The Samsung Museum of Art presented the first ART SPECTRUM at the Ho-Am Art Gallery in 2001, followed by two more editions in 2003 and 2006. Those exhibitions featured Korean artists who were selected for their potentials for future growth regardless of their age and of the genre and subject of their work. Our effort to not concentrate on a particular area or topic resulted in a diverse range of artists—though each edition included only a small group of around ten artists—and thus effectively demonstrated, just like the exhibition title itself, the multifacetedness of contemporary art-making in Korea.

This fourth edition is built on important lessons learned from the past endeavors. Although the eight artists in the exhibition, working across diverse mediums including photography, installation, and moving image, deal with different subject matters that range from personal identity to historical event, we hoped that their individual interests would collectively constitute a view on the current state of contemporary Korean art. All relatively young, the artists—Kim Ayoung, Kim Ji Eun, Bae Chan-Hyo, Oak Jungho, Jang Boyun, Jun Sojung, Choi Kichang, and Han Kyung Woo—are in the process of finding their own voices and are trying out multiple approaches rather than pursuing a single technique or topic. In the hope that this exhibition organized by Leeum would serve as a significant springboard for them, we asked each of the artists to produce a new work based on their experiences to date.

We trust that the numerous discussions we had with the artists in the run-up to the exhibition helped them in furthering their practices. And it is our heartfelt wish that ART SPECTRUM serves as an opportunity for them to reflect on their work and to imagine their future directions, and will later be remembered as a meaningful experience. We also expect the series, which will continue biennially, will grow as an institution, which not only preserves the past but also will contribute to cementing Leeum’s role as a leader in future art-making in Korea.

KIM AYOUNG
PH Express, 2011, Two-channel video, stereo sound, 31`00``
Those artists who studied outside Korea get to see their homeland with a new perspective from the position of an “Other” and also to look back on themselves. Kim Ayoung’s new work takes as its subject a crucial historical event from the time when Korea was opened by encroaching foreign powers. Kim’s moving-image work is a historical recreation based on available diplomatic sources and reports in popular media from the time. Specifically, she hired British actors to star in a reenactment of the Geomundo Island Incident (also known as the Port Hamilton Incident)—the British Royal Navy’s illegal occupation of the Korean island in 1885. Even though it was a significant event in modern Korean history, foreigners are the protagonists of the incident in the resulting narrative because it is constructed on the basis of historical documents written from a Western-centric perspective. Kim’s new work invites viewers to experience the past in a fresh new way through the images and sources she gathered on this historical incident that took place almost 130 years ago, and also through a large-scale architectural space.

KIM JI EUN
Some Watchtower, 2012, Woodgrain contact paper, 1190x527cm
Human lives are formed in buildings and structures that surround us. In particular, the urban environment provides us with facilities of comfort while operating as a determining factor in our lives. Korean cities, which continuously change despite their old histories, give Kim Ji Eun an insight into manmade environments and into those that lie beyond them such as institutions and desires. The incompleteness and disorder of a construction site may be temporary conditions. At the same time, they constitute our quotidian reality marked by endless redevelopments and reconstructions. These structures also reflect a social structure, where secret surveillance and control through invisible regulations, and resistances and battles against them repeat endlessly.

BAE CHAN-HYO
Existing in Costume Anne Boleyn, 2012, C-print, 230×180cm
Bae Chan-Hyo’s staged photography, which he directs and shoots, incorporates the artist’s own experiences of cultural differences as an Asian living and studying in the United Kingdom. In his works, the artist cast himself as female sitters derived from portraits from Western art history or characters in Western children’s stories. The awkward disharmony between the personae he plays and his male physique makes us reconsider Western visual cultures, which we have accepted as a natural course. Situating itself against the backdrop of the English absolute monarchy of the past, Bae’s new work Punishment(2012) interprets the lives and deaths of court women especially through stories of the sufferings and punishments they endured in a patriarchal, classed society. Nevertheless, at the center of these image stands the artist who is male and an “Other” in Western society, which draws out a critical reversal.

OAK JUNGHO
Standing Bow Pulling Pose-Dandayamana Dhanurasana, 2011, Archival pigment print,
Oak Jungho, whose previous works showed candid fragments of contemporary Korean society, has recently been making an unconventional self-disciplinary work involving yoga performances. The exotic yoga poses the artist puts himself in are ultimately intended for attaining spiritual enlightenment, but at the same time, they create comical unfamiliarity. The artist, dressed in a suit, is seen to be at great pains trying yoga poses, and this image, in collision with the unexpected background of a mudflat, produces a hilarious effect. On the other hand, this gesture is very much in line with the artistic goal of training one’s inner spirituality while embracing the world. The sun salutation pose, which he assumes in quotidian urban backdrops such as a fishing place or in the neighborhood around Hong-ik University, is originally a trace of ancient nature worship as well as a basic pose in yoga. But before the viewer understands the deeper meanings behind it, his performance first provokes a laugh.

JANG BOYUN
A Capital City of a Thousand Years, 2012, Digital print
Jang Boyun explores our shared memories through photographs abandoned by others. The photographs collected by the artist are documents of our time containing cherished memories of the past that used to belong to anonymous people. Gyeongju, an important city in Korea’s ancient history, used to be an even more personally meaningful place for many who visited there on their school trips and honeymoons—two important rites of passage—before overseas travels were deregulated. Although young students and married couples captured the famous tourist sites of Gyeongju in their photographs in order to preserve them in their memories, the photographs holding those precious moments ended up being thrown away. By recuperating personal traces left by others, the artist shows us the dim and disappearing shared memories whose realities are no longer graspable.

JUN SOJUNG
A Day of a Tailor, 2012, HD Single-channel video, stereo sound, color, HD, 8`55`
Stories of particular individuals who cross the border between art and life attract and hold our attention. By introducing people who work in specialized professions almost completely unknown to us, Jun Sojung tells the stories of artisans whose auras have reached the state of art. The artist has been making videos that narrate stories of such everyday masters as a tight-rope walker, an embroiderer, and a movie sign painter. While portraying the lives of these people who continue to hone their skills, which are slowly being forgotten, Jun’s work also seeks in these stories points of connection with the attitude of an artist searching for an unreachable ideal.

CHOI KICHANG
Eye Contact, 2012, Two-channel video installation, random loop In his work,
Choi Kichang represents incidents that are linked via invisible connections. From the gazes of people locked in a staring contest with randomly selected foes to a combination of words taken from a newspaper horoscope, Choi’s works highlight a world composed of irrational coincidences. By calling attention to this incomprehensible world, the artist heightens an awareness of our existence determined by chance. Things such as stars and their orbits in the galaxy, and the number of days required by the earth’s rotation around the sun, and a sequence of texts linked to one another all follow their own cosmic orders, but we can never completely understand the meanings behind. This is a result of human reflection, which can never fully understand the meaning of existence until our lives expire.

HAN KYOUNG WOO
Ten 46 Inch Monitor Size Soccer Field, 2012, Video loop, monitor,
Han Kyung Woo’s work first seduces viewers and then changes their consciousness. A painting hanging on a wall and a table placed in an exhibition space are not just objects for viewing but create a new set of images through the eyes of cameras capturing the viewers as they approach them. The image of a viewer standing in front of the black-and-white canvas that appears to be an abstract painting materializes on the screen of television noise. And the warped table appears corrected into a normal table on the screen of a TV whose screen image is distorted by a magnet attached to it. Only through such experience that shakes up our preconceived notions do we realize how unstable the foundation on which the reality before our eyes stands.