The exhibition to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Seoul Olympics, 'Asia code ZERO', is organized with the diverse works from Asia, featuring the concept of 'Zero'. The significance of this exhibition is not in discussion about the identity of Asia according to geographical issues but in the inherent spirit and its visual power. Unlike the Western post-modernism which is still a pile of unsorted documentation, Eastern thought and philosophy have the relaxed but prudent power penetrating the chaos. 空 is not the matter of being or not-being, but it is something to be seen with the mind. 空, originated from Sanskrit 'sunya', means the void or emptiness referring to the absence of any dirt and wrong. The reason why the works in this exhibition repeat the question, "Who am I?", is because the artist exists between the Ego in the phenomenal world and the other Ego in the absolute world. This exhibition starts from the belief that the strength of art from Asia lies at the point towards the absolute world where the Avatar from the phenomenal world can encounter the true Ego and reach to God in cosmos.

Artists: Boo Moon Kwon, Tae Ho Kim, Sang Kyun Noh, Keun Byung Yuk, Seung Hee Hong(Korea),
Yanagi Yukinori, Miyajima Tatsuo, Watanabe Go (Japan), Fang Lijun, Gao Lei (China),
Subodh Gupta (India), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (Vietnam), Suzann Victor (Singapore)

*image (left)
Article 9, 1994
neon, plastic box, print on transparency sheet, acrylic frame, etc., dimension variable
© Yanagi Yukinori

Courtesy of SOMA Museum of Art