Bahc
Yiso: Memos and Memories
24 July
2018 – 16 December 2018
MMCA Gwacheon (Gallery 1)
The
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, director Bartomeu
Marí), presents exhibition Bahc Yiso:
Memos and Memories from Thursday, July 26 through Sunday, December 16 at
MMCA Gwacheon Gallery 1. This exhibition aims to trace the path of Korean art
history by spotlighting an artist who has played a momentous role in the
development of Korean contemporary art.
As
an artist, curator, and critic of the 1980s through early 2000s, Bahc Yiso
(1957–2004) brought New York art scene’s major discourses and exhibitions into
Korea while also contributing and participating in numerous exhibitions that
introduced Korean art to New York, serving as a bridge between the two art
worlds.
Bahc’s
introduction of “in-between art” to the Korean art schools—that had just entered a detente after
the antagonism between Minjung art and modernism at the time—and his artistic
style that conjures neither positive nor negative
paradoxical emotions to broaden the scope of interpretation (such as the slogan
“We Are Happy”) had an enormous influence over the next generations of artists,
diversifying and enriching Korean contemporary art. Bahc showed works in major
domestic and international exhibitions including the Gwangju Biennale (1997),
Taipei Biennial (1998), Yokohama Triennale (2001), and
Venice Biennale (2003), until 2004 when, at the center of the art world’s
attention after winning the 2002 Hermès Foundation Art Award, he unexpectedly
died of a heart attack. Bahc Yiso: Memos
and Memories is his first posthumous solo exhibition held by the MMCA.
This
exhibition is a large-scale retrospective built around extensive archives and
representative works donated by Bahc’s family in 2014. The donation amounts to
over 200 pieces and approximately twenty years’ worth of the artist’s notes,
drawings, lecture materials, exhibition records, and articles that represent
Bahc’s full-fledged artistic career from 1984 to his death in 2004, even
including a jazz library self-recorded and edited by the artist, who was known
to be an enthusiast.
The
exhibition is composed of two intersecting axes, one of which extends in the
form of a timeline or a chronicle, laying out the artist’s major works,
drawings, and archives of the twenty-some years of his career branching from
New York to Seoul. Viewers can examine the chronological transition in the
artist’s philosophy and works along this axis. Cutting across the timeline is
the other axis comprised of three concentric layers: Surrounding a center of
the artists’ notes, which could be seen as the seed, are a ring of sketches and
archives, and then the final works are displayed as the outermost layer.
Through these layers, viewers can get a sense of how the artist’s initial ideas
bloomed into actual artworks.
The
21 volumes of artist notes are detailed process-records of Bahc’s works
produced since his graduation from Pratt Institute in New York in 1984 up until
just before his death in 2004, containing everything from his contemplations on
self-identity as a minority and the cultural differences experienced during his
time abroad in New York to initial sketches of Your Bright Future (2002), one of his major latter works. The large
number of installation drawings produced during the mid-to-late 1990s, when his
paintings expanded and
transitioned into three-dimensional and installation works, show such a high
degree of completion that each one could be considered a finished piece. His
detailed installation directions and descriptions are as meticulous as
blueprints, examining various environments and their effects on the
installations in order to perfect his concepts. The exhibition will also
showcase “Drawings for Untitled”
(2000) previously submitted in the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, and “Drawings for Bakangse” (2002) produced the year he
won the Hermès Foundation Art Award, along with more than 50 works
representative of Bahc’s artistic journey, including Exotic-Minority-Oriental, Three
Star Show, Blackhole Chair, Your Bright Future, and Venice Biennale.
The artist, who went by the name of “Bahc Mo”
(meaning “Bahc Somebody”) instead of his real name Bahc Chulho in New York,
graduated from Pratt Institute and continued as an artist as well as a social
activist, establishing Minor Injury, an experimental alternative space in Brooklyn,
serving as a young leader voicing for the immigrants and minorities excluded
from the art scene. The writings and records of the social movements, study
groups, and the Korean Cultural Network Suhro led by Bahc are remarkable in
that they reveal his unseen strife as a social activist behind the glamorous
exhibiting-artist facade. After returning to Korea as a professor of the newly
established Samsung Art and Design Institute (SADI) in 1995, he changed his
name to Bahc Yiso (meaning “unfamiliar and humble”) and eagerly continued with
his work while also trying to found a new system for art education. The
archives of the syllabi, evaluation sheets, and various lecture documents from
his teaching days at SADI and Korean National University of Arts allude to the
alternative model of art education he had mulled over at the time.
Aside from art, Bahc produced and arranged
over 200 jazz tapes throughout his life. He would often publicly avow to “only
listen to jazz for the rest of (his) life,” showing an extraordinary affection.
His Korean adaptation of Billy Joel’s “Honesty” can be understood in close
connection to his attitude for life, containing lyrics that seem to answer his
own questions, which had shifted from “how and what to draw” to “why draw.”
In correlation to the exhibition Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories held at
the Gwacheon branch, MMCA Seoul presents an outdoor project Park Yiso: We Are Happy. As a pilot
program for MMCA’s environmental architecture project for public interest, two
works by Bahc Yiso, We Are Happy (2004)
and Home Shopping (2003) will be
installed on the rooftop of the MMCA Seoul museum through the duration
of the exhibition in Gwacheon. We Are
Happy is a piece left only in sketch with installation directions before
Bahc’s passing, which was posthumously materialized as an installation at the
2004 Busan Biennale as well as at the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, in the United States.
Bartomeu
Marí, director of MMCA, notes that “Bahc Yiso is one of the most important
artists of the 1980s and ’90s Korean art” and that “this extensive exhibition
of the artist’s journey will be a rare opportunity to assess Bahc’s place
within the post-1980s Korean and world map of art.”
More details are available on the MMCA website (http://www.mmca.go.kr).
※ For general enquiries,
please call +82-2-2188-6000 (Gwacheon, MMCA)
※ For more information on the
exhibition, please contact Exhibition Department 2 of MMCA
at
+82- 02-3701-9572
