Four Korean artists featured at Venice Biennale ‘Foreigners are Everywhere’

The exhibition ″A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk,″ one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024, runs through Nov. 24 at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. [YOO YOUNGKUK ART FOUNDATION]

 
VENICE — The Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most prestigious art festival, kicked off last month and will be running through November. In addition to the international exhibition, Biennale Arte 2024, and those of the national pavilions, numerous off-site exhibitions compete for visitors from around the world during the Biennale. Of these, only 30 are official collateral events, selected by this year’s Biennale director Adriano Pedrosa. Reflecting the elevated status of K-art, four Korean exhibitions are being held, two of which revisit deceased artists.
 
One such exhibit is “A Journey to The Infinity,” a retrospective of Yoo Youngkuk (1916-2002), modern Korea’s first-generation abstract artist, organized by the Yoo Youngkuk Art Foundation at the venerable Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. The exhibition, running through Nov. 24, features 29 paintings and 11 lithographs that show the unique qualities of Yoo’s art — bold juxtapositions of contrasting primary colors without dissonance and radiation of colors.
 
Artnews, an American art publication, named the exhibition one of the “10 Shows to See in Venice During the Biennale,” saying, “Yoo Youngkuk’s abstractions of the 1960s and ’70s are radiant, bright, and enchanting, filled with contrasting planes of color that contain their own strange harmony.”
 

A view of the exhibition ″A Journey to the Infinite: Yoo Youngkuk,″ one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024, which runs through Nov. 24 at Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. [YOO YOUNGKUK ART FOUNDATION]

 
“I think the phrase ‘strange harmony’ sums up the characteristics of Yoo’s paintings,” Kim In-hye, an art historian and former senior curator of Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), told the Korea JoongAng Daily on April 17 in Venice. She curated the exhibition.
 
“It’s not easy to create such harmony using primary colors, and that’s why Western art experts are surprised. We’ve had curators from major museums and collectors from around the world visit this exhibition, and they spend a lot of time in front of the paintings.”
 
Similarly, Yoo’s eldest son, Yoo Jin, chairman of the foundation, told the Korea JoongAng Daily: “In the case of artist Kim Whanki, who was close to my father and led the ‘New Realist Group’ art movement together with my father — he was always concerned about how to show the world something Korean. But my father said, ‘If I, as a Korean, can do something that no one else in the world has done, wouldn’t that be something Korean?’ I think that’s what he did by creating a unique harmony of primary colors.”
 
Some of the paintings in the exhibition are from the state-donated Lee Kun-hee collection and the leader of K-pop boy band BTS RM’s personal collection. Professor Yoo said, “The first buyer of my father’s paintings was the late Chairman Lee Byung-chul [founder of Samsung Group and the late Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s father]. Before that, not a single one was sold.”
 
The exhibition makes the most of its location, a 16th-century Venetian building that was renovated by renowned contemporary architects such as Mario Botta. The first floor, facing the canal and garden, showcases lithographs with Korean nature motifs, while the second floor, a quaint space, displays the artist’s smaller works and archival materials in a study-like atmosphere. The modern and simple third floor showcases large-scale paintings from the artist’s peak period of the 1960s and ’70s.
 

Curator Bartomeu Mari explains the exhibition ″Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes,″ which is one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024. The exhibition runs through Nov. 24 at ArteNova in Venice. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

 
Meanwhile, at ArteNova in Venice, the exhibition “Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes” is on view through Nov. 24 as an official collateral event to the Biennale. The retrospective of Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) was curated by Spanish independent curator Bartomeu Mari, who was the director of Korea’s MMCA when the museum held a large-scale retrospective of Rhee to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday in 2018. The event in Venice is organized by the Korean Research Institute of Contemporary Art (KoRICA), the Rhee Seundja Foundation and Gallery Hyundai.
 
Rhee was the only female artist among the first generation of Korean abstract artists including Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk. After divorcing her husband upon discovering his infidelity and leaving for Paris, she longed for her three children and her own mother back in her native country and created the series “Women and the Earth,” in which she layered oil paint on the canvas as if cultivating the land. The series was recognized by Parisian galleries.
 

The exhibition ″Seundja Rhee: Towards the Antipodes,″ one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024, runs through Nov. 24 at ArteNova in Venice. [GALLERY HYUNDAI]

 
When she visited Korea as a successful artist for a solo show in 1965 for the first time since she left, she finally met her three children, all grown up. She then traveled between France and Korea, where she continued to experiment with various abstractions. In her final years, she made cosmic paintings that she called “Road to the Antipodes.” In the paintings, she depicts nature, the universe and poles that she looked down at from the airplane going back and forth between Korea and France, the two antipodes in her life.
 
The 20 pieces of work on display are mainly from her early series, “Women and the Earth,” and her later series “Road to the Antipodes.” Mari told the press in Venice on April 17, “As a woman in a male, Western-centered society and art world, and as a Korean living in France, Lee’s experience as an ‘other’ in and out of art is closely related to the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale, ‘Foreigners Everywhere.’”
 

The solo show of ″Lee Bae – La Maison de La Lune Brulee,″ one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024, runs through Nov. 24 at Fondation d’Entreprise Wilmotte in Venice. [JOHYUN GALLERY]

 
A current Korean artist’s solo show is also included in the 30 collateral events to the Biennale. It is “Lee Bae — La Maison de La Lune Brûlée (The burnt Moon House)” running through Nov. 24 at Fondation d’Entreprise Wilmotte in Venice. The exhibition is held by the French foundation and Foundation Hansol of Culture.
 
As you enter the exhibition through the tranquil courtyard of Fondation d’Entreprise Wilmotte, a video of black charcoal crackling in a fire unfolds along a long corridor, accompanied by majestic contemporary music. This is the work “Burning.” At the end of the corridor, visitors are greeted by a space that looks like a three-dimensional abstract ink painting, with huge black sculptures and black brush strokes crisscrossing the white space.
 
“I organized the exhibition space as if I wanted the viewer to be inside the painting,” artist Lee Bae, 68, told the KJD at the exhibition space.
 
The work “Brushstroke” is a semicircular trace of charcoal that runs from one wall, across the floor, and back to the other. “It’s ink calligraphy with charcoal powder,” the artist explained. Next to it, a black pillar-like sculpture called “Meok” stands about 5 meters (16 feet) high. “It’s made of black granite, which gives it the feeling of meok,” the artist said. Meok are inksticks used to make ink in East Asia, made from charcoal or the soot of charcoal. “I thought about the connection between East Asian calligraphy with ink from meok and charcoal, and charcoal and fire.”
 
To make the “Brushstroke” work, the artist used charcoal left over from the burning of the “Moon House” on Feb. 24 in the artist’s hometown of Cheongdo, North Gyeongsang. It was the full moon of the lunar calendar, and the artist held the burning ceremony according to a longstanding Cheongdo tradition. It is custom to make a moon house by piling up branches of pine tree branches and straw collected from each house and burning them under the full moon to pray for good fortune and a good harvest. The artist collected wishes from all over the world, wrote them down on pieces of hanji (traditional Korean paper), tied them to the moon house, and burned them together. The process is shown in a long video installation in the entrance hallway of the exhibition center.
 

″Madang: Where We Become Us″ is an archive exhibition to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale. The show, as one of 30 collateral events of the Venice Biennale 2024, runs through Nov. 24 at Il Giardino Bianco Art Space in Venice. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

 
Meanwhile, a Korean rice ball party was held in Venice on April 18. It was at the opening of the Gwangju Biennale’s 30th-anniversary archive exhibition “Madang: Where We Become Us,” as an official collateral event to the Venice Biennale 2024.
 
Rice balls are a symbol of the “Gwangju spirit” — care, solidarity and democracy, since citizens gathered rice to make and deliver to the citizen solders during the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980. It is a fitting food for the Gwangju Biennale, which has generated “social practice of art,” Park Yang-woo, president of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation, said during a speech in the opening. One Hamjibak, a vessel which was used to make rice balls during the uprising, is also on view in the exhibition which is running through Nov. 24 at Il Giardino Bianco Art Space in Venice.
 
The archive exhibition showcases various materials about the past 14 editions of the Gwangju Biennale, as well as two major works of the initial edition of the biennial — a video installation work “Dolmen” by the pioneer of video art Nam June Paik (1932-2006) and the installation “In Order to Forget” by Cuban artist Kcho. In addition, media art works on minorities and migrants by artists Sylbee Kim, Ayoung Kim and So-Jung Jun will be on display, connecting the spirit of Gwangju to this year’s theme of the Venice Biennale, “Foreigners are Everywhere.”

BY MOON SO-YOUNG [moon.soyoung@joongang.co.kr]