Korean Landscapes of Homeland and Longing - A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation @ MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation 

Landscapes of Homeland and Longing 

MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

14 August – 9 November 2025

Chun Hyucklim 

Landscape of Tongyeong, 1992

Oil paint on canvas, 130×160cm

Tongyeong City Hall

Nam Kwan 

Refugees, 1957 

Oil paint on canvas, 160.5×130.5cm 

Private collection

Kim Junghyun 

Landscape, 1940s

Ink and color on paper, 168×94cm (×2) 

Bookook Cultural Foundation

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), presents A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Liberation: Landscapes of Homeland and Longing at MMCA Deoksugung.

Through modern and contemporary Korean landscape paintings, poetry, and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry, this exhibition explores the sentiment of “hometown” that has remained deeply rooted in Korean consciousness throughout the turbulent tides of Japanese colonial rule and liberation, division and war, and the subsequent waves of industrialization and urbanization.

In reflecting on the 80-year history since liberation, the concept of 'hometown' serves as a key link between this land and its people. In Korean literature and art, the “hometown” is depicted as homeland, motherland, paradise, or an object of eternal yearning. During the Japanese colonial period it symbolized a nation lost, it became the land of nostalgia after national division, and it transformed into a fading landscape during the era of industrialization. Nostalgia for home has been an enduring emotional thread running through the country’s turbulent modern history, serving as a source of inspiration in both modern and contemporary art and literature.

The exhibition is centered around four themes: homeland, affection for home, displacement from home, and longing for home. It presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of Korean land through modern and contemporary landscape paintings that portray the loss and rediscovery of territory during the Japanese colonial period, the separation and dispersal caused by division and war, survival amid ruins, and the hope of reconstruction. In particular, this exhibition sheds light on the diverse layers of modern and contemporary art by uncovering and showcasing works that have long been kept in museum storage, private collections, or the homes of artists' families—such as regional landscapes and pieces by local artists that have rarely been seen in the mainstream art world.

Lee Insung 

Untitled, 1930s-1940s 

Ink and color on paper, 47×36cm 

Private collection

Part 1, “Homeland: The Stolen Fields,” examines perspectives of Korean land in the imperialist era through landscape paintings that depict the country’s various regions during the Japanese colonial period. During this period, the concept of homeland was shaped by Japan’s colonial perspective, which portrayed Joseon as an idyllic and pure countryside using the style of “local color” paintings. These works were simultaneously in vogue and at the center of controversy. Other artists, however, such as Oh Chiho and Kim Jukyung of the Nokhyanghoe (Green Hometown Association) in Gyeongseong, endeavored to express the true nature of Joseon through rich variations of light and color by recognizing “hometown” as a space that inspires national sentiment and seeking to discover the unique colors inherent in the Korean land. In addition, landscape paintings by artists from regional groups such as Hyangtohoe in Daegu, Chungwanghoe in Busan, Yeonjinhoe in Gwangju, and the art communities of Jeju and Honam region reflect the distinct climates and sceneries of their respective areas. This section presents works that reflect the complex perspectives surrounding Korean land during the Japanese colonial period, alongside powerful verses by resistance poet Yi Sang-hwa; nostalgic poems by other Korean poets including Jeong Ji-yong, Baek Seok, Lee Yong-ak, and Oh Jang-hwan; and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry written by independence activists in Manchuria, which have been inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. By presenting these materials alongside artworks, the exhibition seeks to explore shared expressions of the sense of 'hometown' embedded in the cultural and artistic consciousness of the time.

Heo Geon 

Cultural Landscape, 1945 

Ink and color on paper, 56×48cm

Private collection

Lee Sangbeom 

Returning at Dawn, 1945 

Ink on paper, 129×256cm 

Private collection

Yoo Youngkuk 

Mountain, 1984 

Oil paint on canvas, 97.5×130cm

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Part 2, “Affection for Home: A Land Reclaimed,” explores how hometown emerged as a significant motif in the works of artists following Korea’s liberation. These pieces reflect experimentation aimed at conveying the vivid spirit of the country’s climate, terrain, and natural environment, along with efforts to incorporate traditional materials, colors, and aesthetic sensibilities. Featured artists include Son Ilbong, who returned to his hometown of Gyeongju after teaching in Japan and created numerous landscape paintings; Moon Shin, who returned to Korea immediately after liberation from studying in Japan and captured the vibrant energy of the sea off the coast of his native Masan; Lee Ungno, an artist known for his innovative approach to modern ink painting who explored diverse formal expressions in ink to capture the landscapes of his hometown Hongseong and its surrounding regions during the pre- and post-liberation periods; Kim Whanki, who forged a uniquely Korean modernism, inspired by the blue islands, skies, and moonlit seas of his native Anjwado Island in Sinan; and Yoo Youngkuk , who developed a uniquely Korean mode of abstraction through his persistent exploration of the mountainous forms of his hometown Uljin. Chun Hyucklim, who discovered a unique artistic language in the landscapes of his hometown Tongyeong, and Byun Shiji, who found his artistic identity in his native Jeju. These artist’ works highlight how hometown served as a powerful artistic inspiration. In this section, in particular, highlights how the artistic roots of well-known painters such as Kim Whanki, Yoo Youngkuk, and Lee Ungno can be traced back to their hometowns, offering insight into a crucial turning point in the transition from modern to contemporary art in Korea.

Kim Won 

Title unknown, 1954

Oil paint on canvas, 102×177.7cm 

MMCA

Byeon Gwansik 

Spring in Muchang, 1955

Ink and color on paper, 181×357cm 

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Shin Youngheon 

Suffering, year unknown

Oil paint on canvas, 35×25cm 

Private collection

Part 3, “Displaced from Home: A Land Ruined,” examines depictions of Korean land as perceived and recorded by artists amidst the nation-wide tragedy of the Korean War. The City After the War (1950) by Lee Chongmoo and Demonlished (1953) by To Sangbong portray devastated urban landscapes with a sense of desolation and quiet melancholy. Abstract and semi-abstract landscapes such as Shin Youngheon’s Tragedy (1958), Lee Soo-auck’s 6.25 War (1954), and Nam Kwan’s Refugees (1957) express the horrors of war and the memory of suffering through dark colors, rough brushstrokes, and a fragmentation and deconstruction of form. Meanwhile, Lee Manik’s Cheonggyecheon (1964) and Chun Huahuan’s The Left Behind By War, (1964), painted from a realist perspective, vividly and intensely depict the bleak reality of the era, portraying the poverty and despair of refugee settlements during the war. Artists of this period reflected on their wartime experiences to confront trauma and terror while seeking to transform and overcome them through artistic creation. Rather than depicting tragedy directly, the expression reveals the inner emotions of people reflected in the landscapes, allowing viewers to interpret these historical landscape paintings from multiple perspectives.

Yoon Jungsik

Spring, 1975

Oil paint on canvas, 41×53cm

MMCA

Choi Youngrim

Spring Garden, 1982 

Oil paint and soil on canvas, 127×191cm

Seoul Museum

Kim Jonghwi

Hometown Nostalgia, 1987

Oil paint on canvas, 97×194.5cm 

MMCA

Part 4, “Longing for Home: A Land of Nostalgia,” features works by artists who explored their own artistic worlds grounded in longing and the pain of displacement and separation due to war and the ensuing national division. These artists included motifs in their work that evoke the lyrical sentiment of their native regions and depicted their hometowns as ideal paradises to soothe their yearning. Works such as Yoon Jungsik’s Spring (1975), Park Sungwhan’s Nostalgia (1971), and Choi Youngrim’s Spring Garden (1982), which present utopian visions of hometowns in the face of losing both family and hometown while enduring loneliness, isolation, poverty, and sorrow, pose a fundamental question: what does art leave behind and what purpose did it serve in an era of such loss and deprivation? During this period, artists who shared the experience of displacement came together to organize the 1952 Wolnam Artists’ Exhibition, followed by the founding of the Creative Art Association in 1957 and the Exhibition of Gusangjeon in 1967, through which they sought to explore a shared artistic direction grounded in the sentiment of longing.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition commemorates the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation by retracing the emotional resonance of hometown that has remained in our hearts throughout the country’s modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, as expressed through landscape painting. I hope it offers visitors a sincere experience of the perspectives held by these artists who captured the spirit of their times and their homeland.”

MMCA Deoksugung - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

99 Sejong-daero (Jeong-dong), Jung-gu, Seoul 04519

www.mmca.go.kr

Teresita Fernández @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Liquid Horizon" Exhibition

Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

August 27 – October 25, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Liquid Horizon, an exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Teresita Fernández, on view at Lehmann Maupin Seou. Featuring a glazed ceramic wall installation and luminous sculptural panels that evoke watery realms, the exhibition extends Fernández’s ongoing interest in subterranean landscapes—soil horizons formed by geological and human-formed layers. Here, her inquiry moves into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency that expand the visual and conceptual language beyond the terrestrial.

Liquid Horizon marks Fernández’s debut at the gallery’s Seoul location and her first exhibition in the city in over a decade. The exhibition proliferates the dialogue with her most recent exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin: Soil Horizon in New York and Astral Sea in London. It is preceded by two recent museum exhibitions at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas and at SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which both investigate the vibratory, interdependent nature of terrestrial and cosmic matter—treating landscape not simply as physical terrain but as a charged space of psychological, political, and cultural resonance. Concurrently, Fernández’s work is on view in the exhibition Shifting Landscapes at the Whitney Museum in New York.

For over three decades, Teresita Fernández has examined the complexities and paradoxes within landscape—the visible and hidden, celestial and earthly, fierce and alluring, material and ephemeral, ancient and contemporary. Her material intellect is firmly embedded within the sculptural investigations that question how place, land, and landscape are defined. Her work reveals landscapes as embodied sites—at once vast and intimate, private and collective—where poetics and politics intertwine, exposing the layered histories, identities, and cosmologies contained within their strata.

Rather than depicting literal geographies, Fernández’s “Stacked Landscapes”—such as Liquid Horizon 3 (2025)—function as sculptural abstractions and metaphors for perception and the human condition. In keeping with the tenets of color field abstraction, albeit sculpturally, Fernández is deeply engaged with material resonance and its capacity to evoke emotional and psychological depth. Composed of relief horizontal striations in charcoal, sand, and blue pigments on aluminum, these works suggest geological formations that merge with aqueous realms and introspective states. This affective quality recalls Mark Rothko’s compositions—his softly divided, luminous fields of color that emerge from profound emotional inquiry. At the base of each “Stacked Landscape” are crackled slabs of velvety charcoal, anchoring layers of black and blue sand that accumulate like shifting, tactile terrains. These strata transition into vivid, translucent veils of blue, ranging from saturated nocturnal depths to spectral, radiant luminosity. The color moves between immersion and emergence, suggesting a space suspended between the terrestrial and the celestial.

The merging of land and water in the “Stacked Landscapes” serves as a critical point of observation, suggesting both origin and passage—a threshold where interior and exterior conditions converge. Rhythmic transitions between light and dark and between reflection and absorption evoke a meditative awareness of history, migration, and otherworldliness. These works also extend Fernández’s ongoing engagement with maps, which consider land, islands, and continents inseparable from the surrounding waters and spaces. A thin, quivering line of electric blue marks the magnified, abstracted boundary between land and water, darkness and light, underscoring the quiet intimacy Teresita Fernández renders with subtle precision. In this fragile seam, she draws our attention to the unseen—what lies beyond immediate perception.

Water—like soil—is treated as a kind of horizon. It contains its own layered depths and reflective surfaces, embodying an “as above, so below” duality that reframes spatial orientation. In Fernández’s recent Astral Sea series, on view in the gallery, water is a central element. Water absorbs and mirrors, dissolving the boundary between surface and depth, earth and sky, rooting the viewer in a fluid, shifting field rather than a fixed location. This expanded notion of the horizon recurs throughout the exhibition in varied forms. For Teresita Fernández, any single element contains multitudes. Metaphor and memory operate as equal counterparts in her evolving conception of landscape.

The glazed ceramic installation White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025) echoes the chromatic depth and surface sensitivity of the “Stacked Landscapes” yet diverges in both structure and scale. Composed of thousands of small ceramic cubes, the work forms a shifting matrix of light and color saturation, moving from pale tones at the center to deeper hues at the edges. This tonal gradient generates a field that simultaneously expands and contracts, suggesting a vortex or an astral body. Swirling with blue and white mineral glazes, the title of the work White Phosphorus/Cobalt evokes a range of paradoxical references, from chemical reactions and mining to natural phenomena and the cosmos. These micro-forms repeat and resemble fractals, echoing geological strata, meteorological patterns, or cosmic fields. Through this intimate–infinite dynamic, the work becomes a site of alchemical, political, and environmental significance, implicating the contentious associations with both white phosphorus and cobalt in relation to extraction and destruction.

The exhibition also features nine solid graphite relief panels titled Nocturnal(Milk Sky). Rendered in soft blue tones, these works depict the rhythmic rise and fall of the tide. Polished graphite elements are juxtaposed with ethereal blue and white skies, creating a visual interplay between reflection and atmosphere. Situated in the liminal space between land and sea, the real and the imagined, these panels highlight Fernández’s continued engagement with materials sourced directly from the earth. Graphite, a recurring element in her practice, underscores her conceptual focus on materiality and place. The parenthetical in the title—Milk Sky—evokes both the celestial expanse of the Milky Way and a maternal link between women and the cosmos.

Liquid Horizon offers a resonant meditation on land and water. Through material intricacy and conceptual depth, Teresita Fernández invites viewers into layered environments where boundaries between past and present, self and world, and memory and perception dissolve.

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

213, Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

James Turrell: The Return @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

James Turrell: The Return

Pace Gallery, Seoul

June 14 - September 27, 2025

James Turrell 

After Effect, 2022 

© James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of five recent installations by James Turrell—including a new, never-before-seen, site-specific Wedgework made specifically for this presentation—at its Seoul gallery. Spanning all three floors of the gallery, The Return also features a selection of photographs and works on paper that shed light on the artist’s process for his installations and the construction of his massive Roden Crater project. Marking Turrell’s first solo exhibition in Seoul since 2008, this show is organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year celebration, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions around the world of work by major artists with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, James Turrell is a key member of the California Light and Space movement. He has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed “perceptual art,” working with the materiality of light and space. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with light, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his Projection Pieces from the 1960s, his work with light and perception has expanded in various series, including his Skyspaces, which he began creating in 1974, and his Ganzfelds, which he initiated in 1976.

Today, the artist is known worldwide for his immersive installations that, he says, require “seeing yourself seeing.” His work can be found in major museum collections around the globe, including the Museum SAN in Wonju, Korea, which is home to five of his installations; the Bonte Museum on Jeju Island in South Korea; the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island in Japan; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. With his monumental, ongoing Roden Crater project near Flagstaff, Arizona, James Turrell is forging a large-scale artwork and naked-eye observatory within a dormant volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona.

Arne Glimcher, Pace’s Founder and Chairman, first met James Turrell some 60 years ago, and the gallery has represented him since 2002. The artist’s presentation in Seoul—his first ever solo show at Pace’s space in the Korean capital—is an ode to the longevity of his relationship with Arne Glimcher and Pace. The Return includes a new, never-before-exhibited Wedgework installation—in which planes of projected light intersect within a darkened room, lending light a “thingness” through which the room seems to expand beyond its physical limits—made by James Turrell this year. Also featured are two large, curved glass installations, a circular glass installation, and a diamond-shaped glass installation. In these pieces from the Glassworks series, shifting planes of light give the illusion of infinite depth. Rarely exhibited together, these Glassworks of different sizes and dimensions are installed throughout the Seoul gallery, offering visitors a special opportunity to experience the breadth of the artist’s recent work.

The works on paper complementing these installations, which the artist has been producing over the course of his career, speak to the importance of printmaking in Turrell’s practice. At Pace in Seoul, he is showing his new series of Wedgework prints, which explore the chromatic variations and formal possibilities of the Wedgework installations. Works related to the artist’s Roden Crater project also figure prominently in the exhibition, alongside aquatints and woodcuts that depict qualities of light in Turrell’s 2014 installation Aten Reign at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Artist James Turrell

James Turrell, associated with the Light and Space Movement initiated in the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the immaterial qualities of light. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with it, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his earliest Projection Pieces (1966–69), his exploration has expanded through various series, including Skyspaces (1974–), Ganzfelds (1976–), and perhaps most notably, his Roden Crater Project (1977–), a large-scale work in a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Turrell’s practice has also materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Nigel Cooke @ Pace Gallery Seoul - "Sea Mirror" Exhibition

Nigel Cooke: Sea Mirror 

Pace Gallery Seoul 

Through May 17, 2025

Nigel Cooke 

Rilke in Rome, 2025 

Oil on linen, 130.5 x 165 cm 

© Nigel Cooke, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Sea Mirror, an exhibition of new work by Nigel Cooke, at its gallery in Seoul. This show brings together never-before-seen canvases created as part of Cooke’s new experimentations with portrait formats and panoramic scales, as well as a selection of 11 paintings on paper produced on the Spanish island of Formentera. With Sea Mirror Nigel Cooke continues his explorations of memory, myth, and the passage of time through his distinctive visual vocabulary of gesture and touch.

Nigel Cooke is renowned for his evocative, atmospheric paintings that blend figurative and abstract forms within layered compositions. Drawing inspiration from a diverse range of subjects—including literature, paleontology, neuroscience, mythology, and zoology—his work merges personal narratives with broader cultural and natural histories. Through intricate networks of calligraphic marks, Cooke explores the intersection of painting, thinking, and perception, where image and meaning emerge from the convergence of disparate elements to create portraits of psychological and physical spaces alike. His intuitive process is often guided by his experiences in different parts of the world and other autobiographical material, and his works can be found in major collections and institutions around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Tate in London, the Pinault Collection in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Long Museum in Shanghai, among others. 

In his latest body of work, Nigel Cooke has departed from the bold colors and graphic mark making that have characterized his paintings in recent years. Rendered in cool tones, his new paintings on canvas and on paper, created across Iceland and Spain, are softer, more contemplative and vulnerable compositions than his previous works. Featuring impressionistic lines that flow and emanate across their surfaces, Cooke’s Sea Mirror paintings can be understood in conversation with works by Titian, Rubens, Turner, and other great painters in London’s National Gallery. As ever, one of the central concerns of his practice is the mystery of painting itself—its timelessness, its narrative power, and its emotional and psychological depth.  

A suite of 11 new paintings on paper, created on the Spanish island of Formentera, complements the paintings on view in Sea Mirror. Deeply connected to his recent travels in Iceland, where he painted waterfalls on a daily basis, and his time spent in Formentera, these compositions meditate on notions of transience and transformation, of impermanence and renewal. Creating this group of gouaches on paper on Formentera’s beaches, Nigel Cooke made use of seawater as a material in their production, imbuing each work with the spirit and rhythm of the Mediterranean Sea. In this way, the artist continues his investigations into the poetic resonances of tidal movements and the ways that bodies of water—ever-moving and ever-disappearing—can metaphorically reflect the creative process. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Pace Publishing featuring new texts by writer Chloe Aridjis and Marcelle Polednik, director of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin.

Nigel Cooke (b. 1973) is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics. Since the late 1990s, Nigel Cooke has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting, creating a highly diverse and distinctive body of work. More recently, his work has assessed this output, moving into a succinct language with which to investigate his wide range of interests. Informed by a range of fields from palaeontology, neuroscience, classical mythology and zoology, the linear construction of Cooke’s latest paintings recalls brain circuitry, the human or animal body and landscape formations simultaneously. The artist is interested in folding familiar dualities such as the mind and body, or the human brain and the natural world, into a single fluid gesture. His organic abstractions are loaded with mammalian and geological fragments, creating an instability and movement in the image as well as an ambiguity between a vast array of natural associations.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Jaider Esbell @ Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

Jaider Esbell

Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

April 1 – May 17, 2025

Gladstone presents the first solo exhibition in South Korea of indigenous artist, activist, and curator JAIDER ESBELL (b. 1979, Normandia—d. 2021, São Sebastião, Brazil). Comprising paintings on canvas and works on paper, spanning the artist’s later years, the show highlights his distinctive visual language of vibrant contrasting patterns across saturated black backgrounds. Esbell’s deep connection with nature, rooted in ecological activism and Macuxi cosmology, permeates every aspect of his work—from the use of plant-based dyes to the depiction of myths and environmental elements such as birds, trees, and cacti. Underscored by his belief in the interconnectedness of all living and natural forms, and the presence of mythological beings and spirits within our complex ecosystem, Esbell’s artistic legacy mobilizes narratives of resistances and champions indigenous epistemologies. 

Esbell challenged the boundaries between art and activism in a practice he named “artivism.” As a key figure in Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art), he used his platform to advocate for the recognition of indigenous rights and territories and to create spaces that highlight myriad decolonial perspectives that transcend Western art historical traditions. Driven by his activist efforts, this social movement uplifted artistic production by Afro-Brazilian communities, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized populations. As Esbell’s prominence in the art world grew, he became a critical voice and contributed to the larger community through the establishment of a gallery that served as an artistic and intellectual laboratory, prioritizing institutional collaborations, and curating exhibitions that center indigenous art. 

Esbell’s artistic practice weaves together activism and ecology to affirm Indigenous relationships with the land and urge environmental consciousness. This exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper that forefront narratives highlighting the relationship between living and non-living entities in the natural world through the lens of Macuxi cosmology. Esbell asserts indigenous worldviews and aesthetics through depictions of mythological beings and spirits including Makunaimî, the Macuxi creator of all nature. Works such as Os cactos e jardins de Makunaimí 2 (2021) render vibrant gardens created by Makunaimî, while A festa da chegada das chuvas (2020) celebrates the arrival of rain, capturing the dynamic interplay of nature’s rhythmic cycles. Recurring motifs such as serpents, birds, and cosmic elements function as both cultural signifiers and political metaphors, reflecting concerns towards the exploitative process of extractivism in the Amazon region. Forged through the intersectional dialogue between art, ancestry, and ecology, Esbell’s “artivism” stands as an enduring testament to the importance of creating pathways for indigenous expression within contemporary art frameworks.

JAIDER ESBELL (1979-2021)

Jaider Esbell was born in Normandia, Roraima, Brazil, known today as the indigenous territory, Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. Jaider Esbell was a member of the Macuxi group and a central figure in the indigenous art movement in Brazil through his work as an artist, educator, writer, curator, and activist. The artist’s multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, writing, drawing, installation and performance, engaging his artistic production as a means of ecological and political activism.

Originally trained as a geographer, Jaider Esbell turned fully to art in 2016 after several years of establishing himself as an educator and advocate for indigenous art and social movements through various curatorial projects and founding the Jaider Esbell Contemporary Indigenous Art Gallery in 2013. In 2021, Esbell's work was shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo titled Though it’s dark, still I sing. That same year, he participated as both an artist and guest curator of the exhibition, Moquém_Surarî : Contemporary Indigenous Art, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM São Paulo). In 2022, Jaider Esbell was highlighted prominently in the Arsenal of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including: Gladstone Gallery, New York (2025); Apresentação: Ruku, Millan, São Paulo (2021); Piatai Datai, Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea e Sesc Centro, Boa Vista, Brazil (2019); and Transmakunaima: o buraco émais embaixo, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas, Brasília, Brazil (2018). Jaider Esbell has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro; Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e da Ecologia (MuBE), São Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy; Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy; and Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, among others. Esbell was the recipient of the 2016 PIPA prize, one of Brazil’s most esteemed contemporary art awards, and the Prêmio Funarte de Criação Literária in 2010. Esbell’s works are held in the institutional collections of the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and Pinacoteca do Estado. 

GLADSTONE SEOUL

760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06070

www.gladstonegallery.com

Sam Gilliam @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "The Flow of Color" Exhibition

Sam Gilliam: The Flow of Color

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 10 – March 29, 2025

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

March 7 – April 19, 2025

Pace presents a two-part exhibition of work by Sam Gilliam at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. This show brings together watercolors and Drape paintings created by the artist in the last several years of his life, between 2018 and 2022. 

Widely recognized as one of the boldest innovators of postwar American painting, Sam Gilliam emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. Drawing inspiration from the use of color, line, and movement in Renaissance painting—in addition to the long history of formalism in modernist art—the artist nurtured a radical vision for his work that transcended the traditional boundaries of painting and sculpture, gesturing toward a new mode of making that would come to be understood as installation. Through his tireless experimentations with technique, gesture, materiality, color, and space, he continually reinvented his practice, pursuing a lifelong inquiry into the expressive, aesthetic, and philosophical powers of abstraction.

A series of formal breakthroughs early in his career resulted in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Sam Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. “The year 1968 was one of revelation and determination,” the artist once said. “Something was in the air, and it was in that spirit that I did the Drape paintings.” Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Tate in London; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, among many others.

Notably, Sam Gilliam cultivated ties to both Seoul and Tokyo during his lifetime. From 1956 to 1958, when he served  as a company clerk in the US army, he was stationed at a base in Yokohama, Japan, visiting nearby art galleries, stores, and woodcut studios whenever he had the time. Also traveling to Tokyo during this period, Sam Gilliam had his first encounter with the work of Yves Klein, a formative experience that, combined with his exposure to Japanese art and architecture, marked “a beginning of when I finally became an artist,” as he once put it. 

“Japan was just marvelous,” Sam Gilliam said in a 2016 interview. “There was one person in our unit who did nothing but go to Kabuki theater. From what I had seen of the art world, I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to be an artist, but I knew I didn’t want to be a soldier. So, I grew up. I went back to school to do my thesis.” 

Decades later, in 1991, the artist presented his first solo show in Seoul at the Walker Hill Arts Center and gave a lecture at the Daegu American Cultural Center as a participant in an arts exchange initiative organized by the United States Information Service (USIS). His work would return to the Korean capital for another major solo exhibition at Pace’s gallery in 2021. 

Pace’s Gilliam exhibition across these two cities sheds light on the artist’s late-career experimentations with form, material, and process. The last years of his life were marked by intense creativity, adding new dimensions to the formal breakthroughs that had first brought him acclaim six decades earlier. 

The Drape works included in Pace’s exhibition in Asia—all of which date to 2018—trace the artist’s late-career experimentations with texture, color, scale, and materiality through his use of Cerex nylon. Employing distinctive soaking, staining, pouring, folding, and spattering techniques, he created totalizing, entrancing compositions with seemingly illimitable contours of color and shape. These Drapes are suspended from the ceiling with a single cord, allowing the viewer to experience them in the round, as active features in a transformed environment, emphasizing the newfound luminosity Gilliam achieved as he continued to discover new energy in this career-defining form. 

Like his Drapes, the artist began producing rich watercolor abstractions on Japanese washi paper in the 1960s. The techniques that he used in these works—staining, folding, and otherwise distressing the surface of the paper—exerted a powerful effect on his artistic practice as a whole. Through this medium, he came to understand color and form as physical, textural presences that reach beyond painting’s two-dimensional surface. 

In his later watercolors, color and support became increasingly inseparable: the paper became the color rather than simply serving as its conveyer or carrier. The sense of depth in the creases and folds of his Drapes is also echoed in his watercolors. Vertical washes of color on these flattened surfaces create the illusion of folds or pleats, and planes of light and dark colors bleed into one another. Saturating the paper support with luminous pigment, Sam Gilliam transformed his watercolor compositions into objects rather than images. 

Concurrent with the run of its Sam Gilliam show in Seoul and Tokyo, Pace presents an exhibition of work by another key Washington Color School painter, Kenneth Noland, at both gallery locations. 

Sam Gilliam (b. 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi; d. 2022, Washington D.C.) was one of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid-1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of the Washington Color School. A series of formal breakthroughs would soon result in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings of exhibition spaces, Sam Gilliam transformed his medium and the context in which it was viewed. As an artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change. Sam Gilliam pursued a pioneering course in which experimentation was the only constant. Inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions took on an increasing variety of forms, moods, and materials.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

PACE TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com

Kenneth Noland @ Pace Galleries Seoul & Tokyo - "Paintings 1966 - 2006" Exhibition

Kenneth Noland

Paintings 1966 - 2006

Pace Gallery, Seoul

January 10 – March 29, 2025

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

March 7 – April 19, 2025

Pace presents a two-part survey of work by American painter Kenneth Noland at its Seoul and Tokyo galleries. These two distinct presentations of rare, museum-quality paintings bring together works created between the 1960s and early 2000s, encompassing the artist’s most celebrated series. This is the first exhibition dedicated to Noland’s work in both countries in some 30 years.

A founding member of the Washington Color School—which included Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, and Alma Thomas among others—Kenneth Noland was instrumental in forging the language of postwar abstraction in the US. His experimental approach to form and color gave rise to radical works that redefined the medium of painting. Between 1946 and 1948, Kenneth Noland studied at Black Mountain College in his native North Carolina. There, he was exposed to the ideas of seminal figures such as Josef Albers and John Cage, developing an early interest in the expressive potential of color and chance. As his style matured, the artist would continue to treat color as a resonant force in his abstractions, which feature circles, chevrons, and other geometric forms.

“By 1960, Ken Noland had become an artist of the first rank, often great, and a primary force in the development of abstract art,” the late curator William Agee, who knew Noland personally, wrote in a 2014 essay accompanying Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work in New York. “His was from start to finish an art of color, part of a long tradition that dates in the modern era to Impressionism, runs through Cézanne and Matisse, into the 20th century…”

Eminent critics and artists also lauded Noland’s work, with Donald Judd affirming in 1965, “By now Kenneth Noland’s salience isn’t debatable; he’s one of the best painters.”

Pace survey of Kenneth Noland’s work in Asia presents a full picture of his practice, featuring marquee paintings from his Stripe, Shape, Plaid, Chevron, Diamond, Flares, Doors, Mysteries, and Into the Cool series. The earliest paintings in the exhibition include Stripe and Diamond works he produced in the mid and late 1960s, when a new visual language emerged from his early Circles from the 1950s. These horizontally-oriented Stripe and Diamond paintings stretch across several meters beyond the viewer’s peripheral vision, evoking the feel of a vast, enveloping landscape. Kenneth Noland would use an array of techniques to apply bands of color in specific proportions—including staining the raw canvas or using a traditional paint roller—to create textural variation. With his use of acrylic paint, which cannot be reworked as easily as oil, Noland embraced the risk factor, quipping that he was a “one-shot painter.” Regardless of the technique he employed in his painting practice, Noland intentionally removed traces of his hand to focus attention on the materiality of the works while also allowing for chance reactions where bands of paint meet.

At the start of the 1970s, Noland began painting vertical stripes over his horizontal bands. The resulting works, his Plaid paintings, draw parallels with the paintings of Piet Mondrian, an early influence on Noland via his Black Mountain College teacher Ilya Bolotowsky, a proponent of the De Stijl philosophy. But unlike Mondrian, Noland retained the soft blur ofstained canvas in his lines, cultivating a quasi-alchemical effect as colors overlap and knit together.

In the ensuing years—when Kenneth Noland was the center of a community of artists in Bennington, Vermont that also included Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro—he turned his attention to the canvas support itself. By creating shaped paintings that took unusual, asymmetrical forms, Kenneth Noland emphasized the objecthood of the painting. These works, with their large expanses of a single color, have a textural richness resulting from the paint’s interaction with the raw canvas and the artist’s distinct and often uneven application.

Chevron paintings from the mid-1980s in Pace’s exhibition refer to a pattern and shape that Kenneth Noland first began exploring in the 1960s but attest to a new concern with texture. In these later Chevron paintings, vertical v-shapes contain a range of colors applied in various depths, thick and thin, creating nuanced textural qualities on their surfaces.

Kenneth Noland’s melding of color and shape is also evident in his Flares series, the first body of work he conceived and executed in California, from the early 1990s. These paintings are especially innovative for their incorporation of colorful and translucent plexiglass strips. Wedged between the irregularly shaped panels of each work, these glossy bands activate a complex interplay between color, material, and form. To Noland, the Flares were “constructed pictures” with “separate component parts,” relating them to both collage and sculpture. He further enhanced the objecthood of the Flares by painting their sides in colors that do not match their frontal surfaces.

Small-scale Doors paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s in Pace’s show offer a more intimate experience of Noland’s abstractions, while Mysteries works from the early 2000s—composed of concentric or horizontal bands of varying width and color—harken back to his early Circles. By 2001, the artist had moved from Santa Barbara, California to Port Clyde, Maine, and the landscape and light of the East Coast captured his imagination and influenced his work in new ways.

The latest works in the survey, dating to 2006, are from Noland’s Into the Cool series. These joyous compositions speak to the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and form, reflecting the artist’s enduring love of jazz in their jaunty, gestural abstractions. Though he returned to the image of the circle in his Into the Cool paintings, Kenneth Noland approached color through subtle tone and transparency, moving away from the hard-edge style of his earlier work.

Up until his last works, Kenneth Noland continued pushing his investigations of color and shape to new limits. Today, his work can be found in major museum collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, among many others.

Pace’s Noland survey is the first presentation dedicated to his work to be mounted in Seoul since 1995, when he exhibited at Gana Art Gallery, and the first in Tokyo since 1986, when he showed at Satani Gallery.

Kenneth Noland (b. 1924, Asheville, North Carolina; d. 2010, Port Clyde, Maine), a key figure in the development of postwar abstract art, studied under Ilya Bolotowsky at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1948, developing an early interest in the emotional effects and expressive potential of color and geometric form. A commitment to line and color can be traced throughout his oeuvre—one essential to the development of Color-field painting—beginning with his Circle paintings and extending through a visual language that includes chevrons, diamonds, horizontal bands, plaid patterns, and shaped canvases. Often adhering to a compositional format, Noland worked methodically within a series to explore color, material, and method—a working process that generated successive forms.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

PACE TOKYO

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A

5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo

www.pacegallery.com

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "Illusive Places" Exhibition Curated by Cy Schnabel

Illusive Places 

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana 

Curated by Cy Schnabel

Pace Gallery, Seoul

May 11 - June 15,  2024

Alejandro Garmendia 

Jessica Descending & Ascending in the North Sea, 2007 

© Alejandro Garmendia 

Pace presents Illusive Places: Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlov, a group show curated by Cy Schnabel, at its gallery in Seoul. This exhibition brings together works by artists who, in one way or another, share an interest in reinventing landscape painting. These five artists—Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, and Milko Pavlov—use landscape as a point of departure to create nuanced approaches to subject matter, form, and content. 

Throughout this exhibition, natural settings turn into imaginary realms that suggest new perspectives of the physical world and life in general. An abstracted sense of space in the pictures on view gives way to unstable compositions that are charged with desire, fantasy, and sometimes loneliness. A range of psychological views carry their own resonances and connect through each artist’s interest in presenting a distinct irreality in their work. Utopias, nightmares, hallucinations, and fragmented memories all materialize in these illusive places.

Cy Schnabel

Cy Schnabel (b. New York, 1993) is an independent curator and the founder and director of Villa Magdalena, a gallery based in San Sebastian, Spain since 2020. The gallery focuses on contemporary Spanish painting and works with international mid-career and emerging artists. In 2017, Schnabel worked as an assistant curator at the Centro Cultural de España en México (CCEMX) in Mexico City, making his curatorial debut with the group show Horizontes Imaginarios. In 2018, Schnabel co-curated the posthumous retrospective Alejandro Garmendia: Paisajes, enigma, y melancolía at the Sala Kubo Kutxa in San Sebastian. Schnabel has presented two exhibitions at Galería Mascota in Mexico City—Mie Yim: New Works on Paper (2022) and Lucy Mullican: Veils (2023)—which marked each artist’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. In collaboration with Spazio Amanita, Schnabel curated Felicidad Moreno: Form and Formlessness (Miami, 2022) and Cristina Lama: Música para un murciélago (New York, 2023), both artists’ first solo presentations in the United States. He was also the author and co-curator of Schnabel and Spain: Anything Can Be a Model for a Painting at the CAC Málaga, a 2022 survey of 23 paintings made by his father between 1997 and the present, showing the artist's works in the context of Spanish painting and the evolution of his practice during this period.

Cy Schnabel’s curatorial writings on the five artists in the show follow below.

Thomas Chapman

After experimenting with shaped canvases for more than 20 years, Thomas Chapman (b. 1975, San Diego, California) has returned to figurative painting, developing a style that is heavily influenced by his drawings of everyday life. Like his Lake Paintings, the works on view in Illusive Places are voyeuristic studies of leisurely moments. Layered imagery resulting in a dense atmospheric haze makes the figures who populate these invented scenes barely perceptible. Throughout his oeuvre, found fabrics, collage, stolen typographies, markers, paint, pencil markings, glue, and many other elements comprise the surfaces of his paintings. The unorthodox shapes of some of Chapman’s early canvases are inspired by a variety of subjects: astronomy, mythology, and ancient history. Taking an unconventional approach to painting, Chapman makes use of supports and many layers of sometimes conflicting visual information as common features in his diverse practice.

Alejandro Garmendia

The two works on view by Alejandro Garmendia (b. 1959, d. 2017, San Sebastian, Spain) are from his Pinturas Sucias (Dirty Paintings) series. But why dirty? Surely it has to do with the murky appearance of these paintings. Their messy execution with a muddy color palette, which reflects the artist’s embrace of accidents and imperfections as part of his practice, confirm that his process for these works is consistent with their conceptual underpinnings. The very idea of a landscape as “dirty” suggests that Garmendia was questioning the legitimacy of the act of painting itself, and, more specifically, the impulse to make something even remotely pastoral in contemporary times. This was yet another ironic and subversive gesture, illustrating an awareness of the risk involved in his chosen subject, given that the pictures seem so opposed to avant-garde tendencies and the general trajectory of contemporary art. In any case, these works serve as pretexts to his experimentations with the surrealist lineage he so admired, along with other art historical references. Garmendia documented the nonexistent, created physically impossible compositions, and ultimately presented a distanced metaphysical vision of the world that evokes estrangement and disorientation.

Louis Jacquot

Louis Jacquot’s (b. 1994, Paris, France) practice hinges on relationships between objects and pictures. The artist’s sculptural paintings combine minimalist gestures with iconographic elements. Blinky (2022) and Imi (2022), the two works present in this exhibition, turn intimate spaces and domestic objects on their sides to create illusive perspectives. In Jacquot’s hands, the intimate subject transcends the image to encompass the entire painting. Both the material— bedding—and the shape of the canvases—like that of a pocket notebook—speak to direct contact with the body. In the past, during his BFA at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist maintained a workspace more akin to a woodworker’s shop than a painter’s studio. He avoided his “own” mark-making in favor of objects that were practically devoid of any graphic elements. In the few cases where pigments are applied, Jacquot chooses images that could belong to anyone. His previous works show an impersonal vocabulary of generic found symbols appropriated from the street—any universal emblems became subjects of interest for him.

Lucy Mullican

Lucy Mullican’s (b. 1994, New York) paintings use the horizon line as a compositional device to create a tension between gravity and the human spirit, which, in contrast to the former, is always in a state of ascension. We can trace maps of ethereal worlds in her works, which are ultimately self-portraits. The artist has experienced a spiritual transformation that is evident in her departure from painting waterfalls, islands, and rivers in favor of a more contemplative, inward consideration of the mind and the organs. Exterior environments blend with bodily forms, creating anthropomorphic landscapes. Her delicate paintings on wood consist of many layers of mineral pigments and pulsating lines, which create translucent surfaces. What the artist refers to as “pockets” or “holes” within her compositions function like portals, allowing the viewer to travel back and forth between pictures. The natural pigments of the watercolor and the wood receivers become one, reflecting the artist’s innate ability to understand her medium and employ technical fluidity. Mullican’s penetrating vision goes beyond the surface to reveal what we cannot see and bring us closer to what we feel. Transient moments flooded with light embody the artist’s representation of spirit.

Milko Pavlov

Milko Pavlov’s (b. 1956, Aytos, Bulgaria) paintings depict an imaginary natural world where rock formations, trees, water, and other organic matter have been rendered unrecognizable. The artist’s pictorial blend of naturalistic representation and abstraction creates a vast scale within the picture plane that is an everchanging way of seeing. In Pavlov’s oeuvre, form, surface, and composition develop in response to paint itself as a subject. His black and white frottage works—a technique he now applies to canvas—are continuations of the graphic work he was making in Bulgaria in the early 1990s. The artist’s colorful palette derives from his early exposure to 18th and 19th century Bulgarian Icon painters, which shifted his attention towards religious works of art instead of assimilating formal ideas related to the socialist realist aesthetic dominant in the country in the 1970s. With his titles, Pavlov is interested in a conceptual dimension that reflects an intersection of different moments in time. In many cases, his artwork titles can contain multiple dates yet to come, as with 2133-2 МРП 2042 (2024) and B.V 2099 МРП 2065 (2022), both of which are included in the exhibition at Pace in Seoul. Through these references to futuristic times, Pavlov is challenging the life expectancy of everything: himself, the viewer, the painting itself. The way the artist organizes space in his paintings—in other words, the composition—loosely resembles mountains or landscapes, a subconscious gesture which perhaps illustrates the mountainous nature of his native country.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.pacegallery.com

Photographer Richard Misrach @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

Richard Misrach 

Pace Gallery, Seoul

May 11 – Jun 15, 2024

RICHARD MISRACH 

Elephant Parable #22, 2020 

© Richard Misrach, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of work by photographer RICHARD MISRACH at its Seoul gallery. This presentation, which marks the artist’s first-ever solo show in Asia, spotlights photographs from his On the Beach, Shorebreak and Icarus Suite series along with his never-before-exhibited Elephant Parable body of work. Together, these mesmeric images—exhibited across two floors of Pace’s Seoul gallery—meditate on humans’ relationships to the natural world and one another.

A champion of color photography since the 1970s, Richard Misrach is known for his poignant, large-scale images that lean into social, political, and environmental issues of the present while also engaging with the history of photography. Subjects for his work have included desert fires, nuclear test sites, and animal burial pits in the American West; San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge; and the landscape of the US-Mexico border. In his radiant, contemplative works, Richard Misrach—who lives and works in Berkeley, California—often examines the destructive effects of human intervention in the natural world. Recent solo exhibitions by the artist include his 2022 presentation At the still point of the turning world, 2002–2022 at Pace Gallery in New York and Border Cantos, which opened at the San José Museum of Art in California in 2016 and later traveled to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. His works can be found the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; and many other institutions around the world.

In his exhibition at Pace in Seoul, Richard Misrach presents works created between the early 1990s and 2019 on the gallery’s ground floor. Among these photographs is Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats (1992), an image from the series Desert Canto XV: The Salt Flats depicting a surreal scene of dining tables and chairs situated, inexplicably, in the middle of a vast salt desert. Meanwhile, in Cloud, Roden Crater (2016), Misrach investigates plays of light and color in the sky at sunset. Photographs from the artist’s On the Beach series, comprising aerial images of figures in the sea, will also figure in the show. With these works—which Richard Misrach has captured from the same vantage point on a hotel balcony in Hawaii for some 20 years—he bears witness to individuals’ interactions with and relationship to the natural world. The first floor will also feature one work from the artist’s Icarus Suite, a series informed by Pieter Bruegel’s take on the Greek myth in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1560)—in these photographs, figures are overpowered and engulfed by towering, swelling ocean waves.

The second floor of the gallery spotlights Richard Misrach’s Elephant Parable body of work, which the artist produced during the COVID-19 pandemic and will be exhibited publicly for the first time in this presentation. Inspired by the fable of the blind men and the elephant, the varied works in this series are all derived from a single image of a bamboo forest in Hawaii to signify the unique perspectives and understandings we each bring to our experience of the world. For Richard Misrach, a negative image is not merely a technical tool but also a vehicle for exploring different aesthetics. Originally commissioned for the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatric Building, these semi-abstract works explore perceptual nuance through color, composition, and scale.

RICHARD MISRACH (b. 1949, California) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 with a BA in Psychology. For over 50 years, Richard Misrach has photographed the dynamic landscape of the American West through an environmentally aware and politically astute lens. His visually seductive, large-scale color vistas powerfully document the devastating ecological effects of human intervention, industrial development, nuclear testing, and petrochemical pollution on the natural world. His best known and ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, comprises 40 distinct but related groups of pictures that explore the complex conjunction between mankind and nature. Recent chapters capture the highly charged political climate following the 2016 US presidential election through photographs of spray-painted graffiti messages scrawled on abandoned buildings and remote rocky outcroppings in desolate areas of the Desert Southwest. Other bodies of work include Golden Gate, a careful study of times of day, weather, and light around San Francisco’s famed bridge, Destroy This Memory, a haunting document shot with a 4-megapixel pocket camera of graffiti found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and Petrochemical America, an in-depth examination of petrochemical pollution along the Mississippi River in collaboration with Kate Orff.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.pacegallery.com

Marilyn Minter Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Marilyn Minter 

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul 

March 7 – April 27, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Marilyn Minter, an exhibition of new paintings by renowned multidisciplinary artist Marilyn Minter, marking her first solo exhibition in Seoul. The works on view depict vignettes of women’s lips and mouths, at once alluring and enigmatic.

Known for her decades-long career that encompasses photography, painting, video, and installation, Marilyn Minter creates imagery that engages both hyperrealist and abstract technique. Her work has often centered around corporeal qualities and practices typically omitted from the mass-media depictions of women that dominate contemporary consumer culture, such as body hair, stretch marks, dirty feet, or acts of grooming. Rather than conceal such realities, the artist seeks to reframe these aspects of womanhood. Minter is also engaged with the art historical cannon, often using her signature lexicon to appropriate traditional tropes like the Odalisque or the Bather.

In Marilyn Minter, the artist’s compositions depict closely-cropped images of women’s faces, their mouths, lips, teeth, and décolletages adorned or open to varied degrees. In White Lotus (2023), a figure wears thick strands of pearls and beads, her open lips and jewelry obscured by steam and water droplets. Similarly, in Gilded Age (2023), dark red lips part to reveal a jewel-encrusted grill. The imagery is intimate yet strange, luring the viewer in with the suggestion of something more. Across the exhibition, Marilyn Minter’s compositions continue her bold exploration of glamor, beauty, and representation through a feminist lens.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition @ Mia, Minneapolis - Minneapolis Institute of Art - The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 

Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)

March 23 - June 23, 2024

Jae Woo Oh 

(South Korean, born 1983)

Let’s Do National Gymnastics!, 2011

Single channel video 

Collection of the artist

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents a new exhibition of contemporary Korean Art. The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, covers five themes: Dissonance, Reinvention, Coexistence, Being Seen, and Portraying Anxiety. The exhibition is on view in the museum’s Target Galleries.

The year 1989 marked a major shift in the world order, with Eastern European countries breaking away from the Soviet Union even as pro-democracy protests were crushed in China. It’s also the year the World Wide Web was invented, jumpstarting the modern era of interconnectivity. South Korea, in the wake of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, transitioned from a long-standing military dictatorship to a legitimate democracy. An international travel ban was lifted, creating opportunities for global engagement, powerful economic growth, and cultural exchange. South Korean artists began to connect in earnest to the global art scene.

“The works in this serve as a snapshot of an important moment in Korean history, and global history,” said Katie Luber, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of Mia. “The diversity of feelings and experiences shared by these artists is profound. I hope that visitors will leave the exhibition with new insights into the ways this historical moment echoes today.”

Using a variety of mediums, including ceramics, painting, fiber, photography, lacquer, installation, metalwork, mixed media, embroidery, and video, these artists explore themes like conformity, displacement, gender and sexuality, coexistence, and dissonance, making universal connections that offer a deeper understanding of South Korea, its history, and its culture.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Dissonance

Ongoing tensions with North Korea and the effects of unprecedented economic growth have long been a part of daily life for South Koreans. The artists in this section reflect on South Korea’s past and present, the foundations of Korean society, and the paradoxes of a divided Korea. Dissonance abounds in works such as Hayoun Kwon’s single-channel video 489 years (2016). The viewer occupies the role of a soldier undertaking a daylong patrol of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), a strip of land separating North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. The work’s title, 489 Years, references the amount of time experts anticipate it would take to clear the one million mines in the area. Yet in the 11-minute single-channel video, the DMZ appears lush and filled with wildlife, the destructive potential of the area hidden.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989  - Reinvention

In the 1990s, South Korean artists began re-engaging with traditional arts and culture, infusing long-established aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Some of them employ centuries-old hand processes, materials, and narratives. All of them re-examine the past, addressing notions of resilience and transformation that are at once specific to their experiences and transcend geographical boundaries. Suki Seokyeong KANG’s vibrantly woven mats from 2018 and 2019, made to be used in the Chunaengmu royal dance, are inspired by Hwamunseok, a handcrafted straw mat tradition dating to the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). These large-scale, abstracted weavings—made with Hwanmunseok thread, painted steel, and leather scraps—feature vibrant colors and abstract patterns that bridge contemporary practice with historic craft traditions.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Coexistence

As Korea participated in a new level of exchange, artists embraced the coexistence of new ideas and existing Korean values and artistic traditions, imbuing them with new meaning. Yoo Eui-jeong’s Treasures of Daily Life (2018) expresses this fusion of ideas in his series of recognizable corporate logos for companies including McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, and Hello Kitty. Created in valuable materials such as ceramic, gold, and porcelain and presented as dishes served at a banquet, these cultural icons of today are presented as valuable treasures for the future.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Being Seen

The artworks on view in this section reflect the reality of the present and express hope for the future. Challenging patriarchal power structures and cultural standards, the artists center experiences that are often marginalized, silenced, or erased. Ultimately, they celebrate their resilience and that of their communities. An Attack by Green Horns, by Sang-hee Yun, is a pair of lacquered and gold dagger-like spikes worn on the front torso and back shoulder, protruding like horns. Drawing on experiences from her childhood, Yun created these spikes as a form of protection for the wearer, simultaneously ornate and ominous.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Portraying Anxiety

Responding to the tensions of being part of a collective and expressing individual identities, artists have turned to alternative ways of approaching, discussing, and challenging social mores. The works in this section raise questions about group participation and the acts of looking and being looked at, while touching on larger societal challenges in Korea and elsewhere. In Let’s do National Gymnastics, Oh Jaewoo fuses nostalgia and the messaging of collectivity and its continued impact on South Korean society. In this ten-minute, single-channel video, Oh evokes the compulsory exercise program prevalent in Korean schools between 1977 and 1999. The video is set to the militaristic beat of the Korean National Stretch Anthem in a commentary on the ubiquitous pressure to conform and the associated anxiety pervasive across Korean culture.

Works from Mia’s permanent collection are added to the exhibition in Minneapolis, including Do Ho Suh’s Some/One, a 2005 sculpture based on a coat of traditional armor. Composed from thousands of polished military dog tags, the work juxtaposes the collective (represented by the armored sculpture) with the individual (symbolized by the dog tags, each representing a single soldier). Also featured is a selection from Byron Kim’s ongoing Synecdoche portraiture project, currently comprised of more than 400 panels, each approximating the skin color of a person Kim has met.

“The artworks in this exhibition respond to South Korea’s complex history and culture, which have been marked by the division of a country, political upheaval, and economic growth, all within a few short decades,” said Leslie Ureña, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art. “The exhibition has gathered artists who have made dynamic works that are deeply imbued with their shared artistic and social contexts. They invite us to consider the experience of exploring the past, present, and potential future.”

“The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989” is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

MIA - MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART

2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404

artsmia.org