[VESTFOSSEN] PLEASE RETURN TO BUSAN PORT: Vestfossen Museum

Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium is proud to present Please Return to Busan Port, a

large-scale group exhibition of twenty-two South Korean contemporary artists.

베스트포센 미술관은 “Please Return to Busan Port” (돌아와요 부산항에) 라는

제목으로 한국의 젊은 현대미술가 21명의 대규모 그룹전시를 선보일 수 있음에

큰 자부심을 가지고 있다.

This ambitious project has been curated by Sunhee Choi (KR) and Jari Lager (DE),

joint directors of the Cologne-based CHOI&LAGER Galerie. Having worked together

for over a decade, the duo have contributed significantly to the expanded presence

of Korean artists in the western artworld of today.

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After collaboratively promoting Korean art in various projects across the UK,

Germany, France, China and beyond throughout the mid-2000’s, Choi and Lager

established their Cologne gallery in 2012 to provide a secure and lasting platform for

an ever-growing stable of established and emerging talents.

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The members of that stable presented here are, in large part, the sons and

daughters of Korea’s postwar generation; witnesses to the turbulent decades which

saw their nation (already traumatically divided) subjected to multiple rounds of

political regime musical-chairs, navigating a rapid ascent from ‘developing country’ to

‘economic powerhouse’ status and finding its footing on the international stage.

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There is no doubt that their coming of age within this unique sociocultural setting

flavours has profoundly influenced both these artists’ practice and the reading of their

work abroad.

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This is not to say that Korean art is insular; Byungchan Lee’s transmutations of

consumer detritus and Hyungkoo Lee’s lampooning of the supposed disparity

between art and science, in particular, clearly speak of global concerns.

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Rather, it is to say that the artists presented here productively draw upon Korean

cultural specificities to offer ways of thinking through universal human

preoccupations; the relationships between past and present, memory and narrative,

individual and collective, perception and reality.

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Given the scale of the exhibition and the subsequent breadth of ideas and forms

contained therein, the curators have arranged the artworks into four loose categories;

Identity, Trace, Metamorphosis and Urban Portraits.

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The theme of Identity is crucial to the works of Yu Jinyoung, Xooang Choi, Heinkuhn

Oh and Ji Yeo. Jinyoung’s sculptures explore relations of presence, absence,

individual and familial. An introvert by nature, Jinyoung’s discomfort with the

insincerities, expectations and conventions of sociability is manifested in life-size

female forms wherein any sense of solid, tangible presence is negated through her

use of transparent PVC as the main casting material.

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The desire for a self-protective inconspicuousness that this entails is mirrored in the

faces and accessories the artist endows her insubstantial characters with;

expressions consistently poised between ambivalence and strained composure,

smiling masks, dolls and floral-patterned clothes jarring in their manufactured

joviality.

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The theme of repressed individualism that emerges here is also present in the

exquisitely-rendered sculptures of Xoaang Choi, in which selective blurring is used to

throw specific quirks of his muted, conservatively-dressed subjects into relief.

Photographic works of Heinkun Oh and Ji Yeo expand on the theme, exploring

feminine internalization of roles and standards and foregrounding the enduring

importance of confimity within Korean society.

Metamorphosis is a common thread between the works of Leenam Lee, Meekyoung

Shin and Jukhee Kwon in particular. Given the wholesale societal shifts in Korea’s

fairly-recent history, the ongoing disputes over looted Korean artifacts still housed in

museums in Japanese/American musuems and the country’s deep engagement with

netwrok and new-media technologies, it is perhaps no surprise that all three deal in

the contemporary transformation of deeply traditional cultural forms. Lee’s digitaldisplay

based works -quite literally- reanimate historic Asian ink-wash and western

old-master paintings, overlaying and interweaving moving elements and sound. Shin

cleverly questions the status of valuable artifacts once they are removed from their

context by crafting convincing facsimiles of 16-20th century Chinese vases out of

humble soap. Books form the raw material of Kwon’s practice; meticulously cut into

thousands of strips and re-combined in the form of monumental cascades, her work

speaks of equally of destruction and re-creation.

As is the case with several other nations which have endured volatile periods and

tramatic breaks before going on to flourish, some of the most compelling Korean art

explores the legacies, narratives and symbols of the past, in the form of the Trace.

Seahyun Lee’s scarlet and white compositions hover between landscape and

abstraction thanks to their clever interweaving of tonal wash and resolved detail,

negative space and beldning of isometric and linear perspective. On closer

inspection, however, these details reveal themselves to unsettlingly incongruous.

Modern streetlights illuminate a ramshackle traditional hut. A treacherous mountain

pass hosts a complex factory. A warship cruises by a turtle-boat, while mushroom

clouds and sea mines emerge from the fissures between pictorial planes. At this

point, the work reveals itself to be a coherent totality made up of intense

fragmentation, these two apparent opposites held in exquisite balance. When one

learns that these fragments represent disappeared landscapes painted from the

artist’s memory and the conjunction of North and South Korean mountainscapes that

he monitored through binoculars as part of his mandatory military service, the work’s

dual emotional import comes to the fore. Between Red is a work of loss,

narrativization and reconstitution at the level of both personal experience and

national psyche.

A similar impulse towards revisiting and reworking narrative characterises the work of

Ayoung Kim. Her three-channel video piece Please Return to Busan Port forms a

psuedo-music video set in the late 1980’s, pairing a well-known sentimental pop

song with both archival footage of the Korean Olympic games and an actor

portraying the everyday comings-and-goings of a drug smuggler. The interposition of

this deviant element between signifiers of nationalist sentiment and global relevance

opens up a rift in the received narrative of Korea’s upward trajectory, questioning the

meaning of a nation’s accumulated wealth thorugh an underclass excluded from the

equation.

The pop song that provided Kim with the title for her work is also an apt one for this

exhibition; it serves as an allegory for today’s diaspora of Korean artists living,

studying and working abroad, some of whom will bring their global experience back

home to further develop Korea’s already thriving cultural landscape. In the meantime,

Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium is immensely proud to have them with us here in

Norway.