Up until now, Minjung art has been interpreted as the social propaganda that collided with Korean minimalism, both of which consisted of the two major pillars of the Korean art in the 1980s. These days, on the contrary, fresh diagnoses are just starting to surface with great urgency in recognizing the contribution of Minjung artists’ lives as the birthplace of the possibility and realization of the present.
The curatorship of this exhibition intends to put an end to the current status where, sadly enough, the incomparable artists, for example, Oh Yoon, Shin Hak Chul, and Ahn Chang Hong, have become fossilized as the myth of the past and, moreover, to reinterpret their works as the perpetual process ongoing in the arena of vivid life. At the kernel of the curatorial conception, which includes a lively roundtable discussion among young emerging critics and curators, lies the main purpose to represent such artists as the living proofs of the indefinable artistic life rather than as members and individual facts of the past Minjung movement.
The title of this exhibition is micro:scope, which means to release the act of seeing to the outside and, more importantly, suggests to concentrate on the outer object of seeing as redefined as the sense of beauty itself rather than the recognition of social circumstance or historical situation. As implied in the title, this exhibition is about drawing fresh discourse and different views from the already existing body of the artist’s work, not introducing newly executed pieces. The participating artworks will be selected around unfamiliar stories that contain more to inform about the artist Ahn Chang Hong and, in parallel, a seminar and publication project will be managed so as to shed new light onto the significance of his work.
Each figure in paintings featured in micro:scope shows off their coquetry. And they are sensuous. According to the artist, all things in the universe, even atoms and molecules, are circulating. It is because they are happy. The entire phenomena of the nature are put in circulation and maintained after all, thanks to the feeling of extreme happiness, i.e. ecstasy. If so, how it will be of human? Despite the exuberant rejoicing expected by our nature, human beings play the politics of jealousy, animosity, and conspiracy. It is the politics of domination and the borderless creativity of power what deprives human of even a modicum of happiness. It is the pain, which all human beings are born with and have to carry and suffer from for eternity. The exhibition micro:scope aims at exposing the spirit of the artist, who wishes to get his own art and life involved into and committed thoroughly to the sphere of the atonement where such innate torment and contradiction is about to heal up. Pain is no remedy for hatred. It foresees renewed hope under the auspice of love, no matter whether sensually deviant or sacredly sublime.
- Lee Jin-Myung (Curator, Alternative Space LOOP)
Courtesy of Alternative Space Loop
