Image: Sun Young Byun at Gallery Artside.
Seoul: the galleries
Jongro-gu, on the opposite edge of the Gyeongbok Palace to where most of the big galleries are stationed (Kukje, Hyundai, Arario, etc.), seems to be the place to open up a new gallery space in Seoul. Unencumbered by piddly details such as heritage or planning regulations, the standard practice is to buy a plot, imagine your ideal space – and then build it. A number of galleries have done just this, creating museum-esque spaces of the like you’d give an arm and a leg for in London.
I met Sun Young Byun at one such space, Gallery Artside, to see her solo show “Neutral Value for Absence”. The cavernous basement housed a series of her intricate paintings of patterned psychedelic interiors, including some of her large 3m plus works. I still struggle to imagine how they’ve been done. Her newest paintings (which I hadn’t seen yet) take this patterning to such a level that you can barely make out the perspective that holds it all together – like a blizzard of designs interlocking with each other. A real treat, and a guided tour at that.
Image: Airan Kang
Across the road, Gallery Simon had a most curious and complex show by installation artist Airan Kang. The ground floor held a collection of luminous neon books, glowing on and off in a pulsating brain-like library. These you could pick up and carry around as they pulsed in your hand. Going upstairs, on the first floor was a dark room with an enormous hollow book that you could step inside. As you walked in, depending on the book you had, the room came to life, projecting text from the book you held along with excerpts read out loud amid the lightshow. This was an ambitious, inventive, and a really interactive hi-tech experience: if this is the future of libraries, I’m all for it.
Image: Airan Kang
With the fair being on, most of the other galleries north of the river were installing, so I went to Gangnam and the Nature Poem building, a place that has for some years been a hive of Seoul’s commercial gallery scene. It’s always mixed, but there are usually a few reliable highlights, Michael Schultz being one of them (although the Oliver Dorfer show this time round was for me a little lacklustre).
Image:So Yeun Lee
The most exciting by far was the surprise of a So Yeun Lee solo at Johyun Gallery. Another artist I’ve liked for some time, So Yeun’s works are an ongoing series of stylised self portraits in a myriad of different settings and costumes. She always appears like a distinctively severe chameleon, staged in worlds that range from urban chic to pastoral fairytale to gothic horror. There was one here of her, in an idyllic field on a sunny day, surrounded by healthy cows straight out of a “Good for you” milk advert – and she’s wearing a cowskin coat and shades. I loved it. Sod’s law, they were all sold. Her next show over this side of the world will be with Purdy Hicks, and would be well worth seeing when it happens.
Image:So Yeun Lee
Nearby, the Chungdam Dong galleries were holding in general OK but unremarkable shows – and on the whole the area seemed to have lost a little bit of the excitement it had a couple of years ago. But a bit further off the beaten gallery track, I went to the opening of Andy Harper’s first solo show in Asia, “Towards a New Architecture” at the Page Gallery in Seochu-gu. And my word was it stunning. Walking into a huge, low-lit, beautiful basement space, the far end glowed with an enormous painted globe lit from the inside, every inch of the surface writhing with detailed painting of a kind of engineered hybrid undergrowth. Knowing Andy’s work from London, it was superb to see such a broad and complete show, with the paintings spreading around the walls with a consistent level of intricacy and impact, and displayed in a powerful setting. The opening was busy, very busy by Korean standards, and by all accounts the show was a sell-out by the opening night. It’s a common complaint that many Asian markets have an almost blind fixation with the YBAs, so to be able to see a new generation starting to really make its mark – well, it’s a breath of fresh air, to say the least.
Image:Andy Harper
The evening was polished off by an after-party at a Korean Oktoberfest, complete with giant knuckles of ham and endless runs of unrequested litres of lager, and a conversation with a brain surgeon with almost non-existent English about his enthusiasm for Irish literature. There’s something very pleasant, and occasionally surreal, about Korea for me. Can’t put my finger on it, but I like very much. The next stop was Beijing.
James Freeman Seoul and Beijing a brief overview #1
