Postmodernism and Aesthetics : Collide or Steer?
THE AHL FOUNDATION’S 15TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION
Venue: Gallery Korea at The Korean Cultural Center New York
460 Park Ave., 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016
Oct 10 – Dec. 14, 2018
Gallery Hour: Monday – Friday ( 10:00 – 5:00 PM)
Opening Reception: Wednesday, Oct. 10th, 6:00-8:00 PM
Artists: Buhm Hong, Heejung Cho, Joo Yeon Woo, Hong Seon Jang, Kate-hers RHEE, Seongmin Ahn,
Kira Nam Green, Sung Ho Choi, Jung S. Kim, Jogn Seunghwan Lee, Yaloo (Jiyeon Lim), Zaun lee, Sangwoo Koh, Ran Hwang, Tai Hwa Goh, Jaye Rhee, Jang Soon Im, Kakyoung Lee, Sangmi Yoo, Jiyoun Lee-Lodge, Eunsook Lee, Yeon Jin Kim
Curated by KyunHee Pyun
The Korean Cultural Center New York is pleased to present the last exhibition from Call for Artists 2018 Program. A group of artists in this exhibition has received prestigious awards of the contemporary art competition by the AHL Foundation, spent their youth in the 1990s in the US.
Postmodernism in South Korea gained a momentum in the era during an economic boom in the 1990s after the Seoul Olympic Games and the democratization movements. While a milieu of fine arts departments at major universities as well as art markets in Seoul still maintained purity of high modernism of abstract painting, younger generations sought for new perspectives of art and tried to establish an innovative paradigm.
When these artists arrived for study abroad toward their MFA degrees in the US in the late 1990s, postmodernism already passed its apex. Many artists from Korea were torn between thorny issues of progressive politics including institutional injustice and aesthetic pursuits innate in their artistic sensibility. Some turned their attention to the conceptual art while many never eliminated their intrinsic values and skills in formal aesthetics.
This exhibition overviews the current status of twenty-two major artists from Korea living and working in the US. As transnational or immigrant artists, they adapted their artistic vocabulary to the demand of the New York art market, global art biennials, local art communities, or glossy art fairs around the world. Artists are divided into groups of popular binary themes of Postmodernism and High Modernism: appropriation/originality; local/ international; simulacra/real; banal/avant-garde; and personal/universal. This does not mean that these works bear significance in these limited fields. They emit versatile meanings beyond these categories. The divisions are tinted glasses through which one can an undercurrent flow of historical forces behind success, failure, recovery, struggle, and tenacity of these artists. Thus, one can discover ingenious ways in which these artists reconciled with or contradicted ideas of postmodernism while they maintained their high standards of aestheticism.
This Exhibition presented by Korean Cultural Center New York, organized and supported by AHL Foundation and sponsored by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
