Art Basel / By Elliat Albrecht
From internet-inspired paintings to sprawling, conceptual installations and tongue-in-cheek sculptures, activity in Seoul's galleries is perking up this season.
The early days of the new year were a transition period for galleries in Seoul, with many gearing up for new exhibitions to mark a hopeful season. Now, must-see shows in the South Korean capital include works by both emerging and well-established Korean artists, major installations, and a number of international artists making their Korean debut.
Rick Prol
Leeahn Gallery
March 4–April 18, 2021
Ugliness, suffering, and death – Rick Prol does not shy away from any of the toughest subjects. Leeahn Gallery expands its purview by presenting the American artist, who has been dubbed the ‘veteran master of gothic angst’. Prol began exhibiting during the heyday of the 1980s East Village art scene in New York. Representative of that era’s punk spirit, his work is dystopian, absurdist, and has no time for pleasantries. While Prol also makes sculptures, installations, and drawings, he is perhaps best known for his oil paintings, which render the humor and suffering of urban life in a cartoonish style with distinct Art Brut influences.
Prol draws inspiration from art history, his own life, and dreams, but has asserted that he does not feel anything as he works – ‘There is no catharsis,’ he has said. Lately, he has taken to Instagram to post his earlier works, including pastel pictures of agonized-looking horses in bathtubs (made around the turn of the millennium and notably predating the psychological trials of BoJack Horseman) and macabre drawings of cats, including a 1987 portrait of artist Lori Taschler with cat ears, a burning candle, and a blank look in her eyes.
Installation view of Gina Beavers' exhibition ‘Passionaries’, 2021, at Various Small Fires, Seoul. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles and Seoul.
Gina Beavers, ‘Passionaries’
Various Small Fires
Through March 20, 2021
If the Internet is a content mine, it’s fitting that American artist Gina Beavers is using sharp tools. For her impastoed paintings inspired by online rabbit holes – think food porn, makeup tutorials, and celebrity snapshots – she carves into layers upon layers of acrylic to produce craggy, tactile surfaces. These rough-hewn textures often lend themselves well to the content: in Korean Krispy Buttermilk Chicken Encased in Sriracha Rice Krispy Coating with Red Jalapeno (2020), for example, the three-dimensional coarseness of the medium makes the fried chicken appear mouthwateringly crunchy.
Beavers, who has a background in anthropology, is concerned with ideas of consumption, reality, and as she has described it, the ‘experience of a capitalist life lived online.’ In addition to Korean Krispy Buttermilk Chicken, this show at the Seoul outpost of the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires includes seven other new, medium-sized paintings. Their subjects range from sandwiches and takeout food to fingernails painted with a scene from the 2019 film Parasite – and one particularly striking image of American singer-songwriter Liz Phair’s bottom represented as a cake, with a slice being carefully lifted from it.
Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1981. © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission. Image provided by Kukje Gallery, Seoul and Busan.
‘Robert Mapplethorpe: More Life’
Kukje Gallery
February 18–March 28, 2021
In May 1988, two years after being diagnosed with Aids, Robert Mapplethorpe established The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation as a way of protecting his work after he died and promoting the causes that were important to him. The American artist – renowned for his poignant photographs depicting homoerotic themes and New York’s BDSM scene – was only 42 when he passed away just 10 months later. Kukje Gallery has been working with the foundation since 2019, and the exhibition of his works in Seoul will coincide with an companion show at the gallery’s outpost in Busan.
While Mapplethorpe is of course best known for the photographs of taboo subjects that scandalized Americans in the 1980s and 1990s – in 1989, a show of his work famously set off debate about obscenity and artistic freedom in the US – the standout image in the Seoul exhibition highlights his ability to convey eroticism with incredible nuance. Self Portrait (1981) pictures the artist from the back, with parted hair and wearing a worn leather jacket. While no flesh is visible, the weathered texture of the jacket over his shoulders looks like skin waiting to be touched.
Left: Cecilia Vicuña, Niña Mapuche, 1975-2021. Right: Girl with Book and Gun, 1975-2021. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York City, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
Cecilia Vicuña, ‘Quipu Girok (Knot Record)’
Lehmann Maupin
February 18–April 24, 2021
In addition to her art practice, filmmaking, and ecological activism, Chile-born Cecilia Vicuña (who splits her time between Santiago and New York), is a prolific poet. The lyricism of her writing, published in more than 20 volumes since the 1970s, feeds into her art: she thinks of her works as visual poems, and fittingly so.
This exhibition, at Lehmann Maupin's three-year-old Seoul location, takes its title from the central work. Quipus were record-keeping devices made from tied strings used in Andean South America; the term quipu girok, which combines Korean and ancient Andean, loosely translates as ‘knot record.’ In the large-scale installation, sheer, knotted panels of gauze, silk polyester, and cotton drape from bamboo poles and drift down toward the floor. But it is color that imparts an ethereal effect: Vicuña used pastel crayon and pigment to mark each strip of fabric.
Elsewhere, another installation combines Vicuña’s series of small, string-wrapped sculptures made of natural materials and detritus – delicate objects that she calls precarios, or the precarious – with drawings, a wire garment, and video documentation of a performance about endangered monarch butterflies, attesting to her lifelong concern for nature.
Left: Kyung Ryul Park, Picture 3, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Haneyl Choi, Daddy, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
‘Lau, gh-; Nothing Needs to be a Tragedy’
One and J.
February 25–April 4, 2021
In One and J.'s forthcoming group exhibition, three Korean artists of different generations and artistic persuasions meet. Choi Haneyl (b. 1991), Hong Seung-Hye (b. 1959), and Park Kyung Ryul (b. 1979) make very different work from each other. Interestingly, the most senior artist’s work is the most technological: Hong’s brand-new animation – made using Flash software and GarageBand – will debut in the show. Park’s large-scale oil paintings, meanwhile, combine layers of saturated paint with quirky line work. With their abstract forms and cartoonish outlines, some recall Philip Guston – if his paintings were viewed in Technicolor. In Picture 12 (2019), yellow forms alternately resemble smiling shrimp, burning buildings, and bundles of grapes.
As for Choi, the youngest, his mixed-media figurative sculptures are frequently human-scaled and often convey his wry sense of humor (a recent one, The creator of form_standard (2020), is a self-portrait in which the artist flips the middle finger). On view at One and J. will be Daddy (2021) – a rough, rust-hued, and blockish figure with no arms – and Another Daddy (2021), a chrome-colored, four-legged beast whose limbs are seemingly flexed in anticipation.
Choi Byung-so, Untitled 016000, 2016. © the artist and Arario Gallery, Seoul, Cheonan, and Shanghai.
Choi Byung-so, ‘SENS ET NON-SENS: Works from 1974–2020’
Arario Gallery
Through February 27, 2021
Choi Byung-so came up as an artist in the 1960s, a time in Korea when political unrest manifested itself in art as tension between formalism and experimental conceptualism. His work shows markers of both influences. The exhibition at Arario Gallery is an overview of the past 50 years of Choi’s practice – albeit an incomplete one, as many of his early works were lost or damaged in a studio flood.
Thankfully spared, however, were several pieces from a well-known series in which the artist covered newspaper pages with ballpoint pen and pencil to the point of illegibility. The resulting works are highly textured monochromes that have garnered comparisons to Dansaekhwa paintings, and have been interpreted as symbolic acts of defiance against repressive authority.
A similar spirit of resistance runs through the installation Untitled 9750000-3 (1975), for which Choi stuck masking tape on the floor to make outlines around folding chairs. The lines of tape resemble chalk at a murder scene; in fact, some sections of the floor are marked off despite the absence of chairs, as if a corpse has been carried away. The highlight of the exhibition, however, is the installation Untitled 016000 (2016), in which more than 8,000 hand-twisted, white Laundromat hangers lie on the ground. The colorless appearance of the tangled mass is like that of frost on grass.
https://www.artbasel.com/stories/must-see-exhibitions-seoul-south-korea