"Mind Topology—The Phases of 2009 Korea", opening this year at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and curated by Byun Gil-Hyun of the Gwangju Museum of Art in Korea, is the second in a series of jointly sponsored exhibitions by the two museums. After they became sister museums in December of 2007, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts curated the exhibition, Sensory Topology - Bodily Perception of Taiwanese Contemporary Art, which traveled to Gwangju, Korea in 2008.

The aim of the current exhibition is to express the contrasting spirit of artwork and the body based on syntactical parallelism found in traditional Chinese literature, and present the spiritual world of Korea in 2009 through art. The exhibition includes installation, painting, video and animation by the artists Ha Bong-Ho, Hur Jin, Kang Un, Kim Sang-Yeon, Lee Lee-Nam, Lee Hye-Rim, Lill Lill, Park Su-Man and Son Bong-Chae. The curator wishes to present the spiritual world of Korea with the work chosen for the exhibition so that the people of Taiwan may appreciate similarities among the two cultures. For example, the photographic series Red Signal, by the artist Ha Bong-Ho, presents pictures taken of pedestrians mindlessly waiting for a light to turn green at intersections in various cities, and symbolizes alienation and enslavement in modern society. Kim Sang-Yeon's artwork Being, which uses ordinary objects from everyday life to guide the audience in reconsidering their existence, presents a sofa in two dimensional space to raise questions about the function of sofas and how they are produced, and ultimately leads audience members to add their thoughts and examine their own lives.

In addition to the exhibition, which will run from October 17, 2009 to January 1, 2010, the museum has also planned related seminars. For further information, please visit the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts website at http://art.ntmofa.gov.tw.