 10 - 5pm daily

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