|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Seoul Art: Where Past and Present Meet
| Article
# : |
10376 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
1,157 Words |
| Author
: |
Betty Rogers Rubenstein
Betty Rogers Rubenstein is an art historian and critic
residing in Tallahassee, Florida. |
In Seoul, South Korea, a high-tech city of thirteen million people, sculpture and painting rank in importance just after the family car. Even a casual visitor to Seoul will notice the current flowering of the arts. New museums flourish, new buildings sport elegant status, and new hotels decorate their lobbies and rooms with original contemporary art. Fifty-three art galleries took part in the Seoul Art Fair in the late summer of 1992. Most of them were from Seoul, and the majority of the artists were young--born in the early fifties. It is as if the long years of Japanese occupation and the destruction wrought by two major wars served as a dam that a new generation has opened, allowing a creative river to burst forth and flood the country with a largess of art.
Grateful for their independence and mindful of their long history, the best of South Korean artists have not rushed to mimic Western styles of abstraction, formalism, or the trendy Post-Modern Appropriation that inserts borrowed images into new designs. Korean artists have skimmed the best of Western styles, married them to Korean tradition, and polished this combination with the natural, outgoing personality of the Korean people. At the art fair, artists who tried for pure formalism, Minimalism were the least interesting. The pseudorealism of twenty years ago, evident in downtown fountain sculpture, has almost disappeared.
Western influences have been studied and digested. A lively landscape like Kim Hong Joo's untitled maplike piece on page 206 owes something both to the legacy of Picasso and to an Oriental tradition that plays with distance and combines multiple perspectives with language. The good humor of the Korean people show through this artful diagram of a country in the process of modernizing its rice culture.
Rapid urbanization has not obliterated Korean artists' feeling for their own unique geography, for animals, and for social interchange. Even Nam June Paik's massive Videotime Videospace, exhibited at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, does not lose the personal touch.
Walking around the plaza connecting the Intercontinental Hotel, the International Trade Center, and the city bus terminal, one can observe a uniquely Korean combination of tradition and modernism. A series of bright blue metal squared arches contrasts with narrative sculptures that recall the legendary founding of Korea. These works stand out against a background of contemporary architecture. Striking examples of the influence of tradition are the black lava figures that guard the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
