EXHIBITION

X : Korean Art in the Nineties SeMA Gold

SeMA Seosomun Museum of Art 1F, 12/13/2016 - 02/19/2017

61 Deoksugung-gil, Seosomun-dong, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea

ABOUT

Ending the year of 2016 Seoul Museum of Art presents SeMA Gold X : Korean Art in the 1990s. SeMA Gold is part of the special biennial exhibition series; SeMA Green, for senior artists; SeMA Gold, for mid-career artists; and SeMA Blue, for emerging artists. Geared towards mid-career artists who have already established their own artistic practices and are at the forefront of the Korean art scene, SeMA Gold invites artists to participate and respond to its given themes. Different from its previous incarnations, this year SeMA Gold focuses on the 1990s, a turning point in Korean art, and attempts to reflect on the significance of contemporary Korean art in aesthetics and cultural history.

Symptoms that signify milestones in the 1990s — the 90s’ zeitgeist that differentiates itself from the 70s and the 80s, are sensed in the post-ideological practices of Generation X who represented this era. To be more specific, we can see small groups of movements and projects that re-codified the various cultural signifiers of the time such as art, technology, mass media and subcultures into an emancipated underground language.

The 1990s have already become a new cultural keyword through a recent TV soap opera 'Reply' series gaining lots of popularity. Summoning the 1990s in the name of contemporary art, this exhibition focuses on the paradigm shifts of contemporary art — Postmodernism and Globalism—, and focuses on its influence on today's art and dynamic relations. This will become an opportunity to illuminate the art historical achievements of the leading artists from Generation X who, as enfant-terribles shifted the ground of the Korean art world in the 1990s.

X: Korean Art in the 1990s constructs the exhibition’s narrative by reconstructing works from that era and amassing various archives. In regards to the concern that this retrospective exhibition might become a simple historicization or sentimentalist nostalgia, the exhibition re-contextualizes art of the 90s within the specificity of its time and place, focusing on visualizing its continuity with the present. I would like to thank all the participating artists who have shown us regard and have given us such tremendous support by presenting works and lending materials.

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