Meekyoung Shin

                                                (koreajoongangdaily.com)

Celestial Whisper

Seoul Museum of Art | SeMA

4 June 2024–5 May 2025

In her exhibition “Celestial Whisper,” Meekyoung Shin’s sculptural practice emerges as a potent counterpoint to the mythic materiality of Joseph Beuys, offering a fresh interrogation of substance, symbol, and the spectral in contemporary art. Where Beuys famously deployed fat as a shamanistic conductor of warmth and energy, Shin’s choice of soap as her primary medium introduces a complex dialectic of presence and absence, permanence and ephemerality.

Shin’s angels, hovering in a liminal space between the corporeal and the ethereal, recall Beuys’s conception of sculpture as a conduit for spiritual transformation. However, while Beuys’s use of fat was grounded in a personal mythology of survival and healing, Shin’s soap angels engage in a more nuanced dialogue with religious iconography and consumer culture. The artist’s initial inspiration from a fragrance named “Angel” points to a postmodern conflation of the sacred and the commodified, a tension that permeates her work.

The materiality of soap in Shin’s sculptures simultaneously evokes the purification rituals associated with angelic encounters and the quotidian act of cleansing. This duality challenges the viewer to reconsider the boundaries between the mundane and the divine, much as Beuys sought to collapse the distinction between art and life. Yet, where Beuys’s fat sculptures were often opaque and inscrutable, Shin’s soap angels oscillate between transparency and opacity, literally embodying the liminal state they represent.

The gradual erosion of Shin’s sculptures over time introduces a temporal dimension that resonates with Beuys’s interest in alchemical processes. However, while Beuys often emphasized transformation as a means of social and political change, Shin’s focus on the inexorable dissolution of her works speaks to a more contemplative engagement with themes of impermanence and transcendence. The scent of the soap, accessible only to those in physical proximity to the sculptures, further underscores the experiential nature of Shin’s work, creating an olfactory aura that echoes Beuys’s concern with the sensory aspects of his installations.

In her exploration of angels as beings that are “known yet unseen,” Shin taps into a rich vein of art historical and theological discourse. Her approach, however, is distinctly contemporary, employing the paradoxical qualities of soap to materialize the immaterial. This strategy recalls Beuys’s use of fat to embody abstract concepts, but Shin’s execution is more subtle, relying on the interplay of light, scent, and the viewer’s imagination to conjure the angelic presence.

Ultimately, “Celestial Whisper” presents a compelling evolution of the artistic concerns that animated Beuys’s practice. Shin’s soap angels – these ephemeral Ozymandiai – offer a nuanced meditation on the nature of constancy and continuity in an age obsessed with iterations and change. 

Yoo Youngkuk

                                                              (yooyongkuk.org)

  

Yoo Youngkuk: Stand on the Golden Mean

PKM Gallery, Seoul

21 August–10 October 2024

Entering PKM Gallery’s “Yoo Youngkuk: Stand on the Golden Mean,” one is immediately confronted with the dialectical tension between modernist abstraction and the specificity of Korean landscape. Yoo’s work, spanning four decades, presents a complex interplay between Western formalism and an indigenous aesthetic sensibility.

The exhibition’s curation is chronological and risks a teleological reading of Yoo’s practice. However, Yoo himself wrestled with the idea of representation in the face of rapid modernization and geopolitical upheaval. How does one represent such rapidly shifting sands upon which no foundation can stand?  

The inclusion of previously unseen works from the artist’s estate provides a crucial intervention in the established narrative of Yoo’s oeuvre. These pieces, particularly from the 1970s, demonstrate a heightened tension between abstraction and referentiality, challenging simplistic readings of Yoo’s practice as a linear progression towards pure form.

Of particular interest is Yoo’s treatment of color. He favors vibrant reds and deep blues that simultaneously evokes the Korean landscape and engages with the international language of modernist abstraction. This bivalence points to the broader question of how non-Western artists navigate the globalized discourse of modernism in terms of their own local traditions and experiences.

The exhibition’s title, “Stand on the Golden Mean,” appears to position Yoo’s work as a harmonious resolution of opposing forces. However, this framing risks obscuring the productive contradictions and unresolved tensions that animate his practice. A more critical reading might consider how Yoo’s work embodies the very impossibility of such a “golden mean” in the context of Korea’s rapid modernization and complex cultural negotiations.

Ultimately, “Stand on the Golden Mean” offers a necessary, if at times uncritical, reassessment of Yoo Youngkuk’s contribution to Korean modernism. While the exhibition succeeds in highlighting the artist’s unique synthesis of abstract form and landscape sensibility, it leaves room for further interrogation of the socio-political contexts that shaped his practice. As such, it leaves viewers of Yoon’s art a sense of dislocation, or at least a suspicion that the art’s context has been de-boned and forgotten in the landfills of Korea’s cultural past. 

Petrit Halilaj

Abetare (Loja me Topa)

The Page Gallery, Seoul

22 August–21 September 2024

Notes and Ideas on Petrit Halilaj

The Artist as Archaeologist 

In Kosovo, 1986: a child is born, named Petrit Halilaj.

In Kosovo, 1997: War breaks out. 

Picasso was once famously quoted: 

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael,

but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Halilaj didn’t have to learn.

War taught him to see through a child’s eyes,

forever.

The Abetare project:

An alphabet of loss,

A lexicon of survival.

He returns to Runik, a prodigal artist, in 2012,

finds his Rosetta Stone in classroom debris.

Encounters the hieroglyphs of youth:

stick figures, daydreams, unfinished homework.

What is memory but a palimpsest, onion-skinned and delicate?

Halilaj scrapes away layers,

reveals the pentimento of a generation.

His soccer team: eleven players,

some human, some not.

A snowman guards the goal.

A cartoon defends midfield.

This is how children wage war:

with imagination as their weapon,

Imagination as their therapy.

In a world of walls, Halilaj builds bridges,

spans the chasm between past and present,

between self and other.

His art: a referendum on remembrance,

a manifesto of resilience.

In the end, what survives of us?

Chalk marks on a green desk,

a child’s drawing brought to life,

the indomitable spirit of play

in the face of unspeakable oppression.

Halilaj shows us:

In vulnerability, strength.

In fragments, wholeness.

In the ruins of a childhood in Runik,

the seeds of rebirth.

                                                                   (nytimes.com)