Collection Highlights: Synchronic Moments
15 February 2018 – 16 September 2018
MMCA Gwacheon (Circular Gallery 1)
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Director: Bartomeu Marí) presents Collection Highlights: Synchronic Moments in Circular Gallery 1 at its Gwacheon branch from Thursday, February 15 to Sunday, September 16.
MMCA’s first exhibition of 2018, Collection Highlights: Synchronic Moments features items from the museum’s collection that show the current state of new media art in Korea. The word “synchronic” in the exhibition title, meaning “sharing the same time frame,” indicates a conceptual approach that seeks to reveal moments in which the different elements of new media art—moving and still images, sounds, and time—form an accord with the viewer as they become overlapped and juxtaposed within works of art. This exhibition raises questions about the meaning of the various images contained within the work of the six participating artists, and what the viewer should be observing within these moments of overlapping.
Kim Heecheon focuses his attention on the gaps between reality and the online world. His work chiefly involves producing videos in which these two worlds are intermingled through the use of 3D, virtual reality, and smartphone applications. Sleigh Ride Chill (2016) is an autobiographical work in which three different stories set in Seoul are edited together. Producing an illusory effect reminiscent of a car race video game, it encourages us to reconsider the boundary between online and real worlds, the real and the unreal, and the social media self.
Nam Hwayeon uses video, photography, performance, and other media to show new approaches to physical movement, time, history, and science. Her 2015 work The Botany of Desire focuses on the “tulip mania” of the seventeenth century, representing the irrational desire for beauty through a mixture of different images of tulips, drawings and choreography on the motif of a bee flying in search of honey, and the voice of an announcer narrating a stock market crash. This work was invited for the main exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Park Chankyong’s work Citizen’s Forest (2016) is a philosophical exploration of national division, a Cold War society, and political issues as well as issues of history and representation. Applying the traditional scroll landscape painting approach to three-channel video, it captures a lament for the nameless individuals sacrificed in the course of Korea’s tragic and chaotic modern and contemporary history. This work was previously shown at the 2017 Art Basel event and the 2016 Taipei Biennial.
An Jungju adopts a clever approach of twisting together sounds and moving images found within social systems to produce work with multiple layers of meaning. For his 2013 work Ten Single Shots, he took ten sounds of a gunshot from the climax of Korean War movies and played it for six dancers, asking them to perform dances to represent moments of death in wartime. Having no experience of the war, the dancers use their own interpretations and imaginations, each performing a different “dance of death” to the shots. It is a work that shows how individuals living in the contemporary era perceive the truth of past wars.
Interested as an artist in the structure of music, Oh Min creates works in which music, objects, and performances generate a subdued rhythm within a series of defined rules. For her 2016 work ABA Video, she adopts the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata no. 2, reinterpreting its structure and transforming the result into video. The subtle regularities and tensions within the video offer a new angle in viewing the rigid forms of music.
The video work of Jun Sojung subtly reveals the different meanings of art that unfold within the lives of individuals in society. Her 2012 work The Habit of Art uses seven videos of everyday life and five photographs representing symbolic images within those videos to show how artists wrestle with their actions and attitude while creating art.
MMCA Director Bartomeu Marí said the works featured in this exhibition “are the most recent additions to our more than 190–item new media collection, five of which are being shown for the first time since their addition.”
“We look forward to this being an occasion for sharing the special harmonies produced by each individual work of art and our own individual moments,” he added.
More details are available on the MMCA website (http://www.mmca.go.kr).
