2013
《2013 Korea Artist Prize》
Kyoung-woon Kim
(Curator,
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)
In 2012, the annual Artist of the Year exhibition, which had been held for 15 years since its inauguration in 1995, was re-organized and enhanced with greater financial support. As a result, the Korea Artist Prize was launched in 2012, co-sponsored by the SBS Culture Foundation and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. The 2012 Korea Artist Prize was a remarkable success, being ranked as the Notable Exhibition of the Year by JoongAng Ilbo and the Best Exhibition of the Year by art INCULTURE. In addition, MOON Kyungwon and JEON Joonho, the recipients of the 2012 Korea Artist Prize, were invited to dOCUMENTA XIII in Kassel, Germany, marking the first time in 20 years that Korean artists were invited to this renowned event. The pair also won the Noon Award at the 2012 Gwang ju Biennale.
Now in its second year, the 2013 Korea Artist Prize seeks to identify and support talented artists who represent the vast potential and future vision of Korean contemporary art, as well as artists whose works have significantly contributed to the development and advancement of Korean art. Offered in conjunction with an exhibition of works by the selected artists, the 2013 Korea Artist Prize adheres to its mission of promoting artistic culture in Korea and presenting new trends and discourses within Korean contemporary art. The selection process of the 2013 Korea Artist Prize was quite involved, starting with the appointment of ten recommenders and five judges by the steering committee. The ten recommenders, who included representatives from the museum as well as other critics and scholars of Korean art, wrote their own recommendations. Those recommendations were then carefully reviewed by the five judges, representing both the domestic and international art community. This process resulted in the final four nominated artists: Sung-Hun Kong, Meekyoung Shin, Haejun Jo, and Yang Ah Ham. These four artists will participate in the 2013 Korea Artist Prize exhibition, to be held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea from July 19 to October 20, 2013.
Rather than selecting artists based on a specific theme or medium, the Korea Artist Prize focuses on the artists’ overall capacity and potential. Since the related exhibition features projects from each nominated artist, the result is a striking juxtaposition of works of various styles. Essentially, the exhibition represents a simultaneous presentation of solo exhibitions from four top artists, each displaying a superlative command of various methods and media.
Of course, with a keen insight and sensibility of the art of our time, the audience will apprehend certain themes underlying and unifying these diverse works.
Haejun Jo: Scenes of Between
Like the great art of any era, today’s most exemplary works do not shy away from controversial social issues. Among contemporary Korean artists, Haejun Jo is perhaps the best representative of an artist who is actively using his works to address the increasing disjunction and conflict between generations, which is one of the most pertinent social issues of our time.
Since 2002, Haejun Jo has collaborated with his father Donghwan Jo to produce a series of drawings based on his father’s oral history, unfolding a personal saga of an ordinary man who lived through the turmoil that has marked modern Korean society. These drawings form a significant axis of Jo’s oeuvre, but the series has progressed over time, evolving into installations in various exhibition spaces, graphic novels for publication, and most recently, a film entitled Scenes of Between.
Through the drawings, Jo’s father related and reflected on the events of his own life. But in the process, he realized that he knew almost nothing about his son’s life as a schoolboy growing up, as is often the case with Korean fathers and sons, who frequently share a mutually reticent relationship. Hence, Haejun Jo recounted his own coming- of-age story in A Rebel Son: 1979-1990. As both the main producer and editor of the works, Haejun Jo provides the overall direction, but his father has also been incredibly productive, creating drawings that initially seem a bit rough, but are actually highly detailed upon closer examination. Through their collaboration, the Jo family shared intimate experiences from each other’s life that they had never known about before, and thus came to understand one another on a much deeper level. In today’s Korean society, evidence of the wide generational gap is everywhere you look, but the art of Haejun and Donghwan Jo represents a rare case of art serving as the key to open communications between generations.
Their collaborative drawing series began from the specificity of a personal history, but has since grown to encompass the broader experiences of each generation of Korean contemporary history. The series has further expanded to include the stories of marginal people who hover near the boundaries of the world. Volgadeutsche: Germany Reflected upon from Without and DPRK: North Korea Reflected upon from Without are anthropological reports to a certain extent, while Arab Spring: The Arab World Reflected upon from Without documents some of the tectonic shifts that are changing the face of our world today.
In the midst of this collaborative series, Jo’s father was rummaging through his storage when he found a painting he had made in the early 1960s. He had submitted the painting to the Grand Art Exhibition of Korea, but it was not selected. Dusting it off, he recollected the “ordinary” life that he had been forced into, after his dream of becoming an artist was shattered. But at the same time, he realized that he was now finally being given the chance to creatively express himself, and all the ideas he had collected in his mind for his entire life, thanks to the opportunity provided by his youngest son. Donghwan Jo’s recounting of his story of becoming a belated artist is quite touching.
A man who gave up his dream of becoming an artist, and instead became a father, is now spending his free time producing a type of outsider art. At first glance, his art looks rather banal and antiquated. However, through his son’s orchestration and direction, these humble creations are transformed into compelling contemporary artworks that powerfully resonate with viewers. They become a sort of archive or menagerie of different artworks— paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and various objects—embodying different aspects of his desire to create. Examining this archive, we see the dam burst of one ordinary man’s desire to create, withheld for so long, but more than that, we begin to perceive emanations of humanity’s innate drive for creative expression, which stirs in all of us.
In most of their works together, father and son have communicated through visual art, using written and verbal language, such as letters and conversations. But more recently, they have taken their communication to a new and deeper level by collaborating on a film. Haejun Jo’s works are an exemplary model of how art can serve as a channel for mediating generational conflicts and enhancing communication and concord
Yang Ah Ham: Nonsense Factory
Lifestyles of the past can often look strange and unfamiliar to the eyes of the present, but try to imagine how our lives today might appear to future generations gazing at them in a museum of history. In the same way, people of the past would be confounded by our contemporary lifestyle, as we would surely be if given the chance to observe people of the future. Our lives today, which seem so ordinary to us, would be marvelous and bizarre to the eyes of both the past and the future. After all, only 25 years ago, it was almost impossible to find someone with a mobile phone.
People from the 19th century could never have imagined the transportation and technology of today. But people from the future will surely look at our “rapid” transportation and “cutting-edge” technology and wonder, “How could they have endured such inconvenience?” While these hypothetical situations can be applied most easily to details from our everyday lives, like airplanes and cell phones, there is little reason to think that they would not also apply to more macroscopic aspects of life, such as the social structure and behavioral patterns that are collectively constituted by millions of individuals. Today, we take our social structure for granted, like the air we breathe, but how would it look to people of the 17th or 25th century? Perhaps Yang Ah Ham’s Nonsense Factory can help us answer these questions, by providing a preview of the museums of the future. This remarkable installation acts as an exhibition that takes a metaphorical view on contemporary life in our highly industrialized society, and thereby allows us to examine the world of today in the same way we experience lifestyles of the past.
Nonsense Factory is the title of Ham’s solo exhibition in 2010, as well as the title of a complex installation from that exhibition, and the novella she wrote upon which the installation is based. But Nonsense Factory is not merely a title or concept, but one of the artist’s primary themes. The Nonsense Factory installation consists of six parts: “First Room: Central Image Box Control Room”; “Second Room: Welfare Policy Making Room”; “Third Room: Coupon Room”; “Fourth Room: Artists’ Room”; “Fifth Room: Factory Basement”; and “Sixth Room: Blue Print Room for Future Factory.” 1
These parts respectively address the following themes of contemporary society: the issues of the “iconomy” 2 ; happiness as ideology; capitalism and the monetary economy; the cultural snobbery of the art field; the precarious state of idealistic values; and the infinite competition inherent to the pursuit of constant growth and progress.
According to Ham, Nonsense Factory was triggered by her contemplations of the various crises that seem to
be inherent to contemporary life. The final result is a mirror that allows us to see our society from a different angle. Using the surrealist atmosphere of her novella as a sketch and framework, the installation exposes the absurdities of reality, recalling the works of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka. Notably, among the primary methods of contemporary art, Ham chose to create this grand metaphor of contemporary as an installation and video. Nonsense Factory brilliantly illuminates elements of our lives that we thoughtlessly ingest like air or water, forcing us to carefully consider the absurdities and complexities hidden in plain sight in our day-to-day existence, and ultimately providing an experience of tremendous surprise and revelation.
Sung-Hun Kong: Winter Journey
Another artist exploring the institutionalized crises and internalized anxieties of contemporary life is Sung-Hun Kong. As many critics have pointed out, Kong creates seditious works that often cause viewers to feel some unease and discomfort without quite understanding why. Early in his career, he created works of various media that questioned how art is systematically established and distributed in a society. But eventually he started from scratch by returning to perhaps the most basic, fundamental form of art: painting. Today, the medium of painting may be considered somewhat outdated and thus, irrelevant to our current times. But looking at Kong’s paintings, anyone with a true understanding of contemporary art is forced to question the assertion that painting is no longer a contemporaneous medium. His paintings act as a kind of puzzle, in which he hides clues about contemporary life within spectacular landscapes that look very classical. Unexpected elements—like a helicopter, parachute, or a vapor trail—are tucked into a corner of the painting, tainting the viewer’s simple and genuine appreciation of the scene with a hint of alienation. These elements are like the surprise ending of a mystery, when the audience learns the identity of the culprit. Even though his paintings initially look like 19th-century landscapes from the age of Romanticism, his tiny clues expose the scene as a landscape of the 21st century. Kong’s strategy is similar to that of other contemporary painters who try to lull the viewer with the disguise of the everyday. Thus, he proves that it is possible to produce paintings that cause discomfort in the viewer while still seeming contemporary due to their supposed ordinary, popular subject matters. As such, Kong is reminiscent of a modern-day Caravaggio or Courbet.
Ironically, Kong brashly takes on the challenge of achieving artistic contemporaneity through a medium that seems to have outlived its prime and become somewhat antiquated. This fervent honesty arises from his temperament, which is the same as that of a model student who only feels satisfied after diligently working to complete an assignment. When taking on such a task, he actively seeks to create incessant switches and insinuations. Taking an example from the world of philosophy, Kong has seemingly revitalized the Decartesian notion of doubt, by using an outdated method as his primary tool for deconstructing contemporary and postmodern ideals.
Keeping in mind Kong’s artistic trajectory, his paintings of the “new cities” recently constructed on the outskirts
of Seoul seem quite contemporary. Today’s art seeks to differentiate itself amidst the constant social and cultural changes, in which new visual media are constantly emerging. But eventually, it inevitably encounters a disturbing situation in which it becomes alienated and marginalized from the society. Within this context, Kong’s paintings
of marginalized living spaces can be read as allegory or metaphor of the status of painting within contemporary art. In a time when the death of painting has been openly announced, what might save it? Kong seeks the answer in the ethics of painting, in the inherent aspect of the medium that allows a person to directly express their inner thoughts on the canvas.
Kong’s images allusively represent the circumstances of lives today. This sensibility can be associated with the symbolism of traditional East Asian landscape paintings, where the landscape represents a mental space. In addition, Kong employs various methods to prevent viewers from perceiving his paintings as mere decoration or as simple representations of real objects. Although his paintings initially seem to resonate with an aura of Romanticism, this blatant conventionality is part of Kong’s overall strategy, along with the resultant sleek finish of the works.
Through these methods, Kong creates landscape paintings that convey neither the awe of nature nor the sense of sublime beauty. Instead, his paintings reveal an exhausted nature that has been endlessly exploited and ingested by people until it becomes no more than a prop on a theater stage. Nonetheless, the tempestuous clouds and storms that engulf his landscapes impart the enduring power of nature that will always remain beyond human control. Such attributes might be an intrinsic feature of nature, but they might also represent other unknowable forces
that continually resist the human capacity for control. Some easy examples include situations composed of infinite variables, like economic crashes, or human desires, which exist in a constant state of flux. But they could also include institutionalized crises, volatile threats of war and violence, or even contemporary society itself, which forms the basis of all the fundamental premises of our lives.
The admiration we feel for Kong’s paintings does not originate from the inherent sublimity of nature represented in the works. In fact, his natural scenes have an effect more akin to a Pierrot, who somehow manages to evoke feelings of sadness and pity despite being extravagantly dressed in bright colors and lavish decorations. Likewise, his views of nature initially present an impressive spectacle, but any feelings of veneration or magnificence the viewer might experience immediately vanish upon discovery of a tiny person in one corner of the canvas. Thus, a new form of sublimity emerges, not from the attributes of nature, but from our appreciation of the artist’s capacity for controlling the canvas. It is this capacity that singlehandedly transforms a mere spectacle of nature into a meaningful metaphor.
Meekyoung Shin: Translation—An Epic Archive
Meekyoung Shin’s works begin with a revision of Western classical art through the medium of sculpture. Born in Korea, where experiences of colonialism and transplanted culture are still fresh in the nation’s memory, she re-examines Western classical art, which was created in specific times and places, but was forcibly established as a universal canon during the era of imperialism. Perhaps most significantly, she executes her sculptural revisions with a common household product that is used daily by almost every person around the world: soap.
From an art historical perspective, Western classical art symbolizes the eternal values and archetypes of humanity, which transcend time to be passed down through the eras. Shin reproduces classic Greek and Roman sculptures with soap, a universal yet highly ephemeral material that is typically used and entirely depleted in a relatively limited time. Thus, Shin’s soap works function to erode the supposedly eternal dominant values from Western civilization, as represented by the classical sculptures.
Shin refers to her soap sculptures as “translation.” As “translation” refers to rendering from one language to another, her works can be regarded as a translation of material culture, from one material to another. Today, the dissemination and exchange of material culture happens almost instantaneously, resulting in increasingly hybridized forms. In such circumstances, Shin’s variety of translation is especially meaningful, as it forces us to confront important questions about the ethics of translating material culture.
As Lawrence Venuti has pointed out, the act of translation can often be an act of resistance. 3 Shin culls objects from the classical canon of Western art history and translates them into a contradictory material. In terms of exterior appearance, her translations are often quite similar, if not virtually identical, to the original, but in terms
of their usage and intrinsic attributes, the original and translation are completely incompatible. Her very act of translation itself exists as an expression of doubt of the dominant norm represented by the original. Her works also subvert the notion of the museum as the storehouse of eternal values. By rendering statues made from impervious marble in a trivial, fragile material like soap, Shin is effectively disintegrating the dominant values at the speed of contemporary society. As such, her works reveal the differences between the original and the translation, eventually illuminating the ethics of difference that permeate contemporary society, where cultural differences are increasingly embraced and celebrated. This ethics of difference represents the final aim of Shin’s ethics of translation. 4
Her works are also notable for the way they consciously reveal the differences between the original and the translated object. For example, she has transformed classic Greek statues into a self-portrait by adding her own
face. Recently, she has been making soap reproductions of Chinese ceramics that were made for the sole purpose of export to the West. In those works, she aims to translate some ethereal quality of the original, as if trying to capture the ghosts inhabiting Chinese ceramics that were made exclusively for Western tastes and ideals. Sometimes, her works directly reveal themselves as translations through obvious visual differences, while other times more significant differences emerge indirectly, as scent. At first glance, our visual perception tells us that her works are made from solid materials, such as stone, glass and fired clay. But soon our olfactory perception is aroused, exposing the true nature of the object, which is made of soft, soluble, and scented soap. This experience serves to highlight the sense of smell as another way of perceiving the world, apart from our dominant sense of vision, just as she seeks to subvert the supposedly dominant Western values of the original sculpture. Each of her translations produces another version of the original, and her translations of various forms and sources are collected together to form her own artistic archive. In this way, Shin shakes up the eternal, immutable categories and definitions of culture.
Korea Artist Prize does not select artists according to any pre-determined theme, but that does not prevent us from seeking to identify themes underlying and unifying the diverse works of the nominees. This year’s four finalists are connected by their overt consciousness of the ethical responsibilities of art. Haejun Jo uses his artistic archive of life’s “ordinary” events for the ethical purpose of traversing generational gaps and eliciting communication between disparate groups. Yang Ah Ham exemplifies the ethical use of art to actively criticize the profound hidden deficiencies in contemporary society. Sung-Hun Kong contemplates the ethics of painting, a medium for expressing ideas through the body. And Meekyoung Shin represents the ethics of translation by exposing cultural differences and thereby disturbing the attempt to eternalize cultural categories. Each artist constitutes their own unique gallery: an anthropological archive; a presentation of social aspects of the early 21st century; a collection of landscape paintings rife with hidden social commentary; and a gallery of sculptures that uniquely translate material culture. Together, these four galleries constitute a prodigious museum of contemporary ethical art.
