Exhibition

Gyeongnam Art Museum

Past

2021 근현대미술기획《황혜홀혜 恍兮惚兮》

In the modern and contemporary art of Korea, what the art circles in Joseon at the end of the 19th century demanded was not to overcome the then rampant feudality or acquire modernity but to drive the independence or self-reliance of people to take root, which was considered as the epic of aesthetic value. At the end of the 19th century or in the early 20th century, Joseon was subject to foreign invasion abroad and aggravation of class contradiction domestically. Thus, the aspiration for such aesthetic values further intensified with Joseon literary painting at the center of the zeal. Against this backdrop, Joseon made its port available for the first time to passengers and goods traveling to and from foreign countries, while going through rapid changes in the social class system. It then started to embrace the West-oriented modern art dynamics with a radical and narrow mindset of “equating the modernization to Westernization” without adequate reflection on traditional beliefs or informed interpretation on the new art. With a lack of tradition-based internal drivers in Joseon, there was a shift in attention from “calligraphy and painting” to the Western “art” at a time when Joseon was not free from outside socio-political conditions. Thus, “calligraphy and painting” along with “folk painting” known as the culmination of the calligraphy and painting in the 500 Years of Joseon Dynasty, in fact, failed to have their values historically solidified.

 

The term “folk painting” has been used up to date after being coined with the statement made by Yanagi Muneyoshi, a Japanese aesthetics scholar and activist of a folk-art movement to refer to the painting by and for ordinary people. True, currently, folk painting encompasses painting of commoners, decorative painting at court and court painting, but that unique, witty and wonderous figurativeness is embedded in folk painting as painting for ordinary people beyond its simple name’s sake is noteworthy. The figurative form of folk painting manifests picturesqueness which transcends abstraction and figuration through multiviews in deconstructing and overturning objects and even the trend of times to reflect the social aspects with many icons having their own meanings. Moreover, artists of folk painting are not professional painters, so instead of complying with certain socially regulated principles or rules, they seek for their own solutions by having their free will, which was crystalized in newer styles on the condition of anonymity. In particular, folk painting allows for suspected factuality, sophistication in expression, omission & distortion and even childish expression, because it is driven by the mindset in literary painting. Such a context can be easily found in the contemporary art later.

 

Folk painting is what embodies people’s ultimate and most humane wish in life by clinging to their secular desires without having any place to resort to in the rapidly changing era. The desires of the times to realize humans’ universal values – happiness, love, wealth, longevity and eternity – develop into yearning for a decent life or an ideal world, being expanded into a new world of folk painting. Folk painting also encompasses fundamental desires to contemplate on life and death of humans: harmony between humans and the nature, success and wealth/nobility, prosperity of descendants, heroic tales, good health & long life, and reality & dreams. Folk painters tried to emulate the sophisticated culture of gentry and appropriated their spiritual painting style, but the beauty of folk painting – unlike literary painting – is uniquely positioned through openness and anonymity. It is to depict the rapidly changing world of reality into dreams, belief and hopes for the future through the world of art carried from the ancient times as a historic tradition, and not to disregard or escape from the times. It is analogous to talisman-like painting with expectations and yearning for the new world. Recalling such fundamental values through folk painting induces disconnection instead of the harmony among the individuals, society and the world, and raises a question that has been asked for long, yet forgotten by the mankind in today’s world when means of individual lives are lost.

 

This exhibition is focused on revisiting fundamental values found in or demanded by the current times through the intersection, juxtaposition and combination of the 19th century Joseon art and the contemporary art, and expand the meanings of modernity by deconstructing the linear “temporality” as well as the vision of “novelty” we have sought to discover for long in the era we call “modern.”

Dichotomy is used for the comparison of traditions vs. modernity, mainstream vs. peripherals, high-class vs. low-class, virtuality vs. actuality, dreams vs. reality, life vs. death and past vs. present. However, it is expected that only when there is further distinction of push-pull ambivalent notions, we can identify possibilities of worlds – the times when folk painting thrived or the new world desired by the current generation – or “two suns.” “What is novelty?” is to be asked through the theme of an ideal world.

 

The Korean title of the exhibition “Hwanghye-Holhye” can be interpreted to mean the presence of a substance (“ousia”) amid vagueness and darkness just like a dawn where the sun goes up and down with a motif from Chapter 21 of Tao Te Ching, a Chinese classic text traditionally credited to the 6th-century BC sage Lao Tzu. It serves as a clue to think about a non-existent world.