Art Stuff!!! Finally!!!!

So while I was in Seoul this past weekend, outside of taking photos of funny Engrish things, I did finally get to check out some art stuff. I first went to Arario Gallery, where I saw a solo painting show of Jin Meyerson's works. His paintings are really ambitious, taking imagery from various sources of our contemporary visual culture and turning them into a vortex of both representational imagery and abstract color on a large scale. For those that know me, it's not really my cup of tea, but I have to admire the ambition and his handling of paint. I really liked some of the passages of heavy abstraction, more-so than the more representational parts. I actually got to meet his family b/c the friend who I went to Seoul with, she knows his mother through her grandmother. He is actually a Korean adoptee as well, and I was hoping to meet him too, but he was too busy and our schedule was tight as well. 

I also went to the Artsonje Center, which was a short walk down the block. I got to see Kyungah Ham's show called, "Desire and Anesthesia." Her show was really cool, and explored the complexity of the displacement of art throughout the ages, and how much of history's great art does not reside in its actual place of origin. This conjures up more serious issues of power, materialism, and colonialism and how they have helped to create the magnificent power house art museums that exist today (the Met, the Louvre, etc). She addressed these ideas through various media, including painting, photography, and mixed media. I really liked photos up on one wall where she documents her own partaking in artifact displacement. She would steal coffee cups in one country and swap them out at other coffee shops in other countries. Humorous, but to the point. 

At the Artsonje Center, on the first floor they have a bookshop. So of course I bought an art book. I ended up buying a book by a Korean American artist who shows at the Tina Kim Gallery, in NYC. The artist's name is Kyung Jeon, and it contains plates of drawings illustrating an almost fairy-tale-like story. It had drawings of naked asians, skulls, and monsters and was only 15,000W ($12), so I had to buy it!

This was the inside of the book shop part of the art center.