The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)
Museum experience description
This is South Korea’s sole national art museum. The museum has only one Korean name, however as the words “modern” and “contemporary” fall into or out of fashion, it modified its English name thrice. The museum was established in 1969 in the side yard of the Palace of Gyeongbok. Its prime objective was to conduct the National Art Show annually. Its evolution represents the economic and political restructuring of the region. The narrative of the museum is markedly different from those recorded in the West (Kim, 2018).
Eight exhibition halls spread over three floors of this large building. Exhibition of a large selection of works by the Korean contemporary artist Suh Se Ok is on display. Really loved witnessing the series and designs of a large project of falling water and sounding out different English words and phrases also. In the downstairs, there were several unusual works. We liked the robotic junk activities on the floor that were roaming around. That sure had a way of catching your attention regardless of whether you enjoyed the job or not. Good for everyone having interest in art. It is too complex for us to grasp. There are free lockers to hold a large bag and coats on the first floor. Even if the collection/ exhibits is of inadequate importance, the architecture and the spectacular view are fascinating enough to grant the museum a go. A presentation of an artist including the establishment of the “painting table” gives a feeling that artist is talking about his work.
Biographical sketch
Suh Se-ok is an Oriental painting artist from South Korea. A skilled calligraphist, stamp craftsman, poet and philosopher born in the year 1929 in Daegu, Korea. After graduating from the Seoul National University College of Arts, he became an artist exploring the contemporary and autonomous developmental world through a wonderful depiction of the abilities of the colorless pale Indian ink and the blank and peripheral spaces of oriental ink-and-wash painting in the Oriental paintings’ lyrical abstract realm. In the reformation of classical ink painting in Korea, he played a crucial role. The human figure is often portrayed in his large-scale experimental, black ink drawings. The artist group Mungnimhoe, or Ink Forest Society, was founded by Suh, which helped to break away from the Japanese nihonga painting style of the period (Lutfy, 1994). The admirable works from him include “Seolhwayijang” and “People handling the sun”. He has won a vast variety of art awards in Korea and has featured in several overseas exhibits, namely the 7th São Paulo Biennial in 1963, the Korean Arts Exhibition in Malaysia in 1966, the 1st Biennial of Contemporary Painting in Italy in 1969, the Korean Arts Festival in France in 1967, and the 1st Cannes Painting Festival in 1969. He also served as the delegate of Korea in the IAA’s annual regular assembly convened in Tokyo, Japan in 1966 (Ahn, 2003).
Suh Se Ok assembled a collective of young artists for protesting against the problems of the art community at the time, such as obsolete attitudes, Japanese style, National Art Exhibition indictments, cliques in the art world, and organized the first exhibition in 1960. He called the party “Mungnimhoe” which was the first and only meeting in Korea of progressive young Korean painting artists,’ and their mission was to tear down the old traditions of Korean art and search for new trends (Se-ok, 2002).
Critical analysis
A variety of works from People, his ongoing series of ink paintings created between the 1960s and 2000s, exhibited by Suh Se Ok. Crafted on large sheets of rice and mulberry paper with extended brushes, the works depict visually stunning silhouettes made from dots and longitudinal strokes that differ in size, thickness, and color. Each artwork is easily developed, but only after a long time of reflection, and the effect is a quiet but concentrated visual poetry that encourages repetitive looks.
Ink painting has increasingly been recognized by such customs as a classical technique. But Suh Se Ok started adapting the concepts of what is regarded as Muninhwa’s ‘literati art,’ originating from calligraphy and poetry and historically accomplished by noble scholars, starting in the 1950s. Suh Se Ok created a new, radical and conceptual visual vocabulary in this strategy that dismissed the contemporary spirit of reckless experimentation in courtesy of one that both accepted and built on historical instances. The original proposal of Suh Se Ok to the process was challenging then, but was also pigeonholed by great awareness and intellect. He was also not alone during his emphasis; he founded a collective named the Mungnimhoe, or Ink Forest Society, in 1959, which pursued special new ink painting styles that had their origins in literary painting.
The remarkably limited painterly rehearsal that Suh Se Ok and his collaborators created, stripped of all color, detail, and perspective space, enables a variety of analysis. His works constitute the boundary around symbolism and imagination, and although the People series explicitly portrays the human body in specific, the artist has indeed described the works as referring to “shadows on the stage of life” (in Korean, geu-rim-ja). A few of his pictures often imitate Korean idiomatic expressions; Suh Se Ok is an outstanding philosopher, artist, calligrapher, and seal jeweller as an incisive ruling elite painter raised in a family of medieval theologians. Suh Se Ok as well as the other Mungnimhoe artists born and raised under Japanese occupation and originally viewed their argumentative vision as an overt threat to the conventional Japanese nihonga painting prevalent at the time. There is also a political aspect to the powerful presence of his works.
Over than half of the exhibit was dedicated to large ink paintings from 1997–2007 on mulberry paper. While these gridded and stacked linear type compositions initially appear abstract, their titles point to their figurative material (usually people or person). Thus for example, People (2000), 91 by 54 inches, moves from reading as a loose net of brushstrokes to a portrayal of hundreds of human beings bound by their arms and legs spread. Suh’s entangled formations fluctuate between interpretation and pure mark-making, likely taking hints from Korean phonetic symbols. It remains simple to re-engage with their symbolic qualities even after having understood the figurative role of his strokes. What contributes here is the impressive bunch of options he can make ink do-sometimes it crouches like a cloud of magnetic particles fixed by an invisible magnet in place, other times it dips deep into the paper, but with a dim, quasi-sculptural appearance it can also throb. I really like the way he always tends to dip his brush back into the ink again in no hurry, causing successive marks to grow lighter, an ‘imperfection’ that adds to the strength of his work immeasurably. Two interesting videos included in the show (one created by Suh’s son Doh-ho Suh, an artist better known than his father in this country showed Suh working in his Seoul workshop, often wearing baseball bat-sized bamboo brushes to apply strokes to large sheets of paper on the floor.
