Exhibitions to See in Seoul, Korea throughout Frieze

Because the third version of Frieze Seoul heads into its remaining day at this time, many worldwide guests are seemingly already on their approach residence. Some could have already left to go to the Gwangju Biennale, which is now in its fifteenth iteration and is curated this yr by Nicolas Bourriaud. (Among the festivities began on Thursday, inflicting  many to go away Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.) A couple of may proceed to the Busan Biennale, which can also be coinciding with Frieze this yr. 

However there may be nonetheless loads to see round Seoul, from Anicka Yi’s first survey in Asia to a significant group exhibition taking a look at how Asia-based girls artists have used their our bodies of their work and far more. 

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Under, a have a look at six exhibitions ARTnews attended throughout the jam-packed honest week.

Anicka Yi at Leeum Museum of Artwork

Essentially the most anticipated exhibition of the week was Anicka Yi’s solo present, which is collectively organized by the Leeum Museum of Artwork and the UCCA Heart for Up to date Artwork, Beijing, the place it should journey subsequent March. Titled “There Exists One other Evolution, However This One,” the exhibition submerges guests into an all-black atmosphere that’s typical of lots of Yi’s previous exhibitions. The survey presents a glance again at over a decade of Yi’s manufacturing, which has beguiled viewers for simply as lengthy. Other than introductory wall textual content, there isn’t a lot context supplied for the works on view, which might make it tough to parse, however that additionally enhances the present’s otherworldly attraction. 

There’s an unmistakable magnificence to her tempura-fried flowers, that are mounted onto sheets of plexiglass and organized in such a approach that they seem as free, floating abstractions when seen from a distance. Her mechanized, octopus-like sculptures, which right here cling above shallow swimming pools of inky water, tantalize as they transfer and shudder. Her 22-minute, 3D movie The Genome Taste (2016), which memorably confirmed on the 2017 Whitney Biennial, nonetheless holds up. 

Regardless of the energy of Yi’s work, I used to be left wanting a stronger curatorial voice that makes the case for why Yi has been such an essential artist over the previous a number of years, one which coalesces her one-off reveals of various our bodies of labor into an overarching creative imaginative and prescient. Don’t despair, although: the place curators Gina Lee and Peter Eleey fall brief, Yi greater than compensates together with her newest video work. Operating solely 16 minutes, Every Department of Coral Holds Up The Gentle of The Moon is a mesmerizing piece that’s half of a bigger AI mission titled Vacancy, for which an algorithm has been “educated on years of art work produced by Anicka Yi Studio,” in response to the wall textual content. The part I caught featured floating objects—flowers, tentacles, micro organism cells—in lush colours. It directly feels acquainted to Yi’s work and excitingly new.

I can’t wait to see the place this mission leads. 

“Connecting Our bodies: Asian Girls Artists” at Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Up to date Artwork (MMCA)

The very best present I noticed this week was, by far, “Connecting Our bodies: Asian Girls Artists.” There’s a lot on view throughout the exhibition’s six sections—with titles like “Versatile Territories of Sexuality” and “Our bodies•Objects•Language”—and greater than 130 artists from 11 nations throughout Asia. A number of of the artists are established artwork stars, like Yoko Ono (represented by Reduce Piece), however many are seemingly solely well-known of their residence nations. Strolling by the cacophony of various views on how the physique might be “a spot the place varied ideologies and conditions intersect,” in response to the introductory wall textual content, I used to be reminded of my expertise seeing “Radical Girls: Latin American Artwork, 1960–1985,” which opened on the Hammer Museum in 2017. That exhibition helped rewrite the canon internationally and gave higher acclaim to the artists featured in it; “Connecting Our bodies” has that very same risk. It desperately must journey. 

Among the many first video works within the exhibition is Mako Idemitsu’s tour of Womanhouse, the ur-work of feminist collaboration from 1972 that itself touched upon the numerous themes explored in “Connecting Our bodies.” I used to be mystified by the haunting pictures of Korean artist Park Youngsook, whose work I had encountered earlier within the day on the sales space of Arario Gallery. A 1992 portray titled The Fall of America by Ryu Jun Hwa is an assemblage of assorted sapphic-looking scenes that appear attractive, steamy, and even perhaps harmful. The work appears to indicate that it’s lesbianism (or queerness extra usually) that has aided within the US’s destruction; what’s highly effective about it’s that a variety of the figures seem like Asian girls. In a room specializing in goddesses and cosmologies, the textile-based works of Lee Bul, Pacita Abad, and Mrinalini Mukherjee share area. A subsequent room has a 1987 {photograph} by Joo Myong-Duck from her “Artist Sequence” of Bul, sporting a sequin leotard and holding a crude child sculpture the wrong way up as she stares on the viewer, one arm on her hip. Elsewhere are three Synthetic Placenta (1961/2003) works by Tabe Mitsuko that look extra sterile than cozy.

There’s a lot to absorb right here, I want I had had extra time to delve deeper. 

Korean Heritage Artwork Exhibition at Changdeokgung Palace

One of many week’s extra off-the-beaten-path exhibitions is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it present. The exhibition is situated on the Changdeokgung Palace—a royal residence for 270 years and in use as such till 1989. The present doesn’t have an official title and solely lasts for six days. In a single set of buildings, a number of works of craft are displayed within the alcoves that had been as soon as used as sleeping quarters. The main focus right here is on the generational lineage of craft, with a number of mother and father and youngsters exhibiting work collectively, in addition to extra up to date works that takes remixes that legacy. Among the many highlights are a pair of hanji-paper-and-bamboo parasols by the final household who makes this fashion of umbrella; 4 lacquerware objects every made by father, mom, son, and daughter; a big cupboard bedazzled in an ungodly quantity of mom of pearl; and an embroidered display screen by Bang Chae-ok, who additionally occurs to be the curator’s mom.

“SeMA Omnibus: On the Finish of the World Cut up Endlessly” at Seoul Museum of Artwork

The Seoul Museum of Artwork (or SeMA for brief) at the moment has a group present on view cut up throughout its 4 venues, which “undertake[s] the omnibus type of storytelling that weaves impartial brief tales round a single theme,” in response to exhibition textual content.

“On the Finish of the World Cut up Endlessly,” the part on the Seosomun Fundamental Department, seems to be on the assortment by the lens of the varied mediums that artists make use of, in what the museum calls a “post-medium/post-media period.” The exhibition, which takes inspiration and a part of its construction from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom on the Finish of the World and Jorge Luis Borges’s The Backyard of Forking Paths, is a bit uneven in the best way most assortment reveals are usually. Han Un-Sung, for instance, has on view horrible drawings of fruit which might be a part of his plan “to provide 1,500 items in 30 years.” In a quote printed subsequent to those works, he admits “that even when an artist produce works all through their complete lives, solely about 10 p.c of the entire are thought of comparatively respectable.” He may need to spend extra time on finishing the ultimate 300 he has left to go. 

However there are distinctive works on view too. A video work from 1977 by Lee Kang-So, who just lately joined the roster of Thaddaeus Ropac, is a knockout. Relying upon if you occur upon the practically 30-minute video, the display screen could also be all white or largely black (barely flickering as if the unique movie is glitching). However if you happen to wait lengthy sufficient, you’ll see it transition to the artist standing in entrance of the digital camera and starting to color in both path. 

Bridging the timeline is one in all SeMA’s most up-to-date acquisitions: Nonfacial Portrait (2018–20) by Seoul-based collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun. For the work, which entered the gathering final yr, the artists have embraced expertise to create a collection of portraits with sinister undertones. On a desk subsequent to at least one such semi-abstracted work is a set of “Portray Tips,” the primary of which reads: “Paint a portrait of the topic, however its face should not be detected by AI.” In an period the place facial recognition software program can be utilized by governments for no matter functions swimsuit their political ends, the piece is a strong condemnation of artists who’re fast to embrace AI with out stopping to query what all of it means. 

“Portrait of a Assortment: Chosen Works from the Pinault Assortment” at Songeun Artwork and Cultural Basis

To proceed the thread of bland choices, there’s a middling exhibiting of the Pinault Assortment on the Songeun Artwork and Cultural Basis, that includes greater than 60 artists, lots of whom are exhibiting in Korea for the primary time. When you’ve seen any Pinault Assortment present in Europe, nothing right here will shock you, although there may be an distinctive mini-survey of Miriam Cahn, who has seven work within the present made between 1994 and 2019. 

Whereas bringing worldwide artwork to any nation’s artwork scene is little question essential, that the inspiration selected this present for Frieze Seoul is somewhat disappointing. The inspiration, established by SungYeon Yoo, has since 2001 given the SongEun ArtAward, which is analogous to Tate’s Turner Prize. From an open-call pool of some 500 functions, a winner is chosen, who receives a money prize of ₩20,000,000 ($15,000), the acquisition of their work for Songeun and SeMA’s everlasting collections, a one-year residency program by SeMA, and the chance to current a solo present at Songeun inside two years of profitable. The pre-winner exhibition or a profitable exhibition would have been a significantly better solution to present these on the town for Frieze what Korea’s younger artists are as much as. 

When you miss this present, there’ll at all times be one other alternative to see works from this esteemed blue-chip assortment elsewhere on this planet. However the basis’s constructing, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2021, is price testing, with a silver-foiled ceiling above the ramp that results in the parking storage and a wooden motif on the outside that hints at Yoo’s nom de plume, Songeun, or “hidden pine tree,” which acts as a metaphor for the inspiration’s mission to create a “sustainable assist system” for rising Korean artists, with the emphasis firmly on these artists, not the founder.

Elmgreen & Dragset at Amorepacific Museum of Artwork 

And eventually, the dangerous.

As of late, I’ve typically questioned who Elmgreen & Dragset’s work is for. I’ve concluded that it isn’t for me. Since their now-iconic Prada Marfa (2005) cropped up in West Texas and have become a viral sensation, the creative duo has leaned increasingly more into re-capturing that magic by creating works heavy on the spectacle. They’ve failed miserably at it. That’s maybe finest exemplified by the work that opens the present, a 2023 sculpture, Social Media (White Poodle), exhibiting the titular canine on a merry-go-round with a black-and-white spiral sample. Positive, it would make for an important Reel on Instagram, nevertheless it doesn’t say a lot about something. There’s no biting social commentary, which has made me rethink the endurance of Prada Marfa and whether or not it actually was a commentary on simply how far somebody may journey for a Prada retailer, or whether it is simply one other limp art work that aides within the gentrification of a border city. The limp artwork continues downstairs in “Areas,” which current 5 immersive installations with which the artists dot their works: a home, an empty pool, a restaurant, and so forth. (I have to admit the lady seated at a desk within the latter work did idiot me for a bit; there’s an uncanniness to that work no less than.) 

Per the introductory wall textual content, the artists “have regularly redefined exhibition-making and the methods wherein artwork might be skilled,” with this exhibition offering “the distinctive alternative to uncover surprising interpretations of on a regular basis realities.” One, yawn; two, it doesn’t. Do your self a favor and skip this facile present.