As the 2014 SeMA Gold Exhibition, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) is presenting by three overseas Korean women artists Yong Soon Min, Jin-me Yoon, and Sook Jin Jo.
SeMa Gold is one of the three SeMA color exhibitions (blue, gold and green) which are held every other year to illuminate on each generation of Korean Art world. SeMA Gold particularly focuses on middle-aged artists of 50s and 60s to view the present situation and future of Korean Art. Through the exhibition, you will be able to see vivid artistic records of the overseas Korean artists whose works are considered another branch of Korean art. The work will show how the artists confronted the world and themselves, who, in the situation of Diasporas, could not belong anywhere but belong everywhere as nobody.
Yong Soon Min (1953~) who is based on Los Angeles, is working as an artist, activist, curator and an art-educator, and deals with the issue of identity that she herself, her parents’ generation and all of us face. Particularly, in this exhibition, she tries to illuminate on ‘nobody’ living with us in Korean society. In other words, she artistically shed light on Diaspora in Korea living under the name of foreign workers, married migrated women, North Korean defectors and refugees. Sook Jin Jo (1960~) is working in New York, and she has been noted for her work which uses and trims abandoned woods to express fundamental energy of life and ultimate cause of existence. To her, something abandoned, discarded and useless are represented as ‘nobody’, but this ‘nobody’ is rather a trace and key to the most important secrets of life. Jin-me Yoon (1960~) who is based on Vancouver, Canada, is an artist who has been inquiring into the problem of place and identity in a post-colonial aspect. Her works show how Mother Nature such as swamp, bush and grassland, and the shadow of civilization such as city, war and disaster are experienced through her body. Jin-me Yoon’s works imply artistic possibility of overcoming ‘nobody’, as an artist of ‘nobody’ herself.
Seoul is also becoming a foreign land with so many immigrants and people leaving their homes. Through this exhibition, try to follow the artistic paths of the three women artist Yong Soon Min, Jin-me Yoon, and Sook Jin Jo who sought to build their own artistic world for more than 20-30 years at the crossing point of different cultures in a foreign land. Furthermore, reflect on certain aspect of Korean society with the viewpoint of foreigners, minorities, women and strangers like they did. Notably, the exhibition will be more interesting if you can compare how the three artists differently expressed the issue of identity which they continuously confronted in a reinforced situation of outsider as non-western, women artists.
*image (left)
Make me, 1989
© Yong Soon Min
courtesy of the artist
