The National Museum of
Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) presents the exhibition Rhee Seundja: Road to the Antipodes held
at MMCA Gwacheon from Thursday, March 22 through Sunday, July 29.
Rhee Seundja: Road to the Antipodes is organized in commemoration of the 100th anniversary
of the birth of Rhee Seundja (1918–2009), and also as an effort to observe and
highlight Korean female artists who have been relatively overlooked. The
exhibition, titled after the artist’s representative piece, encompasses the
traces left by the artist as well as the concepts within her works. To the
artist, France and Korea represented two extreme ends of the world, elements of
conflict, symbolic spaces that need accord.
Rhee Seundja eloped to
France in 1951 and studied the fundamentals of painting, starting her career as
an artist. She studied painting at Académie de la Grande Chaumière and traveled
around to accumulate experiences and insights, continuously expanding the
horizons of her work. Through 80 solo exhibitions and more than 300 group
shows, Rhee mostly worked with oil paint in Paris; in printmaking at her
atelier Rivière Argent (Eunhasu) in Tourrettes, southern France; and with
ceramics back in Korea, constantly challenging herself with passion for more
than 60 years.
Rhee was the only one
without a fine arts degree among the Korean artists who relocated to France in
the 1950s, and hence was strongly influenced by the French school of art in
terms of technique and expression. Nevertheless, being in a foreign country,
the artist clung all the more to subjects and materials related to Korea, which
mainly derived from her childhood experiences and memories. Rhee intended to
create new worlds by harmonizing incongruous elements such as the East and the
West, mind and matter, or the natural and the artificial, which eventually
settled as the main concept and philosophy running through her 60 years of
work. Rhee emphasized that philosophy should be carried within each piece of art.
Instead of expropriating the modernism of the French art schools at the time,
Rhee was determined and followed her intuitions in selecting style and subject
matter, imbuing her own attitude and belief into her work.
The exhibition is comprised
of Rhee’s representative works divided into four themes according to period,
laterally displaying her paintings and her prints to allow the audience to
simultaneously observe the transition trajectories in the artist’s oeuvre. The
works from the early 1950s are shown under the theme of “Exploring Forms,”
works from the 1960s under “Women and Earth,” 1970s pieces under “Yin and
Yang,” and the works from the 1980s till her passing are shown under “Road to
the Antipodes.” The exhibition will also be a special showcase of her most
recent work, the “Road to the Antipodes” series and the “Cosmos” series, which
she worked on since her 1988 MMCA solo exhibition until her death. A special
artist interview can also be found at the archive space modeled after her
Tourettes atelier Eunhasu, a studio the artist referred to as “a work of art in
which I attempted culmination of my life.”
Bartomeu Marí, director of
MMCA, notes, “The 127 pieces presented in this exhibition faithfully contain
Rhee’s artistic journey and spirit, which underwent a series of changes and
experiments,” and he expressed his hopes that “this exhibition will be an
opportunity to broaden the spectrum of Korean art history from a multilateral
perspective, within the international current.”
More details are available on
the MMCA website (http://www.mmca.go.kr).
※ For general enquiries,
please call +82-2-2188-6000 (MMCA Gwacheon)