[Gallery Walk] 'A Place for Connection and Exchange' Arko Art Center 50th Anniversary Exhibition

'Where Do the Wrinkles Pass?' Until March 10 Next Year
‘Creative Collabo’ by 9 Teams and 22 Artists

"Unlike the usual practice where museums take the lead in selecting artists, we relinquished that authority and envisioned the museum as a connective space through the joint participation of diverse individuals."

Installation view of the artwork by artists Choi Jin-wook × Park Yu-mi. [Photo courtesy of Arko Art Center]

Marking its 50th anniversary, the Arko Art Center of the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service is holding the commemorative exhibition "Where Do the Wrinkles Pass?" until March 10 next year. At a press conference held on the 7th at the Arko Art Center in Daehak-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, curator Cha Seung-joo, who planned the exhibition, explained, "This exhibition was conceived by exploring how the museum’s future will be drawn through various points of contact, considering that the museum’s present is the trajectory of intersections and the outcome of paths."

Unlike typical exhibitions commemorating anniversaries, the Arko Art Center boldly dedicates its space to the exchange and communication of artistic subjects, declaring itself as an "exhibition hall that grows together" through this exhibition. Director Lim Geun-hye emphasized the intention behind this commemorative exhibition, stating, "This is an opportunity to reaffirm the past of the Arko Art Center as a place where diverse artistic subjects have exchanged, communicated, and grown together, as well as to confirm its future direction."

The exhibition features nine teams comprising 22 artists with different relationships. The exhibition artists were selected by receiving recommendations from artists who had previously participated in exhibitions, suggesting other generation artists they wished to engage with, thus forming teams. Through this, over 200 works including new pieces and archival materials from nine different teams?Seo Yong-seon & Kim Min-woo & Yeo Song-joo, Shin Hak-cheol & Kim Gi-ra, Park Ki-won & Lee Jin-hyung, Lee Yong-baek & Jin Ki-jong, Jeong Jeong-yeop & Jang Pa, Jo Sook-jin & Lee Hee-jun, Choi Jin-wook & Park Yu-mi, Chae Woo-seung & Choi Soo-ryun, Hong Myung-seop & Kim Hee-ra?are presented to visitors.

More than 80% of the recommended artists are exhibiting at the Arko Art Center for the first time. This exhibition also showcases posthumous and previously unpublished works by late artists Gong Seong-hoon, Kim Cha-seop, and Jo Seong-mook, who left significant achievements in the museum’s exhibition history, alongside contemporary artists.

Installation view of the work by Shin Hak-cheol × Kim Ki-ra.
[Photo by Arko Art Center]

Shin Hak-cheol, renowned for his paintings reflecting Korea’s modern and contemporary history and the sorrows of the people, collaborates with Kim Gi-ra to explore concepts such as various communities, politics, ideology, groups, wounds, and generational conflicts in Korean society, focusing on the points where individual and collective desires and phenomena become distorted. Shin presents a large-scale painting titled "The Korean Massacre during the Great Kanto Earthquake," depicting the massacre of Koreans led by the Japanese military in 1923, while Kim unveils a new video work as an homage, deeply contemplating human suffering sharing the spirit of the era.

Seo Yong-seon, who has continued a unique artistic practice within the lineage of expressionist painting, presents recent drawing works related to the "Amtaedo Tenant Dispute." Collaborating with Yeo Song-joo and Kim Min-woo, Seo expands his existing work forms by exhibiting object and media works. The media space responding to sound and the sculptural experimental works on reality dynamically express the human figure, which has been both the subject and theme of expression, through the relationship between reality and objects.

Installation view of works by artists Lee Yong-baek × Jin Ki-jong. [Photo by Arko Art Center]

Media artist Lee Yong-baek, in exchange with longtime collaborator Jin Ki-jong, attempts to integrate their independent works into a unified whole based on shared reflections. Their work, titled "Error Code: Portal," conveys a narrative about an apocalyptic crisis. The audience realizes through error messages that the ordinary landscape before their eyes was all an illusion of a virtual world. The dramatic mise-en-sc?ne of a diorama set alternating between the night sea and a blue screen challenges viewers with the question, "What is the future of humanity heading toward, and where should it go?"

Jo Sook-jin and Lee Hee-jun, active in the United States and Korea respectively, engage in mutual exchange based on the language of "abstraction," set against the temporal background and urban landscapes where their works were born. Jo’s work closely observes and imagines spaces where people and buildings interact over time to form unique aesthetic qualities, or collects neglected materials such as discarded wood and furniture to preserve accumulated traces and find beauty and vitality, transforming them into artworks. Based on the sensibility gained from this, Lee presents new works. This is a new attempt to connect their works through abstraction methodology, using the city’s past, present, and its surface and underside as supports for installation and painting.

Park Ki-won, who has transformed the sense of space and modes of experience using everyday materials easily found around us, exhibits recent furniture works in the exhibition. As a result of methodological exchanges and dialogues about each other’s working methods, Park and Lee present a collaborative homage work by painting three paintings?two by Park and one by Lee?joined together.

Installation view of the work by Jeong Jeong-yeop × Jang Pa.
[Photo by Arko Art Center]

Jeong Jeong-yeop focuses on the energy emitted through his exchange with Jang Pa, concentrating on points where different generations harmonize and clash. In this process, the female mythological images appearing in Jang’s work and the collective dance of life forms other than humans, blending with the female deity, are embodied as moths, as if these beings are life forms wandering the exhibition space.

Longtime mentor and mentee Choi Jin-wook and Park Yu-mi develop the theme surrounding Park’s "Female Fisherwoman" through Choi’s painting medium, sharing a sense of inquiry. This serves as a kind of artistic annotation and response, where Choi willingly immerses or infiltrates Park’s thematic world.

Chae Woo-seung and Choi Soo-ryun decided to engage in exchange out of curiosity about each other’s artistic attitudes. In this exhibition, based on their shared interest in the mixed use of images and text, as well as folk beliefs and mythological images of a society, they reveal how their works penetrate and respond to each other within a single space, vividly presenting this process to the audience.

Im Geun-hye, director of Arko Art Center, is giving a greeting speech at the press conference commemorating the opening of the Arko Art Center's 50th anniversary exhibition "Where Do the Wrinkles Pass?" held on the afternoon of the 7th at Arko Art Center in Dongsung-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul. Photo by Yonhap News

The Arko Art Center opened in 1974 in Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu, and relocated to Dongsung-dong in 1979, where it remains today. After an initial decade focused mainly on hosting external exhibitions, it intermittently organized self-planned exhibitions from the late 1990s. Subsequently, it was renamed Maronie Art Center (2002) and then Arko Art Center (2005), establishing itself as a museum centered on self-planned exhibitions.

The exhibition title "Where Do the Wrinkles Pass?" is borrowed from a phrase in Gilles Deleuze’s "The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque." Director Lim said, "We aimed to incorporate the fold’s attributes as a system of thought?its intersections of past and future, and the manifold nature arising from various traces and points of contact?into the exhibition. Through this, we hope visitors will consider that the museum’s present is the trajectory and outcome of intersections and paths, and reflect on the question, 'What intersections will shape the museum’s future?'"

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.