South Korea broadens its view

With positive New Year remarks by the leaders of North and South Korea suggesting a possible thaw in relations on the peninsula, South Koreans this year will be able to see more exhibitions than ever before with North Korean elements.

The Seoul Museum of Art is preparing a North Korea-theme exhibit to mark the 70th year of the division of Korea. The exhibition in July is expected to present a broad range of North Korean contemporary art and offer interesting South Korean views on the North.

The preparations include an attempt to restore channels of communication with the North Korean art scene, mainly through the Mansudae Art Studio Gallery, an art-production site for North Korean artists.

"Mansudae often holds exhibitions in China and overseas, but its links with the South Korean art world have been severed over the last five or six years as inter-Korean relations went downhill," says Yeo Kyung-hwan, curator of the planned exhibition.

This spring the Kukje Gallery will show works by South Korean artist Ham Kyung-ah that are embroidered by anonymous North Korean workers. Ham places orders with the North Koreans, providing digital prints so they can reproduce the embroidery by hand. The works are distributed in small pieces so the North Koreans don’t know what the artwork will look like when it’s assembled in the South.

In July the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art will shed light on Lee Qoede, a South Korea-born artist who defected to the North. Lee’s works were prohibited from display until 1988, when the South Korean government took an interest in discovering why some people had chosen to live in the North when Korea was divided. Lee chose to live in the North while captive in a prison camp during the Korean War.

The exhibition, continuing until October, will be a survey of Lee’s earlier works, from the beginning stage of his career to the time spent in the prison camp.

Art lovers can also look forward to seeing cutting-edge works from March to April by media artist Bill Viola. They entail technical mastery and are embedded with his philosophical ideas.

Media artist Park Hyun-ki, who has been very much overshadowed by Nam June Paik, will be highlighted in an exhibition starting on January 27 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Park has been hailed as a pioneer of media art in South Korea in the 1970s. Some 20,000 of his pieces were donated to the museum in 2012.

Leeum, the Samsung Museum of Art, will highlight the sophistication and elegance of traditional art with an exhibition from July to September of Goryeo Dynasty treasures. The practicality of Korean traditional architecture will also be assayed through blueprints, models and historical documents in November.

Works of foreign painters including abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Italian post-impressionist Amedeo Modigliani and Colombian stylist Fernando Botero will be on view at the Seoul Arts Centre.