6 Exhibits to See in Seoul Throughout Frieze

Because the third version of Frieze Seoul heads into its remaining day at the moment, many worldwide guests are seemingly already on their manner house. Some might have already left to move to the Gwangju Biennale, which is now in its fifteenth iteration and is curated this yr by Nicolas Bourriaud. (A number of the festivities began on Thursday, inflicting  many to depart Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.) A number of would possibly proceed to the Busan Biennale, which can also be coinciding with Frieze this yr. 

However there’s nonetheless loads to see round Seoul, from Anicka Yi’s first survey in Asia to a serious group exhibition taking a look at how Asia-based girls artists have used their our bodies of their work and far more. 

Under, a have a look at six exhibitions ARTnews attended through the jam-packed truthful week.

Anicka Yi at Leeum Museum of Artwork

Essentially the most anticipated exhibition of the week was Anicka Yi’s solo present, which is collectively organized by the Leeum Museum of Artwork and the UCCA Heart for Modern Artwork, Beijing, the place it’ll journey subsequent March. Titled “There Exists One other Evolution, However This One,” the exhibition submerges guests into an all-black surroundings that’s typical of a lot of Yi’s previous exhibitions. The survey presents a glance again at over a decade of Yi’s manufacturing, which has beguiled viewers for simply as lengthy. Apart from introductory wall textual content, there isn’t a lot context supplied for the works on view, which might make it troublesome to parse, however that additionally enhances the present’s otherworldly enchantment. 

There’s an unmistakable magnificence to her tempura-fried flowers, that are mounted onto sheets of plexiglass and organized in such a manner that they seem as unfastened, floating abstractions when seen from a distance. Her mechanized, octopus-like sculptures, which right here grasp above shallow swimming pools of inky water, tantalize as they transfer and shudder. Her 22-minute, 3D movie The Genome Taste (2016), which memorably confirmed on the 2017 Whitney Biennial, nonetheless holds up. 

Regardless of the power of Yi’s work, I used to be left wanting a stronger curatorial voice that makes the case for why Yi has been such an essential artist over the previous a number of years, one which coalesces her one-off exhibits of various our bodies of labor into an overarching inventive imaginative and prescient. Don’t despair, although: the place curators Gina Lee and Peter Eleey fall quick, Yi greater than compensates together with her newest video work. Operating solely 16 minutes, Every Department of Coral Holds Up The Gentle of The Moon is a mesmerizing piece that’s half of a bigger AI challenge titled Vacancy, for which an algorithm has been “educated on years of paintings produced by Anicka Yi Studio,” in accordance with the wall textual content. The part I caught featured floating objects—flowers, tentacles, micro organism cells—in lush colours. It directly feels acquainted to Yi’s work and excitingly new.

I can’t wait to see the place this challenge leads. 

“Connecting Our bodies: Asian Girls Artists” at Nationwide Museum of Fashionable and Modern Artwork (MMCA)

One of the best present I noticed this week was, by far, “Connecting Our bodies: Asian Girls Artists.” There’s a lot on view throughout the exhibition’s six sections—with titles like “Versatile Territories of Sexuality” and “Our bodies•Objects•Language”—and greater than 130 artists from 11 international locations throughout Asia. A number of of the artists are established artwork stars, like Yoko Ono (represented by Minimize Piece), however many are seemingly solely well-known of their house international locations. Strolling by the cacophony of numerous views on how the physique might be “a spot the place varied ideologies and conditions intersect,” in accordance with the introductory wall textual content, I used to be reminded of my expertise seeing “Radical Girls: Latin American Artwork, 1960–1985,” which opened on the Hammer Museum in 2017. That exhibition helped rewrite the canon internationally and gave larger acclaim to the artists featured in it; “Connecting Our bodies” has that very same chance. It desperately must journey. 

Among the many first video works within the exhibition is Mako Idemitsu’s tour of Womanhouse, the ur-work of feminist collaboration from 1972 that itself touched upon the various themes explored in “Connecting Our bodies.” I used to be mystified by the haunting pictures of Korean artist Park Youngsook, whose work I had encountered earlier within the day on the sales space of Arario Gallery. A 1992 portray titled The Fall of America by Ryu Jun Hwa is an assemblage of varied sapphic-looking scenes that appear horny, steamy, and maybe even harmful. The work appears to indicate that it’s lesbianism (or queerness extra usually) that has aided within the US’s destruction; what’s highly effective about it’s that quite a lot of the figures seem like Asian girls. In a room specializing in goddesses and cosmologies, the textile-based works of Lee Bul, Pacita Abad, and Mrinalini Mukherjee share house. A subsequent room has a 1987 {photograph} by Joo Myong-Duck from her “Artist Collection” of Bul, sporting a sequin leotard and holding a crude child sculpture the wrong way up as she stares on the viewer, one arm on her hip. Elsewhere are three Synthetic Placenta (1961/2003) works by Tabe Mitsuko that look extra sterile than cozy.

There’s a lot to soak up right here, I want I had had extra time to delve deeper. 

Korean Heritage Artwork Exhibition at Changdeokgung Palace

One of many week’s extra off-the-beaten-path exhibitions is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it present. The exhibition is positioned on the Changdeokgung Palace—a royal residence for 270 years and in use as such till 1989. The present doesn’t have an official title and solely lasts for six days. In a single set of buildings, a number of works of craft are displayed within the alcoves that had been as soon as used as sleeping quarters. The main target right here is on the generational lineage of craft, with a number of mother and father and youngsters exhibiting work collectively, in addition to extra modern works that takes remixes that legacy. Among the many highlights are a pair of hanji-paper-and-bamboo parasols by the final household who makes this model of umbrella; 4 lacquerware objects every made by father, mom, son, and daughter; a big cupboard bedazzled in an ungodly quantity of mom of pearl; and an embroidered display by Bang Chae-ok, who additionally occurs to be the curator’s mom.

“SeMA Omnibus: On the Finish of the World Break up Endlessly” at Seoul Museum of Artwork

The Seoul Museum of Artwork (or SeMA for brief) at the moment has a group present on view cut up throughout its 4 venues, which “undertake[s] the omnibus type of storytelling that weaves impartial quick tales round a single theme,” in accordance with exhibition textual content.

“On the Finish of the World Break up Endlessly,” the part on the Seosomun Principal Department, seems on the assortment by the lens of the assorted mediums that artists make use of, in what the museum calls a “post-medium/post-media period.” The exhibition, which takes inspiration and a part of its construction from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom on the Finish of the World and Jorge Luis Borges’s The Backyard of Forking Paths, is a bit uneven in the way in which most assortment exhibits are typically. Han Un-Sung, for instance, has on view horrible drawings of fruit which are a part of his plan “to supply 1,500 items in 30 years.” In a quote printed subsequent to those works, he admits “that even when an artist produce works all through their entire lives, solely about 10 p.c of the whole are thought of comparatively respectable.” He would possibly need to spend extra time on finishing the ultimate 300 he has left to go. 

However there are distinctive works on view too. A video work from 1977 by Lee Kang-So, who just lately joined the roster of Thaddaeus Ropac, is a knockout. Relying upon whenever you occur upon the almost 30-minute video, the display could also be all white or largely black (barely flickering as if the unique movie is glitching). However in case you wait lengthy sufficient, you’ll see it transition to the artist standing in entrance of the digicam and starting to color in both course. 

Bridging the timeline is one in all SeMA’s most up-to-date acquisitions: Nonfacial Portrait (2018–20) by Seoul-based collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun. For the work, which entered the gathering final yr, the artists have embraced expertise to create a sequence of portraits with sinister undertones. On a desk subsequent to at least one such semi-abstracted work is a set of “Portray Tips,” the primary of which reads: “Paint a portrait of the topic, however its face should not be detected by AI.” In an period the place facial recognition software program can be utilized by governments for no matter functions go well with their political ends, the piece is a robust condemnation of artists who’re fast to embrace AI with out stopping to query what all of it means. 

“Portrait of a Assortment: Chosen Works from the Pinault Assortment” at Songeun Artwork and Cultural Basis

To proceed the thread of bland choices, there’s a middling exhibiting of the Pinault Assortment on the Songeun Artwork and Cultural Basis, that includes greater than 60 artists, a lot of whom are exhibiting in Korea for the primary time. If you happen to’ve seen any Pinault Assortment present in Europe, nothing right here will shock you, although there’s an distinctive mini-survey of Miriam Cahn, who has seven work within the present made between 1994 and 2019. 

Whereas bringing worldwide artwork to any nation’s artwork scene is little question essential, that the muse selected this present for Frieze Seoul is fairly disappointing. The muse, established by SungYeon Yoo, has since 2001 given the SongEun ArtAward, which has similarities to Tate’s Turner Prize. From an open-call pool of some 500 purposes, a winner is chosen, who receives a money prize of ₩20,000,000 ($15,000), the acquisition of their work for Songeun and SeMA’s everlasting collections, a one-year residency program by SeMA, and the chance to current a solo present at Songeun inside two years of successful. The pre-winner exhibition or a successful exhibition would have been a significantly better strategy to present these on the town for Frieze what Korea’s younger artists are as much as. 

If you happen to miss this present, there’ll all the time be one other alternative to see works from this esteemed blue-chip assortment elsewhere on this planet. However the basis’s constructing, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2021, is price testing, with a silver-foiled ceiling above the ramp that results in the parking storage and a wooden motif on the outside that hints at Yoo’s nom de plume, Songeun, or “hidden pine tree,” which acts as a metaphor for the muse’s mission to create a “sustainable assist system” for rising Korean artists, with the emphasis firmly on these artists, not the founder.

Elmgreen & Dragset at Amorepacific Museum of Artwork 

And eventually, the unhealthy.

As of late, I’ve usually puzzled who Elmgreen & Dragset’s work is for. I’ve concluded that it’s not for me. Since their now-iconic Prada Marfa (2005) cropped up in West Texas and have become a viral sensation, the inventive duo has leaned increasingly into re-capturing that magic by creating works heavy on the spectacle. They’ve failed miserably at it. That’s maybe greatest exemplified by the work that opens the present, a 2023 sculpture, Social Media (White Poodle), exhibiting the titular canine on a merry-go-round with a black-and-white spiral sample. Positive, it’d make for a fantastic Reel on Instagram, however it doesn’t say a lot about something. There’s no biting social commentary, which has made me rethink the endurance of Prada Marfa and whether or not it actually was a commentary on simply how far somebody would possibly journey for a Prada retailer, or whether it is simply one other limp paintings that aides within the gentrification of a border city. The limp artwork continues downstairs in “Areas,” which current 5 immersive installations with which the artists dot their works: a home, an empty pool, a restaurant, and many others. (I need to admit the girl seated at a desk within the latter work did idiot me for a bit; there’s an uncanniness to that work no less than.) 

Per the introductory wall textual content, the artists “have frequently redefined exhibition-making and the methods through which artwork might be skilled,” with this exhibition offering “the distinctive alternative to uncover surprising interpretations of on a regular basis realities.” One, yawn; two, it doesn’t. Do your self a favor and skip this facile present.