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Rhee Seundja: Road to the Antipodes

  • 2018-03-23

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)