Korean Craft Museum 20th Anniversary Exhibition
23 April. 2021 ~ 20 June 3 floor of The Culture Factory main building, Gallery 6
Online Exhibition KOR
<Into the New world: UTOPIA> tries to visualize our dreamlike world, one that is aesthetically enhanced by crafts, within crafts' basic principle of being an art combining functionality with humanity's values that exists while transcending space and time. We seek to take mighty and courageous steps for Korean crafts' future, even if the utopia we dream of becomes a mere daydream, resulting in a dystopia. The ideal-values, worldviews, and stories of each of the 20 artisans participating in this exhibition will become layered to paint a utopia of Korean crafts, and our such intentions will surely provide future generations of artisans who dream of a utopia through crafts positive strength and energy even after our era passes.
Kim Jongin, Kim Jihye, Kim Hyungjong
Ryu Yeunhee, Maeng Wookjae, Suh Jinhwan
Shin Sangho, Oh Byungwuk, Won Kyunghwan
Yoo Euijeong, Yoon Saerom, Lee Kajin
Lee Sanghyeob, Lee Seunghee, Lee Eunsook
Lee Taxoo, Rim Kwangsoon, Jang Meeyeon
Chung Haecho, Pyun Jongpil
The artisan KIM Jongin explores what crafts are and what directionality crafts should have for the benefit of our lives, and she expands this from herself, whom she can speak of best, to women and people to express diverse stories in her work. <In Today's Image of Women 2021>, which she presents in the current exhibition, too, Kim finds and shows through her work forms she most candidly professes in 2021. Particularly, the head and sitting Buddha imagery variously represented using the modern and sensuous colors that appear in the work alludes to our current lives and reminds one of the diverse human and natural entities we live with.
The piece <Conga>, which KIM Jihye presents in this exhibition, is an installation piece consisting of ceramic objects reminiscent of cymbals or UFOs. The space produced through the work visualizes an imaginary space or location. Viewers experience the space while engaging in utopian imagination as they freely pass between spiral ceramic objects. Although a utopia is an uncertain and futuristic space, it is a concept implying that it is merely not before us yet and is being created now or will come some day. Like how <Conga> is a utopian place to Kim Jihye, I hope viewers will picture our uncertain but hope-filled future with faith in what they pursue.
KIM Hyungjong creates diverse figures using sheet glass. The work produces multi-angled images depending on the glass's thickness, the cut plane, the distance between planes, and the light's angle. The image of lines and planes appearing according to the light simultaneously possesses painterly effects and glass's physical properties. One can interpret various emotions, including anguish, frustration, and hope, in the appearance of people that seem to walk into an endless world of the unknown. Kim presents viewers with emotions and interpretations as free as his work's diverse colors.
RYU Yeunhee is an artisan who uses cold metal materials to present warm yet modern kettle work including her unique sensibilities and a natural, handmade feel. Overflowing with personality through free yet refined modern sensibilities, Ryu's work undergoes a special crafting method and process. To create a craftwork, artisans usually measure ratios starting at the planning stage and then craft and refine as they complete their piece. However, Ryu pursues the method of simultaneously creating several works, not just plans, to create any piece. In the case of a kettle, one could divide the piece into the four parts of the body holding the liquid, the mouth for pouring liquid, the lid, and the handle; and Ryu first creates several similarly sized bodies of different shapes, such as a rectangle, circle, and oval. She also crafts several lids, mouths, and handles, too, and she produces several pieces simultaneously by trying out different combinations of the parts she made before connecting together the ones that go well together. When Ryu finishes by connecting the metal, she gifts viewers with friendly and warm sensibilities while transmitting a feeling of indifference like she connected the pieces sketchily. The artisan's work mostly employs bronze, brass, silver, and iron for its main materials, and Ryu uses wood for the handles and lids to add a novel flavor to metal's strength.
MAENG Wookjae thinks art must metaphorically speak of the past with life in the present as the standard or that it must present directions regarding the future. Based on this thought and with his perspective on the current environmental change and relationships between life forms, Maeng creates his work's narratives while making objet and installation pieces using ceramics as his main medium. Also, viewers can ask various questions through the narratives as they interpret his work within large concepts like the Anthropocene. What might be the ideal relationship between humans and life forms of various species within an anthropocentric environment? What might we be able to do to create and maintain ideal relationships?
In the present exhibition, SUH Jinhwan exhibits his <Wall Decoration> series work, which is made using gold in the nonfigurative art style of the painterly canvas format. One can view a piece in which are placed rhombus-shaped metal weights standing in an irregular but balanced formation on an elongated metal plate on which lattice pattern lines are drawn, and a work in which round spheres are placed in a regular arrangement but have created a rectangular form through the change of a color. While delivering various stories using minimal forms, Suh is creating an expanded interpretation of crafts' meaning and value in the current work.
SHIN Sangho is an artisan who, through work reinterpreting traditional ceramics while exploring the possibilities of clay, is expanding crafts' realm while researching the point where ceramics seek a transformation into a sculptural form, the point of broadening the scope of creation into public art and contemporary architecture as ceramics become sculpture. <The Dream> series, presented in the current exhibition, was created in 1994 and offers a glimpse into Shin's such agonies and attempts. The image of animals represented on ceramics with simple forms of straightened lines conveys to viewers strength and energy as the liveliness and movement of the life forms harmonize with large and satisfying ceramic forms. Also, the pedestal exhibited along with the work was personally made by the artisan, and it sublimates the entire exhibition space into a space where aesthetic energy is felt as architecture's intuitive lines and structural expressions mix nicely, with the steel material being used, as the work and pedestal converge the space.
OH Byungwuk's work is spread out across different genres and ranges, including the materials of metal and wood, and from small jewelry to large furniture. Viewers feel a common sense of beauty in Oh's multi-genre, multi-range work, and it due to aesthetic elements discovered in nature being reflected. He induces viewers to marvel at the restrained comeliness in which cold straight lines and soft curves contrast yet harmonize with one another to be refined, as well as at his flexible yet fine craftsmanship.
WON Kyunghwan is an artisan who, while exploring clay's physical properties and textures, is building a new visual world beyond the range of ceramics that are completed by clay and the kiln. The work he is exhibiting in the current exhibition, <Impressions of Clay 2021>, begins with the method of adhering clay to the insides of a clear acrylic box, and it was created with the method of causing natural crevices to form in the clay based on its thickness as it dries. Although cracks in ceramics are a minus element leading to a decline in the work's value, the clay crevices formed in Won's work serve as passageways for light and expand the work's physical space to turn into a plus element that brings various elements of enjoyment to viewers. Also, the boxes displaying clay crevices gather like mosaic pieces to produce an installation work. The colorful LED lights that are visible through the clay's crevices in the piece harmonize with the clay's physical properties to present a beautiful feast of light.
The artisan YOO Euijeong is creating work recording contemporary cultural phenomena using the original medium of ceramics. Yoo's characteristic is the fact that he works by mixing various forms and techniques appearing in the history of ceramic art. His work <Coexistence> includes the coexistence of the past, present, and future by combining, in the form of ceramics, several symbols represented with a range of techniques and materials. Also, the work <Liquid-Time> is a large ceramic sculpture in which the Chinese characters for "liquid era" are carved in the center of the body, and this symbolizes contemporary society and culture, which quickly flow like water without becoming fixed for even a moment. As such, the Yoo is creating ceramics recording modern life by reflecting the social and cultural forms that were made through the flow of time based on a ceaseless exploration and interpretation of ceramic art's tradition. Yoo Euijeong explores contemporary ceramic art's actual changes and direction of expansion through such work.
YOON Saerom is an artist who is mostly inspired by nature to create furniture, sculpture, and installation pieces using acrylic. The current exhibition's <Crystial Series_Installation Piece: One Day in August> is an expression of Yoon's memories of a day in August last year that had a beautiful sunset. The artist sublimates into his work and delivers to viewers his memories of gazing at a clear, micro-dustfree sky dyed with a sunset on a day with a cool autumn breeze after a hot summer. The work's colors change by nature's hour according to the sunlight, but also by modern technological developments like different types of lighting. Yoon's installation piece, which constantly changes by freely moving through space and time, is a spectrum of light and provides a vivid experience of colors if not more.
While based in the tradition of celadon porcelain, LEE Kajin offers questions about boundaries while continuing modern attempts spanning different materials and forms. Lee invites viewers inside work arranged in a circle in <I SEE YOU>, the installation piece she newly presents through the current exhibition. Viewers will participate simultaneously as viewers and the viewed. They will be surrounded by 14 unique celadon paintings and experience three-dimensional and private communication as they interface with each work. The artisan infuses the craftwork's form with the individual's artisanal identity and a meta awareness of the craft genre. I hope for viewers to have an occasion to casually encounter a certain point inside themselves through a meeting with works in which complex thoughts, regarding the subject and object, insides and outsides, the social self, and energies of the reverse side, are melted in.
LEE Sanghyeob is an artist who simultaneously displays the traces and time of the artisan's assiduous labor to create his work with crafts' artistic properties. The silver vase and calabash series presented through the current exhibition raises the work's completeness through Lee's act of repeated hammering. Also, he raised the beauty to an extreme by maximizing the sense of depth of the silver material's inherent colors to light up the entire exhibition space. Furthermore, while positively breaking the familiar image of the white moon jar, <moonⅣ> and <moonⅤ>, which Lee created by determining a ratio through his own sense of aesthetics, allow one to feel metal crafts' appeal while seeing the copper material's characteristic shine and traces of the artist's rough yet dynamic hammering work.
LEE Seunghee creates an artistic spectrum that is at once both broad and unique while presenting a fresh, modern aesthetic sensibility by transferring ceramics' three-dimensionality to flat surfaces, and he is now transcending flatness to also offer installation work encompassing space. The artisan was able to build his unique domain thanks to his tireless spirit of experimentation; it was because he has been accumulating thorough data through ceaseless research and experimentation with clay types and densities, and fire temperatures, while settling in Jingdezhen, China for over 10 years. <Like Water>, included in the current exhibition, is a piece that causes the illusion of entering the ocean's abyss with the deep colors filling the surface of a thin clay plate. Also, <Like Paper>, which consists of a large, rhombusshaped canvas form with a folded corner, stimulates the modern person's sensibilities through the realization of minimalism. I anticipate visitors will, as they view Lee Seunghee's work which simultaneously expresses visual beauty and deep colors, have a time of peering into their inner selves and be able to bring out their own stories written in some corner of their mind.
LEE Eunsook is an artisan who works with materials she personally develops for her expressions based on an artist's experimental spirit and boundless spirit of exploration. Using a special transparent fabric material she developed herself, Lee created <Refuge for the Soul>, which is exhibited in the current exhibition, by applying the operational principles of commercial roller machines and basket-weaving techniques. The piece is a three-dimensional installation in the form of a bed, and the special neon thread in it captivates viewers by restoring a dark, windowless room into a space of light. Lee creates her work so as to allow viewers to intuitively feel things upon seeing the work and reading the title, as opposed to getting viewers to understand by explaining her work in detail. I.e., the artisan's ultimate wish is for viewers to feel solace and sympathy through <Refuge for the Soul> immediately upon seeing the work and its title.
LEE Taxoo majored in ceramics and fabric crafts in college and practiced his craft based on ceramics for over 10 years before attempting new work using fabrics since a year or two ago. While superficially it appears he switched genres from ceramics to fabrics, the artisan's experimental spirit with its basic direction in his work and the fact that Lee makes his work through intensive labor remain the same. Lee Taxoo's labor-intensive form mentioned here is different from that of most artisans. Artisans commonly undergo the process of reaching the state of masterhood through thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions to practice and gain proficiency with the same expression technique. However, with his work's variability, Lee intentionally created distorted, split, and broken forms in his ceramic work to deliver to viewers a different aesthetic sentiment each time, and he created countless differences with many variables in the dying process to produce diverse colors in his fabric work. I anticipate viewers will have a time of feeling their special existence anew and finding their selves as they sense the difference apparent in the work's diversity and substitute it into our multi-cultural lives.
RIM Kwangsoon presents art furniture he created by newly changing the appearance of Korea's traditional architectural techniques through modern sensibilities. He conveys traditional Korean architecture's temporal stories via his materials and processing techniques in particular. <Comb Teeth_Two-Person Bench 1>, <Comb Teeth_Stool 1>, and <Comb Teeth_Stool 2> were created by the method of balancing the structure using structural materials such as beams of traditional architecture. The work in the form of three stools adds a sense of visual beauty by matching the contourshaped pedestal placed in the gallery. In <Ironic Space_Comb Teeth 4>, Rim adds to the sense of volume and liveliness by representing a wood texture using the traditional inlaying technique of carving the surface of wood and filling the depression with a pattern or image.
JANG Meeyeon is an artist who is most earnestly expressing and realizing the happiness crafts give us. The accessories the artist has produced create various stories with a visual language and colors transcending simple beauty and the function of ornamentation, and the work performs the role of messenger of happiness for users (wearers or viewers). The flowers, leaves, fruits, and fish appearing in her work are repeatedly piled with the basic visual language of dots, lines, planes, and volume to display a stable and comfortable, universal beauty. Due to this, Jang's work transcends the cold material properties of metal ornaments and expresses a dazzling hope for the future with metal's characteristic light and splendor.
CHUNG Haecho is an artist with 50 years of experience who represents colors of an incalculable depth through lacquering. He completes his work in way that enlivens the natural materials' textures while excluding ornamentation as much as possible by appropriating from obangsaek (lit. "colors of the five directions"); red, blue, yellow, black, and green, which are Koreans' foundational hues; and grafting onto the colors the hemp lacquering technique, in which the artisan makes forms using several layers of hemp before lacquering and polishing them. The visual forms of his work consist of flexible curves that can express humanity's essential beauty and include the Korean people's sentiments through modern sensibilities. Viewers can sense different light refractions, undulating sensations, and sheens depending on their angle of vision and can feel lacquering's multi-faceted appeal.
PYUN Jongpil is an artist who advances beyond the essence of glass to conduct various experiments about ceaseless material exploration and to lead the expansiveness of glass crafts. His work <The Creation and Termination of Time> is an installation piece attempting light and glass's artistic interaction through a special glass material that is used for semiconductor development. Pyun provides fresh images by delivering to viewers light and colors' interactions through a special kind of glass that one rarely comes across in daily life. The shadows cast by glass according to the movement of light lamp are reminiscent of a clock's hour and minute hands. The lengths and densities of the hour and minute hands change depending on the light's distance and intensity, and this signifies the differences in people's time in life. The image of light in the work, which is unspecifically produced according to the light's movement, leads viewers to think about life's time, which is created and extinguished differently for different people, and to reflect on our life experiences.