An Era of Peace, A Peaceful Land - The 4th Episode

March 18, 2019 New York, NY — Korea Art Forum is pleased to announce the season premier of its 2019 exhibition series with AN ERA OF PEACE, A PEACEFUL LAND. THE 4TH EPISODE. Part I & II. The exhibition explores ideas implicated in the founding notion of Korea Art Forum that peace is not an absence of hot war, but a living process of interacting with others and understanding their values and perspectives. 

Part I features magazines, books and posters from North Korea in tandem with work by contemporary artists from New York, South Korea and China:

• Bethany FANCHER, Alicia GRULLON, LEE Kakyoung, Nikki SCHIRO from New York

• JEON Jongcheol, U Juju, and YUE Kyoeng Sub from South Korea

• QI Yutian, and artist pair WU Gaozhong and ZHANG Qi from China

Back in November 2018, Grullon, Jeon, Qi, U, Wu and Zhang, and Yue were invited to create works based on their observations of the West Sea Five Islands near the Northern Limited Line (NLL), the maritime border between South and North Korea. The artists produced work during their visit to the heavily (de)militarized area where everyday rituals conflate with arms and tensions. Grullon and Jeon produced booklets. U created an installation of found objects at various beachfronts. Qi made a sculpture. Wu and Zhang generated performances. Yue actively engaged with his audiences by asking them to write a peace message and releasing the message by using balloons. The exhibition features these new artworks and performance documentation. 

In parallel to the new bodies of work specifically created via commission in order to explore the Korean Division in cultural terms, the exhibition includes footage of Korea, which was never shown before and taken during the Korean war (1950-1953), materials which artist Bethany Fancher discovered from the inheritances left to her by her father. Additionally, Lee Kakyoung contributes a set of prints while Nikki Schiro presents a new painting, both further commentaries on the Korean division. 

Via a wide spectrum of visual arts media, the exhibition offers visitors an active viewing experience prompting questions on inclusive frameworks for contemporary art as a community that integrates traditional, modern, socialist, and capitalist aesthetics. The exhibition hopes to communicate the aforementioned meaning of peace by action and vice versa, to discover new ways of understanding the Korean conflict, and to provoke audiences to rethink notions of contemporary art. Serving to expand public access to artworks previously not shown in New York, such dialogues hope to provide art-professional and general audiences with diverse entry points to new perceptions of contemporary art. Here, radically different artworks coexist, creating intercultural connections, which transcend ideological, geographical to temporal boundaries. 

Part II features photography, text-based art, and Asian ink paintings. 

• Alejandro Salgado Cendales from Montreal, Canada

• Young Sun Han, Seol Park, and the Estate of Dennis Oppenheim from New York, NY

• You Hong Kim and Tae Soo Shin from Seoul, South Korea

• Yong Seob Kwon from L.A., CA

Alejandro Salgado Cendales contributes a text-based painting using a quote from TOWARD A THIRD CINEMA by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Cinéaste [Vol. 4, No. 3, Latin American militant cinema (winter 1970-71), pp. 1-10]. The quote highlights the unity of art and life for the liberation effect of disrupting the post-colonial processes that happen everywhere around the globe in the form of economic and cultural domination and subordination. 

Young Sun Han presents a part of his large photographic documentaries of locations visited in Korea, reconstructing poignant narratives of victims and loss caused by the Korean War (1950-53) or the 4.3 Jeju Massacre (April 1948 to May 1949). The series is a reminder of the Korean War or “forgotten war” in the United States, while returning to the Jeju Massacre, a historically misrepresented genocide of Jeju islanders, committed by the South Korean police and armed forces under the control of the United States Military Government. 

You Hong Kim shares a portion of his ambitious production of 10,000 paintings entitled Faces of Mind. Here, shapes and forms emerge by association in the artist’s response to intended chance operations, such as dripping, spreading and flowing colors. The outcomes are quirky humorous figures that hide a sense of despair, pain or sadness, reminding of a passage from Tears of a Clown sung by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: “But don’t let my glad expression give you the wrong impression. Really I’m sad, oh I’m sadder than sad.”

Yong Seob Kwon, a specialist for quick drawing in ink, presents four landscape ink paintings from a rare series of work produced on location in outdoor public spaces while the artist was travelling throughout parts of North Korea. Following the Korean tradition of literati ink painting, he often includes short texts in calligraphy within his ink paintings and they enhance viewer’s understanding of the paintings. 

The Estate of Dennis Oppenheim generously contributes the Oppenheim’s seminal photograph Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) which is a piece documenting the artist’s body. Challenging the act of painting, in particular to aspects of color, Oppenheim utilized his body as canvas and skin as pigment controlled by time and solar energy. The outcome was the “reversal” of the typical relationship between an artist’s felt energy and the intense color instigated by the former. In his performance, the artist felt the sensory intensity caused by “the act of becoming red.” 

Seol Park’s photo-synthetic painting fuses the image of an iconic Korean ink painting, After Rain at Mt. Inwang by Jeong Sun in 1751, with today’s urgent relevant issues of refugees from Central America and Syria, connecting dots between seemingly unrelated events, which occupy completely different places in time and space, to create new narratives of contemporary significance.

During his 2014 artist residency on the island of Baekryeong, a maritime demarcation between North and South Korea in the West Sea of Korea, Taesoo Shin produced a scroll depicting the scenic landscape of the renowned ridge, Jansang Got, in a red hue. Located in the North Korean territory, the ridge offers many South Koreans, particularly those originally from the North who were displaced in the South, an ironic sense of both comfort and intense discomfort—being so close, yet so far away. 

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One of many functions that this exhibition serves is the operation of inserting art into the life of society: here is an inquiry into the possibility of a third realm in which art is not a member of a class, nor a fashion or a style, but an active force that makes intercultural or intercommunal connections among people possible. As a result, this exhibition is bound to be in transition from one point to another in time and space, evolving through exchanges and encounters with the artists and the public. Connecting the polarities between text and image; tradition and modernity; as well as solidity and fragments, the exhibition presents conditions of global contemporary art that transcends ideological, geographical and cultural boundaries.