Abu Dhabi presents thought-provoking showcase of contemporary South Korean art

The mid-20th century was a time of seismic change in Korea. After its liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the peninsula was divided into North and South, setting the stage for the Korean War, a devastating conflict that took place between 1950 and 1953, ending not in peace, but ceasefire.

South Korea came out in shambles, soon entering a period of military dictatorship, industrialisation and strict censorship. It was in this politically charged, socially repressive environment that a generation of avant-garde artists emerged. Their work rejected traditional aesthetics and state-sanctioned art, embracing experimentation, performance and provocation.

The exhibition at Manarat Al Saadiyat, titled Layered Medium: We are in Open Circuits, kicks off from this period, showcasing the beginnings of the avant-garde contemporary art movement in South Korea and charts its development to the present.

It is the first major showcase of Korean contemporary art in the Gulf region and comes as the inaugural project of a three-year collaboration between the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (Admaf) and the Seoul Museum of Art (Sema). It has been co-curated by Maya El Khalil and Kyung-hwan Yeo.

“We thought about how we could genuinely work together, rather than simply transfer,” El Khalil says. “This is not an exhibition that is travelling. That's not the idea at all. It was inspired by an exhibition that Kyung-hwan curated at Sema, but we worked together to completely reconfigure the exhibition [for the local context].”

Layered Medium brings together works by more than two dozen South Korean artists, from pioneers including Nam June Paik and Park Hyunki to renowned contemporary figures such as Lee Bul, Haegue Yang and Moka Lee.

While the exhibition doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive survey of contemporary South Korean art, it still presents a healthy breadth of works that show the diversity of practices that have shaped the country’s avant-garde scene. “We wanted to capture the flow and the main core of Korean contemporary art for the audience in Abu Dhabi,” Kyung-hwan says.

Aware that Layered Medium is, for many in the UAE capital, a first encounter with the country's contemporary art scene, the curators set the stage with a historical overview spanning from the mid-20th century to today. This introduction underscores a central premise: contemporary South Korean art has developed in tandem with both political transformation and technological innovation.

Paik’s Self-Portrait Dharma Wheel opens Layered Medium and stands out as a major work from the artist’s later career. It features five CRT screens arranged on wheels within a sculptural installation. The dizzying set of images that touch upon Buddhist motifs reflects on themes of spirituality and transformation. The 1998 work was created after Paik suffered a stroke, and has an added undertone.

It was important to begin with Paik’s work, Kyung-hwan says, because of the artist’s towering legacy on the avant-garde contemporary art scene. His influence was not limited to the borders of South Korea, as Paik is widely considered to be a forerunner of the video art movement as a whole.

On the other side of the exhibition wall is a work by another pioneering video artist. Park’s 1979 Video Inclining Water is a key example of how he reflected on technology with natural elements and physical interventions. The work was performed initially at the 15th Bienal de Sao Paulo before being exhibited in South Korea as a series of colour photographs, which are being displayed in Layered Medium. The performance features Park tilting a CRT television, giving the impression that the water on the screen was shifting.

Along with Kim Kulim’s seminal 1969 work Space Structure 69 – which features vinyl tubes filled with water and oil and lit by coloured fluorescent lights – as well as Paik’s 1996 work Moon is the Oldest TV, which presents magnets within a set CRT televisions to create lunar phases, the exhibition showcases early examples of how South Korean artists explored how technology tested the nature of human perception.

The assembly of opening works also makes clear from the beginning that the curators were not interested in simply presenting the 48 works in the exhibition chronologically. Rather, they coaxed out thematic threads between, elegantly segmenting the exhibition across three layers: body as a medium, society as a medium and space as a medium.

“The medium has two main meanings here,” El Khalil says. “It’s how we experience and relate to the world. Artists also tackle fundamental questions of media with the works, showing how media does not only refer to its technical meaning, but also thematic lenses through which to look at society, policies and history.”

While the opening segment considers perception as one aspect of the body, other artists examine a broader range of physical and bodily experiences. A 2007 acrylic work from Lee Kun-Young’s The Method of Drawing explores traces of bodily movements. Hyejoo Jun draws comparisons between our studies of nature and our pursuit of survival in The Birth of a New Flower (2023-2024). Hong Seung-Hye reflects on death and mourning through digital avatars in Ghost (2016), whereas Min Oh highlights the human voice as a musical instrument that can prompt transformation in Etude for Etude (2018).

Another highlight is a 2006 work by Lee Bul. Untitled (Crystal Figure) presents an outline of a woman’s head and body manifested by transparent beads. An overhead light casts mesmerising, glittering patterns on the floor below. The work takes cues from the illustrations of 16th-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius and is less interested in a clinical rendering of the female form than a spiritual and even spectral one, drawing a statement to the systemic overlooking of women’s contribution and influence in history.

Society as a medium is the second layer that the exhibition examines. The section opens vividly with a pair of cotton-embroidered works by Young in Hong. Still Life Parade (2015) is based on a children’s parade from 1970. Her use of embroidery as opposed to a photographic medium is an attempt, as the exhibition explains, “to fossilise history” and prompt new ways of thinking about memory and material beyond direct experience.

Under the Sky of Happiness (2013), meanwhile, takes inspiration from the 1974 film Under the Sky of Sakhalin, examining its premise about Korean labourers strander after Second World War from a feminist point of view, replacing the male protagonists with pioneering Korean women such as the poet, journalist and painter Na Hye-sok. Three video pieces by Sojung Jun, meanwhile, reflect on Korea’s divided present while also presenting music as a mode of dialogue and reconciliation. Hayoun Kwon, on the other hand, presents 1920s colonial-era Seoul through VR.

Finally, the exhibition presents the concept of space as a medium in itself. Three works bare the section’s theme. Minouk Lim’s video performance S. O. S-Adoptive Dissensus (2009), featuring staged scenes across Seoul’s urban landscape, juxtaposed with Haegue Yang’s Yes-I-Know-Screen (2007), a set of ten traditional South Korean doors fashioned as folding screens, and two works from Ram Han’s vibrant digital painting series Room (2018) that shows hotel spaces in a bold and dreamlike palette of colours.

The trio of works smartly underscores demarcations between the public and the private spheres, and how built environments are shaped by social relations as well as economic and political factors.

This section also has the most innovative application of technology within art. In Forest of Subtle Truth 2 (2018), Byungjun Kwon employs a Local Position System (LPS) that plays recordings through headphones depending on where the viewer is within a space. The sounds are of various songs sung by Yemeni refugees, who escaped the war to seek shelter in South Korea.

Kwon also presents another technologically interesting work at the tail end of the exhibition. Dancing Ladders features foldable ladders – symbols of ascent – that have been affixed to robotic technology and tracks. However, by using 3D printing technology to make the works, as well as open-source software, to make a statement about the democratisation and accessibility of art and technology.

Overall, Layered Medium offers a thought-provoking entry point into the avant-garde landscape of contemporary art from South Korea. It exhibits a breadth of approach and subject, as well as a ceaseless desire for innovation and material reflection. The exhibition also implicitly underscores a thoughtful way of curating cross-cultural exhibitions – to show how research and mindfulness is essential in making the most of these exchanges.

“I wanted to show our collection, this avant-garde contemporaneity but in a global context,” Kyung-hwan, who is a curator at Sema, says. “We struggled with the notion that, how can we escape typical notions of cultural exchange. We had to approach it differently with research trips, artist residencies and collection researches. This is, after all, a three-year-long project, a long-term institutional collaboration.”

Layered Medium: We are in Open Circuits runs until June 30 at Manarat Al Saadiyat

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