Insa Art Space

Unconquered : Critical Visions from South Kore

Park Chan-Kyong, Lim Minouk, Beom Kim, Bae Young Whan, Sangdon Kim

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo

2009. 10. 15 - 2010. 1. 24

2009. 10. 15. 20: 00

‘Unconquered : Critical Visions from South Korea’ presents eighteen works by five Korean artists who have practiced through the 90s to the present, all based in Seoul, Korea. This exhibition takes a complimentary proposition between a historical survey exhibition and an agenda-focused project. By juxtaposing some old works that contextualize each artist and their new productions, ‘Unconquered’ attempts to provide both a framework of understanding each artist and their recent agenda converged from new works.

2009
International Network Program
Insa Art Space / Arko Art Center of the Arts Council Korea

Continuing international network programs of Insa Art Space that was integrated into AAC in the past June, Arko Art Center of the Arts Council Korea introduces three programs – Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition in Mexico City, Satellite Presentation and Institutional Symposium in New York. All three programs are originated from IAS’s collaboration with Museum as Hub, an international art institution network organized by New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

IAS and Museum as Hub
International programs of IAS since 2005 have been characterized by its multilateral, inter-local collaborations with networks of art institutions and artists. Matching different contexts and needs of international institutions and artists, IAS experiments programs, activities, modes of collaboration and final forms of presentation. IAS’s experimental search for network collaboration with institutions and artists came to be activated by Museum as Hub that invited IAS in 2006 as one of international partner institutions worldwide.
Museum as Hub is a curatorial laboratory for art and ideas realized through a partnership of five international arts organizations. The initiative seeks to support art activities and experimentation and explore artistic, curatorial, and institutional practice. Five partner art institutions include Insa Art Space(Seoul), Vanabbe Museum(Eindhoven), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo(Mexico City), Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art(Cairo) and the nexus institution, New Museum(NY). The five partner institutions share common characters of being public, balanced focusing on international and local contexts, and being experimental. Developing programs together by two year cycle, Hub partner institutions collaborate together in each phase from agenda development, theme conception, initiative creation, collaboration matching to program organization. Nexus institution maintains a platform of conversation, discussion, information share and structural connection among partner institutions by running weekly intercontinental conference calls, annual offline conference, Hub website and physical Hub space on the fifth floor of New Museum.
The communal theme of the first cycle of Hub programs in 2007-08 was “neighborhood” and each partner institution developed a community-oriented project focusing on the issues of locality, community engagement and institution in the local public. IAS organized the project, “Dongducheon : A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision” and made various forms of project presentations in Seoul, Dongducheon and NY.
New theme of the second Hub cycle programs is “In and Out of Context” which marks a new development in the Museum as Hub program made along the inter-contextual process of collaboration among institutions.

1. Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition in Mexico City

○ Exhibition Title : “Unconquered : Critical Visions from South Korea”
○ Venue : Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City
○ Date : October 15, 2009 – January 24, 2010
○ Opening : October 15, 8 pm, Museo Tamayo
○ Featuring Artists : Park Chan-Kyong, Lim Minouk, Beom Kim, Young Whan Bae, Sangdon Kim
○ Organized by Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea
○ Sponsored by : Korean Embassy in Mexico, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, PKM Gallery, Samsung, CANAL 22, Holiday Inn, VERTICE, El PAIS, ISN CORPORATIVO, FUNDACION Olga y Rufino Tamayo, FUNDACION/COLLECCION JUMEX, Deutsche Bank

‘Unconquered : Critical Visions from South Korea’ presents eighteen works by five Korean artists who have practiced through the 90s to the present, all based in Seoul, Korea. This exhibition takes a complimentary proposition between a historical survey exhibition and an agenda-focused project. By juxtaposing some old works that contextualize each artist and their new productions, ‘Unconquered’ attempts to provide both a framework of understanding each artist and their recent agenda converged from new works.
Park Chan-Kyong, Lim Minouk, Beom Kim, Bae Young Whan and Sangdon Kim, spanning over the age group of thirties and forties, have shaped their artistic positions from the influence of Minjung(People’s) Art Movement in the 80s of Korea through international Public Art practices in the 90s. While varying in an aesthetic application of these two influences, these artists share the common interest that combines a local concern with the regional reality and an international concern with the public as social subjectivities. While practicing within the gap between local and international sphere of art, their double concern became more critically acute to both ends than diluted in-between. So-called “regional criticism” observed in the works in this exhibition therefore manifests inter-locally sharable critical vision ascribed from keen contingency with the locality.
The issues of historical discontinuity, sense of displacement and mediation of one’s consciousness by mass media are universally discussed agenda in the cultural field, but new works produced by these five artists throw a much more intense question if the mediation by external socio-political, economical and inter-personal agencies goes down to the level of one’s sensing, feeling and thinking, the possibilities the culture in general has expected from relational strategies would be at stake. If diverse human sensibilities are normalized and the normalized sensibilities surpass individual critical awareness, how could one ever share creative activities with others other than serving for instrumental reasoning?
Distinctive care about cognition, sensibilities, memories, conversations and collective behaviors in the works in ‘Unconquered’ denote these artist’ struggles to sustain the precarious state of critical discernment among/in individuals from multiple levels of conditioning agencies in the region. Park Chan-Kyong’s call for critical acuteness to seeing, Beom Kim’s speculation on the process of thinking, Bae Young Whan’s emphatic approach to feeling, Lim Minouk’s performative engagement in building collective memory by sharing multisensory experience, Sangdon Kim’s sensitivity to individual ruptures amid collective behaviors concordantly demonstrate an urgent need to uphold individual criticality as social subjectivities.

Park Chan-Kyong (b. 1965, Seoul)

Lim Minouk (b. 1968, Seoul)

Beom Kim (b. 1963, Seoul)

Bae Young Whan (b. 1968, Seoul)

Sangdon Kim (b. 1973, Seoul)

1-1. Parallel Programs “Critical Visions from Mexico”
“Critical Visions from Mexico” is the education program conceived to be presented, parallel to the exhibition Unconquerable : Critical Visions from South Korea. This program seeks to respond to the exhibition, through specific, critical visions from Mexico, regarding concepts and themes that are directly or indirectly suggested by this project through, the works themselves, the institutional collaboration, the curatorial discourse, as well as the Korean “reality” that we identify from our country as possible topics of global interest. The program includes diverse activities in which people from different backgrounds will participate and/or collaborate, some of them related to contemporary art and others not.

1) “Guided Vision”, October 15, 10:00 am
Preview of Unconquered, plus a guided tour in English by the curator of the exhibition, Heejin Kim, with an interpretation of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, director of Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. This activity is exclusive for patrons, members and sponsors.
2) “Valuable Unidentified Object”, October 15, 6:30-8:00 pm, Doryun Chong
Round table with personalities from extremely different contexts and backgrounds in which each of them will present a case study in order to discuss ideas around the “mystic object”. This unique encounter hopes to generate a conversation around importation and exportation of “original” objects, “copies” and appropriated material and their values while they are being relocated around the world.
3) “40 Years Later: Tlatelolco”, October 16, 1.00 pm, Eungie Joo, Chan-Kyong Park, Tercerunquinto
A presentation by the Mexican collective Tercerunquinto of the documentation material of the action, Desmantelamiento y resintalación de un símbolo patrio, carried out in 2008, 40 years after the student´s movement massacre in Tlatelolco. For this action, Tercerunquinto temporally took away the “national coat?” from the façade of the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco. Eungie Joo, Director and Curator of Public Programs at the New Museum, and Chan-Kyong Park respond to this presentation.
4) “Public Tables: Based on a true story…”, October 25 / November 29, 1:00 pm
Screening of fiction films based on real facts and presented by a specialist in the subject.
The President´s Last Bang(Im Sang Soo, 2005, 102 mins.)
Buenos días, noche(Marco Bellochio)
5) “Tracing the map”, October 24, 1:00 pm, Alfredo Romero Castilla (Faculty of Science and Social Politics at UNAM)
The tracing of a conceptual map in one of the walls of the exhibition space by Alfredo Romero Castilla, specialist in Asian politics and culture. This map will emphasize historical events parallel between Korea and Mexico, perhaps parting from the Mexican Olympics 1968 and the Seoul Olympics 1988.
6) “Pre-closure of Unconquerable. A night at the norae-bang”, December 10, 8:00 pm, Nallely López
Last days of Unconquerable. Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo calls for a night at the norae-bang with an introduction by the specialist in popular culture in Korea.

2. Satellite Presentation
“In and Out of Context”, space design by Choi Jeong Hwa and installation views of John Bock’s “PARA-SCHIZO, ensnarled”(2008, 40 mins.) and Young Whan Bae’s “Library Project, Tomorrow”(2009) at the Hub Space in New Museum, NY. © photo by Benoit Pailley, 2009

○ Title : “In and Out of Context”
○ Venue : Hub Space, 5th floor, New Museum, NY
○ Featuring Projects : Choi Jeong Hwa “New Hub(space design 2009-10)”, Young Whan Bae “Library Project, Tomorrow”(2009), John Bock “PARA-SCHIZO, ensnarled”(2008), Rana Hamadeh “INTERROGATIONS 1-5”(2008-09), Latin American Video Series “Panorámica”, Cairo Residency Symposium, Seminar series “Propositions”
○ Co-organized by Annie Fletcher(Vanabbe Museum); Eungie Joo(New Museum); Heejin Kim(IAS, Arko); Tobias Ostrander(Museo Tamayo); William Wells(Townhouse Gallery)

Major considerations of “In and Out of Context” are the challenges of producing and exhibiting work in differing international contexts. Museum as Hub pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration and considers what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York.
“In and Out of Context” is conceived as an evolving exhibition that incorporates works commissioned by Museum as Hub partners as well as works by an extended network of artists and organizations from around the world. Central to this presentation is the design of the Hub space by Choi Jeong Hwa that serves as an “envelope” for the coming year – a flexible, playful, yet functional space that is an active zone for viewing, discussion, and activity. The Hub space will be activated by public programs such as a seminar series, and informal open discussions. Additional works, projects, and discussions will be introduced to “In and Out of Context” as the project develops to offer new perspectives and demonstrate the evolution of ideas.

3. Institutional Symposium
○ Title : “In and Out of Context”
○ Venue : New Museum, NY
○ Date : October 21, 2009, 12:15 – 17:30
○ Co-organized by Museum as Hub partner institutions

12:30-2 p.m.: The Museum as Hub in Public: Past, Present, Future
This panel will recount the history of the Museum as Hub initiative, evaluate its original goals, and address how the Museum as Hub network can be structured in different institutional and geographical contexts in the future. Museum as Hub programs and the exhibition “Unconquered: Critical Vision from South Korea” (Insa Art Space/Arko Art Center at the Museo Tamayo) will be discussed, as well as the possibilities for future manifestations that support the evolution of the Museum as Hub.
Panelists : Annie Fletcher, Eungie Joo, Heejin Kim, Tobias Ostrander, Daniela Perez, William Wells

3:30-5:30 p.m.: Local Urgencies/Productive Distances
Panelists will give presentations on their respective programs with particular attention to the differing realities and necessities of their organizations and how they might be shaped or even defined by local demands and urgencies. Panelists will also consider how expanded networks and information exchange can provide useful input and allow for experimental approaches to exhibitions and public programs.
Panelists : Marilyn Douala Bell(co-director, Doual’art in Douala), Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy(director, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City), Claire Hsu(executive director, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong), Heejin Kim(curator, IAS/AAC, Seoul), Maria Lind(director, The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Bard)