Latest news with #KoreanArt
Wall Street Journal
27-07-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
At the Peabody Essex Museum, Korean Diplomacy and Design
Salem, Mass. The reinstalled Korean gallery of the Peabody Essex Museum opened this spring after a 13-year closure. Its name, the Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture, commemorates a young diplomat from the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) whose time in Salem from 1883 to 1884 resulted in its earliest Korean acquisitions, and this emphasis on the importance of interpersonal relationships to the collection's formation unites the current display of about 100 objects.
%3Amax_bytes(150000)%3Astrip_icc()%2FTAL-woman-phone-red-art-reflection-SEOULART1025-17d93108590a47e5b1bcb04a7d1a5666.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
Travel + Leisure
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Travel + Leisure
Asia's New Art Capital Is Flashier and More Fabulous Than Miami or Basel—Here's What to Know
It was a hot summer day in Seoul, and I had taken refuge from the sun in the cool, industrial studio of the Korean artist Kim Yun Shin. Dressed in denim overalls, with a poof of gray hair, Kim, 89, had the demeanor of a woman content with her life. Through a translator, I admired the sculptures lining the walls: blunt wooden pieces cut with a chainsaw, many of them painted, some replicated in bronze. They all had a geometric quality that felt distinctly modern, but also reminded me of the joinery of a hanok , or traditional Korean house. Kim explained that she made them from algarrobo, a type of wood native to South America—not the red pine traditionally used in this region. As we walked through her studio—she moved slowly, steadying herself with a cane—she told me how she came to work in that material. She was born in 1935, at a time when Korea was under Japanese occupation, in the city of Wonsan, now in North Korea. She always knew she was an artist. Nature was her first teacher—as a child, she would draw in the dirt with a stick. But after the conflict between North and South Korea in the early 1950s, there were no trees left. Everything had been cut down. Artist Kim Yun-Shin in her Seoul studio. We paused to look at drawings Kim made as a lithography and sculpture student in Paris in the 1960s. She lived in Europe for several years, then returned to Korea to teach and work. Soon after, though, on a trip to South America for an exhibition, she had an epiphany. 'When I saw the forests there, I wanted to stay,' she said. Kim moved to Argentina in 1984, and lived in the country for 40 years. It wasn't just about the materials: Kim found it easier to work as an artist there. In the 80s, she explained, life in Korea was hard. There were no museums and galleries to show her work. Women had fewer resources. The Korea we see today is completely different—modernized, digitized, constantly metabolizing and evolving. 'The youngsters now,' she added, 'are really fast.' Today, South Korea has the world's 14th-largest economy, and its evolution from an underdeveloped, war-torn country to one of Asia's financial powerhouses had been on full display as I drove across the city to visit Kim that morning. Towering office buildings shimmered in the heat, and the streets bustled with workers on their way to office jobs. In the blocks surrounding my plush hotel in the Gangnam district, I noticed numerous plastic-surgery offices (and the occasional patient emerging, bandaged and bruised, fresh from a procedure). There were high-end retail spaces like the concept store Haus Dosan where, the previous evening, a life-size animatronic robot had greeted me as I had browsed pieces by Gentle Monster, a hip South Korean eyewear brand. Spaces by Elmgreen and Dragset, at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Perhaps most impressive of all was the Frieze Seoul, which was to begin the day after I arrived. In 2022, Frieze—which operates art fairs in London, New York City, and Los Angeles—introduced its first Asian iteration in Seoul: an indication of South Korea's robust appetite for contemporary art. The capital has several museums specializing in the genre, including the Seoul Museum of Art, the Leeum Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as dense gallery scenes in neighborhoods like Samcheong and the upscale Hannam-dong. Back in Kim's studio, we slowly wrapped up the tour. She showed me sculptures she was considering sending to London for Frieze Masters, an offshoot of the fair for artworks produced before the year 2000, and said that she had just exhibited at the Venice Biennale, one of the world's premiere art exhibitions. These achievements represent the kind of recognition many artists dream of, but Kim said she never aimed to exhibit in art fairs or compete for prizes; she has always been more focused on the work itself. I admired her indifference to the market. It was remarkable to look at not just her body of work, but to think of how much of Korea had changed in her lifetime, and how her career as an artist reflected that. The COEX conference center in Seoul's Gangnam neighborhood, where Freize is held. On her bookshelf stood a miniature turtle sculpture. I asked her if it had any special meaning. 'Turtles live a very long life,' she said. 'I want to live a very long life, too.' The next morning was the opening day of Frieze. I joined the crowds of artists, curators, collectors, museum leaders, and gallerists entering COEX, with its glass walls and cavernous halls. I passed the David Zwirner booth, where a Yoyoi Kusama pumpkin and a Gerhard Richter painting were on prominent display. Kukje Gallery, which represents Kim and is one of the most established in South Korea, had a large booth displaying works by painter Park Seo-Bo and the pioneering multimedia artist Suki Seokyeong Kang. Guests at a Kukje Gallery party discuss a piece by Kyungah Ham. I spotted many of the art world players who have staked a serious claim in Seoul. The London gallerist Jay Jopling, who opened a branch of his White Cube gallery in Dosan in 2023, was standing in his booth, discussing tax breaks with a man in a suit. Antwaun Sargent, a director of Gagosian Gallery, was there from New York City to help oversee the opening of a small show of Derrick Adams's paintings at AMPA Cabinet, a gallery located in the headquarters of beauty conglomerate Amorepacific. The people who populate an art fair are always fashionable, and always discreet. Gallerists and their employees were tastefully adorned in quiet-luxury labels—Loro Piano, the Row, Celine, and Dries Van Noten—and sitting at tables bearing equally discreet floral arrangements. Well-to-do South Koreans roamed the fair. Occasionally, celebrities made an appearance, like the K-Pop star Joshua Hong of the boy band Seventeen, who I could only just glimpse through the crowd of fans and bodyguards that surrounded him. A Frieze visitor takes in Up Right, by Philadelphia-born Autumn Wallace. It was in the Focus Asia section—where only 10 Asian galleries were invited to exhibit—that I found the sense of discovery I was looking for. The booths had the feel of an exhibition, rather than of a commercially driven art fair. The galleries were smaller and took risks with emerging artists or artists with less of a shiny blue-chip appeal. Amid the frenzy of buying, it was refreshing to see their points of view. I was particularly taken by the work of the Sri Lankan artist Kingsley Gunatillake, who is 73 years old and represented by the New Delhi gallery Blueprint.12. His striking work, Protest, depicts the bloodshed of Sri Lanka's long civil war, using books that are charred or rendered illegible, often decorated with symbolic or figurative objects, like toy-soldier figurines marching across a soiled page. If much of Seoul is shiny and new with money to burn, the beauty of the city lies in its depth and sorrow. At Frieze Masters, I gazed for a long time at the extraordinary paintings by the great mid-century abstract Korean painter Kim Whanki. Kim was born to a wealthy Korean family in 1913, but rebelled against his father and chose to study art in Japan. His focus was the vast change that Korea underwent in his lifetime, and he incorporated various principles of abstraction into the more traditional vernacular of East Asian art and decorative objects. In that crowded convention center, something about Kim's painting, Moon and Mountain (1967), made the world stop for me. His sense of color and form—even the way a particular shade of blue felt as if it had been pulled straight from the night sky—was extraordinary. Out of curiosity, I asked for the price. The gallerist told me it was selling for approximately $5 million. Nearby, next to an incredible 18th-century ceramic moon jar from the Joseon dynasty, was another of his paintings, Refugee Train (1951). He painted it earlier in his career, before he fully abandoned figurative painting for abstraction. It depicted people in a black train against a flat blue and red background. They are, the gallerist explained, fleeing North Korea at the start of the war. I asked what the price was. It was not for sale, she informed me; it was on loan for the fair from a private—and anonymous—collector. That made me think, if much of Seoul is shiny and new with money to burn, the beauty of the city lies in its depth and sorrow. It is a place unafraid to confront its history in stark terms. Changgyeonggung, a palace built by the Joseon Dynasty in the 15th century. The next day, I met a Korean photographer named Myoung Ho Lee, in the city center, at the grounds of a part of Deoksugung Palace that was once known as Seonwonjeon Hall. During Korea's imperial era—which ended in 1910, after more than 500 years of Joseon dynasty rule—Seonwonjeon was where portraits of kings were enshrined and royal memorial rites were held. Yet the two-story building in front of me didn't look especially palatial, with its wooden beams and dusty windows. Through a translator, Lee said that Seonwonjeon was almost entirely destroyed by the Japanese—a fate that befell many imperial Korean landmarks during occupation. In fact, he went on, the building we were looking at was actually built in the 1920s as an executive residence for a Korean bank. It was later used as a girls' high school. Soon, it was to be demolished, but for the last few months of its existence, the Korean government had granted Lee an artist's residency there. Like most Koreans, Lee knows his country's history well. He explained that at the beginning of the last century, imperial Japanese forces insisted on replacing Korean culture with their own. Openly speaking Korean at the time or using Korean names was a punishable offense. Today, as part of a nationwide project to restore cultural heritage lost during the war, the Korean government is rebuilding Seonwonjeon Hall, hoping to return the site to its former glory. It is expected to be complete in 2039. An installation by Elmgreen and Dragset at Seoul's Amorepacific Museum of Art. Lee pointed to two black tents filled with men in hard hats. Nearby, a lone chicken darted around a pile of large rectangular blocks of granite. Part of the restoration, Lee said, required workers familiar with the practice of ancient Korean masonry. Most of the workers with such knowledge were either elderly or close to retirement; as a result, they worked very slowly. As Lee talked, the sounds of hammers on stone echoed in the background. Lee, however, was more focused on a decades-old Paulownia tree, often called the Empress tree in Korea, growing on the site. With its thick, slightly jagged trunk and foliage still dense and green in the summer season, it was a striking sight. Lee first started to photograph trees in 2006, and has since built a sizable body of work around this practice. He often erects a white backdrop behind his subjects using a crane, ropes, even a few pairs of hands, all of which he erases from the final image with digital retouching. The final result is a work of nature framed by a white backdrop, a way of removing the tree from the context of the natural world, while still reminding us that these giant plants are also, in their own way, works of art. 'This tree has been a witness to everything,' Lee said of the Paulownia. At the end of our visit, he asked the small group of American journalists I was with to stand in front of the tree for a portrait. To fit us into the frame, Lee had to stand with his camera almost a quarter of a mile away, across the giant pit that will soon become the foundation for the new Seonwonjeon. We couldn't hear him over the sound of the hammering masons, so the only way we knew he was finished was when he waved his arms. As I left, I thanked him for his time, aware of the fact I had witnessed a part of Seoul that will soon be destroyed and rebuilt. Frieze visitors view works presented by Gana Art, one of Seoul's most established galleries. That evening, I headed to the Jung neighborhood for Korean barbecue. Several in-the-know Koreans, including Patrick Lee, the director of Frieze Seoul, recommended Geumdwaeji Sikdang, or the Gold Pig. I used one of Seoul's English-speaking taxi apps, Kakao T, to call a car for us: a group of friends I had collected from the fair—an art writer, an art publicist, and a few others. Once there, we stood impatiently in the long line in front of the restaurant. The Gold Pig is unassuming, with a plain white-tiled façade and rows of tables with metal grills and extractor fans to suction up the oily air. But since opening in 2016, it has earned multiple accolades—including a Michelin Bib Gourmand award, which recognizes excellent food at budget-friendly prices. It was worth the hours-long wait to eat freshly grilled pork, beef, and vegetables, dipped into the hot and spicy ssamjang sauce or rolled in salt. We ordered rounds of beer and soju, the drink of choice for late, freewheeling nights in this city. A few of the group had the energy to find a nightclub afterward. There was talk of karaoke. Maybe even a late-night stop at a Korean spa. That's the thing about an international art fair: fueled by people gathered together from around the world, the energy can become infectious. It lends a city a sense of limitless possibility. Diners wait in line outside Gold Pig, one of Seoul's most popular barbecue restaurants. The following day the heat had dissipated and the weather was overcast and drizzly. There was a deflated feel to the morning, a kind of collective hangover from the rush of openings, dinners, and events. Most of the people who arrived for Frieze Seoul had departed for another art fair, the Gwangju Biennale, by bus or train, or had already gone home. The sales numbers from Frieze had started to emerge. Booths had sold out. A painting by Hauser & Wirth artist Nicholas Party had sold for $2.5 million to a private Asian collector, the biggest purchase of the fair. I headed back to the city center, this time to Bukchon Hanok Village. I was visiting the home and studio of Teo Yang, a handsome Korean interior designer and artist who had created a beautiful, eclectic home out of two adjacent hanoks he purchased more than 10 years ago. Yang left Korea at the age of 19 to study interior architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; later he earned a degree in environmental design at the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena, California. But it was only after he began working with the Dutch architect and art director Marcel Wanders, who mines the rich history of the Netherlands for his own practice, that Yang began to look at Korea with new eyes, diving deep into the architectural history of his homeland. Hanoks date back to the 14th century and are made by joining wooden beams in a way that doesn't require nails or other bindings. With their low ceilings, insulated mud walls, and floor-based heating system, hanoks are meant to withstand both Korea's hot, humid summers and long, cold winters. Yang had designed his interiors to incorporate a tasteful mix of Western and Eastern décor: a wall covered in de Gournay wallpaper here, a Serge Mouille light fixture there, Joseon pottery and contemporary Korean art scattered throughout. A pine tree grew in the center of one of Yang's courtyards. Yang's studio manager told me that having a tree in the courtyard is not typical for a hanok , as Confucius believed one needed a clear view in one's home. But the tree was perfectly elegant, its green boughs peeking above the low-slung roof covered in traditional gray clay tiles. The courtyard of architect and designer Teo Yang's studio. Afterward, I walked through the streets of Bukchon Hanok Village, a popular tourist destination because of its architecture, shopping, and food. This is where brands like the Korean beauty label Sulwhasoo have converted traditional hanoks into stores, their wooden beams contrasting with sleek glass walls. I stopped to buy some goguma mattang , or candied sweet potatoes, from a street vendor. I also picked up a few rice cakes from Biwon Tteokjip, a sweet shop that first opened in 1949 and claims to use the same recipe it once presented to the king. I ended up at EOESeoul, a charming modernist-looking café, where I had tea with a young Korean architect, Daniel Song, who designed not just the café but the entire building. His firm, INTG., which he co-founded with his wife, Kate Cho, occupied both the top floor and the basement. The couple has developed a reputation for minimalist designs with a decidedly Korean point of view. Song and Cho studied architecture at Columbia University, then worked with several firms around the world, but chose to return to South Korea. Since starting their practice in 2016, they've gone on to design White Cube's Seoul gallery, various private interiors, and a number of commercial spaces for Korean companies. The night before Frieze Seoul began, the White Cube gallery threw a party at the Mondrian hotel. Song took me on a quick tour, proudly showing me details throughout the building: the café's lacquered sambe (hemp) countertops and the ceiling's decorative wooden beams, which were rescued from a derelict hanok . His reverence for Korean culture was noticeable: fabrics were chosen to match the green of matcha tea or the burgundy of red-bean paste. As I left, Song gave me a small box of financiers made in the café, wrapped in a bojagi , or traditional Korean wrapping cloth. There was just enough of that afternoon left to stop by the Arumjigi Foundation, which is devoted to preserving traditional Korean culture. This nonprofit was started in 2001 by a group of volunteers who wanted to clean up palace grounds in Seoul that were at the time abandoned and overgrown. The foundation has now grown to encompass other crafts and traditional Korean practices. An exhibition on the top floor explained how Korean walls were once made by hand with straw and mud. On the ground floor, displays incorporated the work of contemporary artists with traditional Korean spaces. After several days of looking at art made after the 1950s, it was refreshing to be around such literal, but beautiful, objects and ideas. Jiwon Park's Nature Being Things, on display at the Arumjigi Foundation. I returned to my hotel to get ready for one final Frieze dinner, hosted by Stone Island, the Milan-based fashion brand that is enormously popular in South Korea. That evening, I was served champagne on a hilltop overlooking Seoul. The city glittered around me. The menu stated that our dinner's produce was from an organic farm in Surisan Provincial Park, some 27 miles south. The delicately plated courses included dainty slices of aged Korean beef with Parmesan fondue. I glimpsed the Korean DJ Peggy Gou posing for a selfie in the bathroom with a few of her friends, then posting it to her Instagram following of 4 million people. A Scottish creative director who lived in Paris chatted to me about New York restaurants and whether or not to have kids. Nearby a few Frieze executives from London discussed the pitfalls of jet lag with an American writer based in Berlin. For a moment, I marveled at the thought that we could be anywhere, really. Berlin. New York. London. Mexico City. For tonight, though, we were in Seoul. A version of this story will appear in the October 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline 'Seoul on Fire.'
Arab News
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
Landmark exhibition ‘Layered Medium' brings six decades of Korean art to the GCC
DUBAI: The first large-scale showcase of contemporary Korean art in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, 'Layered Medium: We Are in Open Circuits – Contemporary Art from Korea, 1960s to Today,' promises to be a transformative experience for audiences in the Middle East. Co-curated by Maya El-Khalil of the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation and Yeo Kyung-hwan of the Seoul Museum of Art, the exhibition brings together a sweeping collection of artworks that explore the evolution of Korean contemporary art from its roots in the 1960s to the present day. Held at the Abu Dhabi art gallery Manarat Al-Saadiyat from May 16 to June 30, the exhibition marks a historic cultural bridge between Korea and the region, offering insights into how Korean artists have responded to shifts in political landscapes, technological advancements, and the complexities of modernity. Ayoung Kim, Still image from Delivery Dancer's Sphere, 2022, single-channel video, 25 min. (Courtesy of the artist) 'This exhibition is a testament to the power of art to transcend boundaries and ignite conversations across cultures,' said El-Khalil to Arab News. 'It's an opportunity for audiences to witness the dynamism and resilience of Korean art over decades of transformation.' El-Khalil drew on her first experiences in Seoul, which she described as a 'moment of discovery.' For her, the city revealed what she called 'productive contradictions': an art scene that was deeply specific to its context but spoke to universal experiences of urbanization, globalization, and technological change. 'This tension between specificity and universality became central to our curatorial approach. Rather than trying to explain Korean art, we wanted to create frameworks that would allow audiences to encounter works through shared experiences of inhabiting our rapidly shifting, technologically mediated worlds,' El-Khalil said. Ayoung Kim, Installation view of Delivery Dancer's Sphere (2022) from the exhibition "What an Artificial World (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju, Korea, 2024)." (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Photography Hong Choelki) The exhibition begins with the immediate sensory experiences of the body, intersecting with social constructs of gender, nationality, and identity. From there it connects to cultural narratives of history and tradition before engaging with contemporary spatial realities of rapid urbanisation and precarious ecologies. It begins with its experimental phases in the 1960s, moving through the politically charged works of the 1980s, and culminating in the boundary pushing digital and multimedia explorations of today. Yeo explained the curatorial decision. 'We experience reality through our bodies, our social structures, and our physical and virtual terrains. By organizing the exhibition through this expanded sense of medium — as atmospheres of meaning-making — we created a framework that reflects circuits of experience: from our immediate bodily presence to our social relationships, to our navigation of built environments striated with power and control.' Byungjun Kwon, Dancing Ladders, credit MMCA (2). (Supplied) Among the standout works are installations that challenge conventional perceptions of space and time, multimedia projects that intertwine Korean folklore with digital storytelling, and large-scale sculptures that articulate the tension between tradition and innovation. El-Khalil spoke of parallels between Seoul and Abu Dhabi, citing rapid urbanization and globalization as shared narratives. 'Both cities are the product of rapid, accelerated development, each environment a remarkable narrative of transformation, though the stories are quite distinct: South Korea emerging after war and poverty, while the UAE grew quickly thanks to a clear vision and the discovery of natural resources,' she said. 'What's really interesting is how artists in both places respond to similar changes like urbanisation or globalisation but from different cultural perspectives. Even though these changes seem global, they're always shaped by local histories and ideas about the future. For example, Sung Hwan Kim's 'Temper Clay' (2012), set in uniform apartment blocks, looks at the emotional and social impact of this kind of growth. These parallels allowed us to explore how different societies process similar transformations through different historical and cultural frameworks,' she added. Ram Han, Room type 01, 2018. (Collection of Seoul Museum of Art) The exhibition also highlights the impact of technological revolutions on Korean art, particularly in the realm of video and digital installations that emerged in the late 1990s. 'Korean artists have always been at the forefront of exploring new media, often using technology as a medium to dissect cultural narratives and global dialogues,' said Yeo. 'Their work is a testament to adaptability and forward-thinking—an open circuit that is constantly evolving.' In addition to the main exhibition, 'Layered Medium' features a series of panel discussions, workshops, and interactive installations aimed at engaging the community in dialogue about the role of contemporary art in shaping cultural identity and understanding. El-Khalil emphasized the importance of these community-focused initiatives: 'We want this exhibition to be more than just a visual experience; it's a platform for learning and cross-cultural exchange.' As the first large-scale Korean art exhibition in the GCC, 'Layered Medium' is poised to set a new standard for artistic collaboration between Korea and the Middle East. With its emphasis on dialogue, innovation, and historical reflection, the exhibition not only showcases the richness of Korean artistic expression but also reinforces the universal language of art as a bridge across diverse cultures. 'Ultimately, our hope is that visitors leave with a deeper appreciation for the complexity and beauty of Korean contemporary art,' said Yeo. 'It's about creating connections—not just between East and West, but across generations, mediums, and ideologies.'
Korea Herald
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Gallery Hyundai's 55 years of history on view
As Korea's leading commercial art space, Gallery Hyundai's 55th anniversary exhibition reflects on its history through the works of artists it has represented over the decades Behind the Korean art scene's growth are pioneering galleries that supported artists and consistently served collectors -- and one of those is Gallery Hyundai, founded in Seoul's Insa-dong neighborhood 55 years ago. The leading gallery is now located in Samcheong-dong, led by Do Hyung-teh, president of the gallery and son of the founder, Park Myung-ja. Marking its 55th anniversary, the gallery opened the exhibition '55 Years: A Legacy of Modern & Contemporary Korean Art,' which looks back on the history of the commercial gallery and its artists. When the gallery was founded on April 4, 1970, as Hyundai Hwarang, the Korean art market was still developing, and the gallery played a major role in cultivating and supporting talented Korean contemporary artists. "Through this exhibition, the gallery invites visitors to explore the past, present and future of Gallery Hyundai and Korean modern and contemporary art," the gallery noted on the exhibition. The first section of the exhibition brings together artists who had a special relationship with the gallery, dating back to its founding by Park in the 1970s through the 1990s. The artists include Park Soo-keun, Chang Uc-chin and Lee Jung-seob who are widely regarded as masters of Korean art, known for paintings that portray family life and evoke Korean sensibilities. Two other masters -- Kim Whan-ki and Yoo Young-kuk -- whose popular works have led the Korean art market, are presented in the show as pioneers in the history of Korean contemporary abstract art. Under Do's leadership, the gallery has worked to raise the profile of Korean experimental artists such as Quac In-sik, Sung Neung-kyung, Lee Kun-yong and Lee Seung-taek. Their works were shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last year at the exhibition titled 'Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s.' Among the artists whose works are on display at the exhibition is Paik Nam-june, who also had a special relationship with the gallery under Park's leadership. Famously, Paik performed at the gallery in 1990 in tribute to his long-time friend and German artist Joseph Beuys, who died in 1986. Paik later had two solo exhibitions at the gallery in 1992 and 1995. Another artist, Shin Sung-hy -- whose 'sewn-canvas' series was highlighted at the Venice Biennale last year in a solo collateral exhibition -- is also part of the exhibition. A total of 36 artists and 180 of their works will be on view starting Tuesday. Due to its proximity to the Constitutional Court, the gallery will be closed this Friday and Saturday as security measures intensify ahead of the impeachment ruling on President Yoon Suk Yeol.
