Uppsala Art Museum은 1447년 설립되어 북유럽에서는 가장 오래된 Uppsala Universitet (웁살라대학교)의 학문의 도시 Uppsala 에 위치한 시립 미술관이다. ● 웁살라 대학은 8명의 노벨상 수상자를 배출하였으며 국내의 아주대, 서울대, 고려대 및 성균관대와 교류협정을 맺어 한국 리서치 유학생들도 많이 늘고 있는 실정이다. ● 이 뮤지움은 16세기 건설 후 스웨덴의 역사에 중요한 역할을 한 궁전에 위치해 오늘날 미술관 소장 컬렉션 전시 및 스웨덴 국내작가와 국제 현대미술 작가 기획전을 전시 중이다. 미술관 관장님 Elisabeth Fagerstedt 씨는 정치적이면서도 열정적이고 해외 젊은작가층에 귀 기울일 줄 아는 지도자로서 한국 현대미술 작가들의 역동적인 에너지를 여러 국제미술 행사에서 발견해 2011년 봄 국제미술 기획 전시로 A GLOCAL VIEW: KOREAN CONTEMPORARY ART 를 선보일 예정이다. ● 이 전시의 주된 의도는 세계화로 인해 획일화 되어가는 "국적 없는 예술" 과 지역성을 강조함으로서 "다양성을 상실한 예술" 사이의 팽팽한 갈등에 대한 상호간의 문제점들을 진단, 의문하는 것이다. 또한 국제 미술 무대에서 두각을 나타내는 이 참여 작가들이 인식하는 가장 이상적인 "국제적 지역성" 과 "지역적 국제성" 은 무엇인지, 이 이슈에 대해 예술가들이 가지고 있는 영향력은 무엇인지에 대한 의문을 관람자와 함께 풀어나가는 학습장으로서의 역할을 담당하는 것이다. 이러한 세계적 이슈와 시대적 패러다임을 잘 반영한 한국작가들의 작품을 전시함으로서 한국의 동시대 미술의 현황을 알리고 문화적, 이론적 관심이 담긴 담론을 창출하여 학문의 도시 웁살라의 관객과 작가의 경험을 혼합하는 협업의 과정을 조성할 수 있는 전시를 기대한다. ■ 장미영 (Miyoung von Platen)

Bae Joonsung_Costume of Painter - Museum R, Left Legs 2_ Oil and lenticular on canvas_181.9×290.9cm_2009

The opportunity to view international contemporary art in Sweden was limited to those artists hailing from North America and Europe until recently, but this Korean art exhibition is an exponent of the impact of globalization on the international art scene, allowing local audiences to experience the diversity of international art. ● Since 1989, the world has experienced a tremendous international political and social transformation. The changes of the world's socio-political climate with the collapse of USSR, the Tiananmen Square protest, the fall of the Berlin wall, Hungary's independence from communism, The rise from apartheid in South Africa, the removal of restrictions to travel abroad in Korea in 1989 and the advancement of internet communications furthered the era of globalization. Gradually, the effect of globalization on the international art scene began to generate non-Western contemporary art exhibitions like Magiciens de la terre (1989)i at the Centre Georges Pompidou and The Chinese Avant-Garde Show (1993)ii at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, examining the post-modern issues of hybridity, globalized mobility and nomadic identity. Many young non-Western artists were going abroad to study and work, and the growing numbers of artists working in the diaspora were beginning to question the role of international artists in connection with global and local concerns for their art. ● The recent increase of Korean art being shown in renowned museums and galleries around the world can be seen as the result of globalization. However, the crucial question for Korean artists of how to sustain the relationship between international art and traditional Korean art is constantly discussed, as it has been since the period of industrialization in the 1970s. The growing argument between nationalists who insisted that Korean art must represent or be interpreted by specifically Korean sentiment and the liberalists who asserted that strictly emphasising national identity will hinder the development and internationalization of Korean art, generated intense discussions and has played an important role in the reassessment of the identity of Korean art since then. The perplexing question concerning the representational perspectives in art, "Must national art represent, or be interpreted by, a specifically national sentiment?" is not a concern only for Korean art but has become a vital topic of debate also on the international art scene since the millennium. ● The title and concept of this exhibition, A Glocal View: Korean Contemporary Art, seeks to discuss how these artists deal with the rising tension between the demand to accept globalization and the pressure to retain local identity in their art. It is also intended to illustrate why these Korean artists have received increasing international acclaim recently, and how this is shifting the role of artists in terms of global and local representations of the artists' view of themselves. The aim for this exhibition is thus to encourage interested viewers in Sweden to explore the main question of how traditional local values influence artistic creativity and expression, and compare their own experiences of the effect of globalization with these Korean artists. ● Bae Joonsung (b.1967) creates a new kind of multi-layered lenticular oil painting, in which the canvas is overlapped with a transparent acrylic film that is painted and becomes partial sequence oil painting. Although the emphasis in traditional Korean art lies on ink and paper, Bae Joonsung has been interested in the process of Western masters like Jacques-Louis David, Dominique Ingres and John Singer Sargent since he began his art training at the Western art department of the college in Seoul in the mid 1980s. The academic training was based on life-drawing or drawing from plaster statues such as Venus or Agrippa, not Eastern images of Bodhisattvas. In his recent series The Costume of the Painter (2006) and Museum (2007), he begins his works by photographing museum sites in the West and female nude in the East, followed by the process from sketch and painting to layering. In these series Bae Joonsung demonstrates his observation that the artists or viewers who grew up in the West seeing paintings by Van Dyck or Vermeer must have a different way of looking at Western oil paintings than those in the East who began experimenting with Western art and culture. Using both photography and painting, he suggests new ways of "seeing" and "being seen" and explores the limits of perception of the structure of painting and the static nature of the art form in the changing aesthetics of the global art practice. Einstein defined the existence of a fourth dimension that is time in The Theory of Relativity (1905) which has impacted on our understanding of space as relative and

Kim Dong Yoo_Marylin Monroe (John F. Kennedy)_Oil on Canvas_162.2×130.3 cm_2009

unstable. Hence, our view of the world cannot be understood in a purely three-dimensional way, and space can no longer be seen as finally fixed or measurable but depends on the situation of movement or stasis we happen to be in at the time of looking. Bae Joonsung's works present fundamental questions concerning our perception of three-dimensionality, the reality and non-reality of place, orientalism and occidentalism, movement and still life – that together illustrate his interest in the relationship between "art and its viewers" and "the exhibition space and the time of looking" in the era of globalization. ● Kim Dong Yoo's (b. 1965) approach to painting is deeply complex. Where Bae Joonsung creates a humorous fusion of photography and painting of the female nude exploring modern-day notions of beauty, morality and the concept of traditional European painting, Kim Dong Yoo is a traditional painter who painstakingly composes and paints hundreds of small faces of two contrasting iconic figures, using a variety of brushes and syringes on the canvas. At first view, his paintings recall Pop Art, but at second glance, paintings such as Mao Zedong made of Marilyn Monroe (2010) convey the satirical tensions of power interplay, capitalism, vanity and the role of mass media in contemporary society. The unconventional portrait juxtaposing public figures is based on memories from his youth in the late 1970s, when Korea began its rapid economic growth. It conjures up the myriad of meanings associated with how Korean art began to be profoundly influenced by the West of that time. The association of the two iconic faces may appear to represent his acknowledgement of how communism transforms into capitalism, but his obsession with studying and expressing how faces can reveal the personality, constitution and cultural codes of human beings is his central concern. His statement about his art as "masterpieces of Western art re-painted and crumpled" reveals his fascination for concepts of "distance and intimacy" and "macro-and-micro perspectives", which all seem to lead to new ideas and perceptions of "merging and mixing" in our "global and local" contemporary society.

Jung Yeondoo_Handmade Memories – Barley_ Dual channel HD video on LCD displays mounted on wall: Duration 48:45 min_Edition 3/6_ 2 Aps_2008_Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery New York / Kukje Gallery, Seoul

In his analysis of memory in Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson suggests that memory is of a deeply spiritual nature, serving the need to orient present action by inserting relevant memories. His notions of memories and his view of the world as dynamic rather than static and immutable are reflected in the relationship between "memory" and "present" as active and influential components in Jung Yeondoo's (b.1969) works. Jung Yeondoo studied art in Seoul and London. His photography, video work and installations to date operate in the margin between reality and fantasy. Jung Yeondoo's double-screen video works, Handmade Memories (2008), reveal the active role of experiences, memories and dreams in the perception of anonymous individuals. The centrepiece of this work was an installation titled Time Capsule (2008), in which a mobile photo booth provided visitors with the opportunity to place themselves in a Seoul landscape of the past. Viewers were then given the printed image of themselves in the past as a souvenir and led to experience his combined video and stage performance installations where they encounter the stories of six elderly people who would otherwise have remained strangers. In each video Jung Yeondoo interviews them and asks, "What was the most memorable event in your life?" The left screen, parallel to the emotionally-charged video interviews, shows the artist and his assistants recreating and delivering narrative

Lee Dongwook_Untitled_Photograph_142×142 cm_2010_Courtesy of Artist and Arario Gallery

installations based on the elderly people's recollections. In Handmade Memories, Jung Yeondoo addresses the phenomenon of rapid change in today's individualised society, one of the effects of globalization, and how Korean history, social class, memories and dreams of the local faith are perceived and represented through a process of otherwise-forgotten recollections. ● Lee Dongwook (b. 1976) reveals his curiosity and his observations of live organisms that are totally unaffected by the environment outside the microcosm they inhabit. His imaginative renditions of miniature human figures are derived from his hobby of collecting everything from toys to glass bottles, cans, plastic objects, etc. and his desire to gather, collect and classify them. His solo exhibitions titled Inbreeding (2003) and Mouthbreeder (2004) portrayed the characteristics of contemporary human society's utter hopelessness and showed his fascination for the organisms that live within restricted spaces, such as goldfish and caged birds. Lee Dongwook, as a member of the globalization generation being the youngest artist in this exhibition, appears to investigate the paradox of how to survive in our civilization's compromised system and social hypertensions. There is an undeniable element of disturbing emotional charge in Lee Dongwook's art, reminiscent of Jake and Dino Chapman's Neo-Victorian art that often suggests very disturbing abusive aspects of society. However, Lee Dongwook's naked human figures express post-human powerful yet basic feelings, not aggressive but enigmatic, and the nudity of his sculptures seems to reflect his intention not to indicate either the social status or cultural origin of individuals, as if they were in the diaspora in an age of globalization. ● Altogether, this exhibition tries to underline the need to keep an open mind. The works of these artists stress the importance of the spectators and their interaction with the works of art. The four leading Korean artists who are presented here also exemplify perpetual issues in art – tradition, techniques, the development of science, and the use of new materials in the today's global art practice. The aim has been to create an exhibition that is exciting and diverse, demonstrating that "the international" – what we all have in common – is not a substitute for "the local" – what these artists carry with them from their own cultural backgrounds. ● i Magiciens de la terre curated by Jean-Herbert Martin at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989 was considered to be the first major international contemporary art exhibition that included non-Western artists' works at a public institution in the West to the general public. The show aimed to confront problems presented by several exhibitions that perpetuated a colonialist mentality, confronting the idea of "Primitivism" that was only interested in displaying tribal art with little or no historical evidence of the works. This show addressed the issues of colonialist ideology and ethnic stereotyping in the international art scene's so-called "centres" (USA and Western Europe) and "margins" (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia) through visual and sensual experiences of the art. ● ii In 1989, a major Chinese contemporary art exhibition called China/Avant-Garde was presented at the National Gallery in Beijing. The exhibition featured 185 artists from all over China and covered everything from traditional painting and abstract oil painting to installation and performances. Since then, many Chinese cutting-edge artists, the "Chinese avant-garde" have left for the West. The Chinese Avant-Garde Show was later exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 1993. A second version of The Chinese Avant-Garde Show toured from Berlin to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Oxford and was shown with a new exhibition titled Silent Energy, curated by David Elliot in 1993.The Chinese Avant-Garde Show was not intended to show art only, but covered the cultural attitudes and concepts of recently-modernized China that stretched beyond the forms of art that contained them. ■ 장미영 (Miyoung von Platen)

■ Inauguration and reception Saturday, April 9th, 3 PM at Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala Castle. Jin-Hong RIM, cultural attaché and first secretary at the South Korean Embassy to Sweden will introduce the inauguration. Welcome speech by the Museum Director Elisabeth Fagerstedt. Co-curator Miyoung von Platen will present the exhibition. VIP reception in the castle 4:30 – 6:30 PM Uppsala Art Museum will be providing champagne and canapés Uppsala Art Museum and the museum director Elisabeth Fagerstedt warmly welcomes you to the exhibition!

■ exhibition event During the course of the exhibition, the following activities will take place: Wednesday April 13th, 6 PM Theme: A Glocal View Swedish-Korean cultural encounters of the past and present. Tobias Hübinette Ph D in Koreanology and researcher at the Muticultural Centre. Hübinette wrote his thesis on the issue of Korean adoptions and has conducted research regarding the representation of Asians in Swedish contemporary culture. He will illuminate examples from popular culture and show the tension between post-colonial structures and the dynamic growth that South Korea is the perfect example of. Saturday May 21st, 2 PM Guided tour: A Glocal View - Korean Contemporary Art. Curator: Miyoung von Platen. Please note: the guided tour will be conducted in English. The guided tour will present the artists and introduce the South Korean art scene.

Vol.20110409a | A Glocal View: Korean Contemporary Art展