KMK: Against the Sculptural

A few weekends ago my friends and I went to the Seoul Arts Museum to see the newest exhibition: Against the Sculptural. The show focuses on sculpture in a new and exciting direction.

Forget the old school view of sculpture. Forget the traditional stone and wood what you see is what you get. The artists of this exhibit want to open your eyes to nontraditional materials and new uses of space.The exhibit is divided into three sections. Section one is The operation of Force Unstable. Section two is Material imagination and Objects Trivial. Section three is Vaporizing Sculpture Fluid.

When you first walk into the exhibit you come  face to face with SeonGhi Bakh’s An Aggregate. It’s a piece made entirely of pieces of coal suspended by transparent wire. The coal is shaped into five forms each signifying the various stages of water droplet falling to the ground. It’s beautiful and elegant peice that contrasts nicely with the usual coarse nature of coal.

The next piece in this section I found intriguing was EuYoung Hong’s Fragmented Space. Here the artist uses huge cubes embedded in the walls to present a disjointed, off center, feeling of uncertainty. It’s jarring to see how the corners and edges that jut out in strange places transform a typical space into an almost fun-house landscape.

Section two deals with taking ordinary objects and materials and presenting them in a new visually arresting way. By far my favorite piece of this section and the entire show is SiYeon Kim’s Thorns.  The artist hand cut hundreds of soap bars and positioned them in a corner of the museum in rows, piles, and shapes to evoke a fantasy landscape where the beautiful curves and forms belie the visually sharp edges which is contradicted by the knowledge that those edges are simply soap bars. It works on another level as well by incorporating the fragrant smell of the soap.

This is also the section that had the piece I most dispised as well. I don’t even know the artist because once I realized what the artist had done the disgust flipped a switch and I tuned everything else about the piece out. All you need to know is that it’s called Shit Ball. No euphemisms necessary. To the artist’s credit they did incorporate duct tape. Bull shit never summed up a piece of art ever so aptly.

That fiasco was quickly forgotten when I encountered Seung Jung’s Multi Complex. It’s a whimsical piece involving dozens of plug in converters all attached to each other into one long twisting snake like piece. Two hair dryers are attached and they periodically turn on. From afar it resembles half of a DNA strand or like some insect creature.

Section three is where the artists really took flight with reinventing what sculpture is. Here artists like Onishi Yasuaki whose piece, Untitled(plastic bag), deals with air, and white space. The work presents dozens of large transparent plastic bags floating at various heights bringing into question the usual heaviness and solidity of typical sculpture.

Jungsun Oh’s Invisible Boundary shows a video clip of the artist behind a pane of glass. Periodically steam fills the space and obscures the artist in a cloudy fog. For me it sums up  the conflict between the transitory and permanent nature of art.

I highly recommend seeing the exhibit. The price is under 1,000won. You can’t beat that. The exhibit runs until February 16th 2010.

Seoul Museum of Art