“Postmodernism and Aesthetics: Collide or Steer?” Exhibition
Gallery Korea
This event has ended.
AHL Foundation presents the 15th Anniversary Exhibition “Postmodernism and Aesthetics: Collide or Steer?”. This exhibition will feature recent artworks of 22 past awardees of AHL Foundation’s Contemporary Visual Art Awards.
The artists in this group exhibition spent their youth in the 1990s as immigrant artists or study abroad fine art students in the US. While postmodernism gained a momentum in post-1988 Seoul Olympic Games in South Korea during an economic boom in the 1990s, a milieu o fine arts departments at major universities as well as art markets in Seoul still maintained purity of high modernism of abstract painting.
Organized by curator and professor Kyunghee Pyun at Fashion Institute of Technology, this exhibition overviews the current statues of about 20 major artists from Korea living and working in the US. As transnational or immigrant artists, they adapted their artistic vocabulary to the demand of the New York art market, global art biennials, local art communities, or glossy art fairs around the world. The show divided artists and their works into the most popular binary themes of Postmodernism and High Modernism such as appropriation/originality; local/international; simulacra/real; personal/universal; and banal/avant-garde. Although applicable to subjective interpretations, each artist’s work can be seen in one of these categories, each with four or five artists.
In 1977 when most of these artists were young children, the New Museum of Contemporary Art was just founded in SoHo where Mary Boone also opened her eponymous gallery. The civil rights movements and student demonstrations in the 60s brought forth more chaotic society exposing all of its social ills. Facing the fiscal crisis in New York City, intellectuals and artists were more agitated by precarious urban environments and found solace in art communities in SoHo. As Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss increased followers and readers in the 1980s along with French writers of semiotics and psychoanalysis, art galleries in SoHo gradually invited conceptual and installation artists. Norman Bryson and Terry Eagleton were also among serious readings in Greenwich Village. It was in the late 1980s that Gagosian Gallery and the Kitchen—not-for-profit art center for performance and video art—started a venue in Chelsea, an emerging depot of warehouses-turned-galleries on the west side of New York City.
South Korea where the participating artists in this exhibition grew up in the 80s discovered literature of postmodernism in the 90s after the 1986 opening of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, the 1987 June Democracy Movement, and the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. It was in 1994 when Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish was published in the Korean translation and the Minjung Misool (People’s Art) Movement saw a large-scale exhibition celebrating its 15th year anniversary at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Most artists in this exhibition spent their 20s and 30s in the 1990s studying socialist literature and reading postmodernist art criticism in graduate seminars and in underground book clubs. Chaotic and disorderly society was felt more bewildered and confounded in glossy art magazines from New York and London. Unofficial reading activities and art scenes were too distant from studio classes on campus. That is why these artists also pursued prolonged study abroad experience or sometimes became diasporic artists in the United States.
Few artists in this exhibition major in painting or sculpture. Most artists specialize in performance, conceptual, installation, mixed-media art. Many are versatile media artists encompassing video installations and audience-participating interactive technology. The exhibition catalog will include five essays by Kyunghee Pyun, Mary A. Valverde, Dana Liljegren, Laura Hillegas, and Jinkyoung Choi along with the timeline of postmodernist literature and exhibitions in the US and in South Korea.
Participating Artists:
Buhm Hong, Heejung Cho, Joo Yeon Woo, Hong Seon Jang, Kate-hers RHEE, Seongmin Ahn, Kira Nam Greene, Sung Ho Choi, Jung S. Kim, John Seunghwan Lee, Yaloo (Jiyeon Lim), Zaun Lee, Sangwoo Koh, Ran Hwang, Tai Hwa Goh, Jaye Rhee, Jang Soon Im, Kakyoung Lee, Sangmi Yoo, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Eunsook Lee, Yeon Jin Kim.
Media
Schedule
from October 10, 2018 to December 14, 2018
Opening Reception on 2018-10-10 from 18:00 to 20:00