KIAF Seoul is South Korea’s first international art fair which opened in 2002. Its rapid growth has seen Seoul emerge as a global art city, evolving to exceed market standards. It has become a vibrant art hub, connecting people and art to provide unforgettable memories and blue chip works as installations, and sculptures . With 20 years of history, KIAF Seoul opens a powerfully inventive art festival running September 4th to 8th, 2024.
At Seoul, Sundaram Tagore Gallery , will mesh into the global group of artists, an echo from the past, along with a blueprint into contemporary epochs, with colourful paper assemblages by the brilliant Chun Kwang Young, new Waterfalls by Japanese Hiroshi Senju, dynamic stainless-steel sculptures by Zheng Lu, indigo paintings by Miya Ando, and select work from Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami.
Anish Kapoor Untitled 2011
As soon as you set your eyes upon the painted , fiberglass 2011 sculpture by Anish Kapoor , you will be fascinated by his ability to manipulate the language of form and space with materials.
One of the most important sculptors of his generation, Kapoor has re-imagined the medium of sculpture, finding new ways to challenge and beguile his audiences across the world.
This Untitled (2011) is coated in a deep wine colour, and stands serenely against the wall in a meditative focus, as it silently swallows the surrounding light as well as sounds of art lovers walking within its radius due to its reflective powers.
Kapoor embraces the ideals of Minimalism with grace and gravitas. He creates a subtle inertia of artistic emotion and intuition to create inorganic shapes filled with powerful potentialities.His rendering of physically tactile material, is indeed a lingua franca that appeals in colour and contour, to project a profound narrative.
Art lovers will experience opposite binaries—presence and absence, concaving and projecting, hiding and revealing.
Zheng Lu
The arches and the flowing fluidity within the gravity-defying sculptural works of Zheng Lu are deeply influenced by his study of traditional Chinese calligraphy, an art form he practiced growing up in a literary family. Lu’s use of language as a pictorial element, inscribing the surface of his stainless-steel sculptures with thousands of Chinese characters derived from texts and poems of historical significance, become the most intrinsic element of enrapture in his sculptural forms.
Water in Dripping Yangtse 2023
Zheng’s dynamic stainless-steel composition pulse with movement, as they evoke splashes of water suspended midair. For Zheng, water is an amorphous medium that can take on abundant meaning, from an element essential to existence to a substance symbolic of change, self-reflection and the passage of time. “Water has always been a very important motif in my art,” he says. “As a key element in Chinese philosophy, it was observed, visualized and ruminated upon rather than examined in terms of logic.”
Zheng captures the power of water in myriad ways. Contained within, is a liquid vortex that appears on the cusp of breaking free from its rigid confinement. The rolling waves of water form a window or portal through which viewers, while observing the work, can also see one another as if spectators.
Technique and treatment are Lu’s prime partners. To create his metal sculptures, Zheng Lu begins with a plaster base and laser-cuts characters into metal. Then in a fashion similar to linking chainmail, he uses heat to connect the pictographs so that they can be shaped to the support. The works are technically astonishing; their fluid, animated forms are charged with the energy (qi) of the universe, belying their steel composite.
Hiroshi Senju
“When you see the many diverse colours in nature, it is an effect of light reflection. So even in the darkest times, I am painting light, ” said Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju when he had his historic solo in Japan.
At Seoul his compelling signature Waterfall series, will shine a light on the evolution and many nuances of his waterfall works.
Senju has been exploring the sublime power of nature for more than thirty years. The falls, in his view, are a unifying symbol—a powerful example of a life-giving force that people everywhere can appreciate. “The natural world is a place of refuge and a common ground we share that transcends natural, cultural and ideological boundaries,” he says.
Senju’s decades-long preoccupation with waterfalls is an homage to planet Earth. Although his deep respect for Japanese culture and traditions has given him a particular reverence for and aesthetic appreciation of nature’s qualities, he views these as collective values that unite humankind.
Senju creates the waterfalls on view using bespoke natural pigments produced in Japan as well as manmade pigments. His robustly physical process involves pouring pigments downward from the top of paintings mimicking the trajectory of gushing water. He also uses spray guns and airbrushes to create a sensation of mist. Standing before these paintings, the senses and imagination are activated—one can almost hear the rushing water and feel the dampness in the air.
Chun Kwang Young
Known for his Aggregation series created out of millions of bits of mulberry paper, Chun Kwang Young’s works look like craters with small pools of water. Born in Hongchun, South Korea, in 1944, Chun grew up during the end of Japanese colonization and the brutality of the Korean War. In the early 1970s, he moved to the United States to pursue a Master’s Degree at Philadelphia College of Art, where he was deeply drawn to Abstract Expressionism. “It seemed to be the best way to freely express my surprise and sadness at witnessing the huge gap between idea and reality,” he says.
Chun has explored effects of light and colour, to create a unique series of installations that are reflective of his history as a South Korean along with a deep sense of cultural identity.
The development of Chun’s signature technique was sparked by childhood memories of seeing medicinal herbs wrapped in mulberry paper, tied into small packages and hung from the ceiling of the local doctor’s office. He became intrigued with the idea of merging the techniques, materials and sentiment of his Korean heritage with the conceptual freedom he experienced during his Western education.
Chun’s decision to use mulberry paper—known as hanji in Korea—is significant. It embodies the essence of Korean history and imparts a spiritual power, even in its most mundane applications. Derived from native trees and prized for its strength and ability to resist water, hanji has been used in Korea for centuries for everything from writing and drawing to packaging and weatherproofing.
With history in mind, Chun sources paper from antique books. “The hanji that I am currently using are from books between fifty and a hundred years old,” he says. “Each has its history and each generation of our ancestors’ joys and sorrows can be seen in the thousands of aggregated fingerprints that make my work even more mystical and precious. It’s almost as if these fingerprints are trying to have conversation with me, to explain their reasons for being there.”
Over the years, Chun’s Aggregations have become more colourful and evolved in complexity and scale, but the use of mulberry paper remains at the core of his practice. Although imbued with the spirit of Korean tradition and history, Chun’s work, with its intricate, abstract compositions, is grounded in a the charisma of contemporary complexities that seek to evoke unending conversations.
Sohan Qadri
Dye and paper, incisions and meditation all coalesce in a pair of brilliant ink dye on paper works by the author, poet and abstract Guru Sohan Qadri.His love for the creation of colour fields within techniques of ink dye and folding paper into rhythmic moorings stand as a testimony to his brilliance.
Balini III and Uma III are a riveting pair that at once emanate deepened reflections within the bliss of solitude. To create his compositions, Qadri played with the idea of creating textural terrain within the paper sheets he used. He also adhered each flat sheet and created minute holes within to create the idea of seeds ( beej ) to create the mooring of a sculptural substructure. The process of the paper being dipped in ink dyes of different colour tones, created a multifaceted yet finely repetitive meditative approach that created its own intonation within islands of reflection.
Images: Sundaram Tagore Gallery NY
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
END OF ARTICLE
