SeMA Bukseoul: Ju Jae Hwan vs Kim Dong Kyu “Title Match” + “Neighbors and Strangers” + Lee Ju Yong “Photographic Studio”

Seoul, July 26 – October 16, 2016 (Title Match), July 22 – October 26, 2016 (Neighbors), May 3 – August 15, 2016 (Lee Ju Yong), http://sema.seoul.go.kr

The Ju Jae Hwan 주재환 and Kim Dong Kyu 김동규 “Title Match” exhibition has been a continuation of the title match series that puts together an artist of an older generation with a younger emerging artist. This time the central topic has been that of war, violence and destruction. In Ju Jae Hwan’s work (that’s the older artist, *1941), the approach has been primarily mimetic – models of guns, soldiers backpacks, an image of a B-52 bomber compared in scale to a Bin Laden toy, etc. He attempted to visualize the absurdity of violence by objectifying it in the form of things. Kim Dong Kyu (the younger one, *1978) took a more conceptual approach which unfortunately meant that a lot of the (Korean) text-based works stayed beyond the reach of my understanding. Nevertheless there was at least one work that I could enjoy, consisting of seven inflatables similar to those placed in front of shops for advertising purposes, only that this time they had the form of rocket missiles, with some text written on them (Korean).

The second floor of the museum had a collaborative exhibition of artworks created by students from universities and art schools in the North part of Seoul (“Neighbors and Strangers”). Projects explored different aspects of the urban space, from accessibility to mapping and social interactions. Once again, it was quite text heavy, with displays of sketches, research diaries and documentary videos that were all in Korean. But the overall feeling was one of coherence, hinting at the involvement of a strong curatorial voice in the center, advising everyone on what is “right” and “wrong” to do and taking care of the overall exhibition architecture to achieve an art-professional outcome.

The third space of the museum contained an exhibition of Korean studio photography history and present. Lee Ju Yong seemed to be both a collector of historical photographs and studio equipment and a studio portrait photographer in his own right. One floor featured a series of contemporary large-size portrait photographs and the other floor featured a historical perspective, composed both old photographs (separated into three groups according to nationality – China, Japan and Korea), empty photo frames as well as two historic photo studio backdrops and large vintage cameras. The exhibit was quite informative and engaging, without being too complex or overly demanding. The early Korean photographs were quite fascinating, and it would be interesting to know more about what specifically they depicted. Especially the bare-breasted Korean mothers looked quite unusual and I wondered about the time period and context of that.

Overall, SeMA BukSeoul did not disappoint. This is a family friendly museum, focusing on the local community, which however manages to keep a good artistic standard of the exhibits and even I felt like being able to take something away from it despite being a statistical outlier as not many foreigners probably venture into this part of town.