Seokpajeong Seoul Museum wants you to stop scrolling and start strolling past art with 3 new shows

These days, people scroll past more paintings in a week on their smartphones than they will ever actually stand in front of in person over the course of their lives. The images arrive, register in the eye and soon fade away.

It is against this that Seokpajeong Seoul Museum, back from a long hiatus, opens three exhibitions on Wednesday, each making its own argument for looking slowly at works in person.

“We believe art has a power that comes from the space, and that what matters is coming face to face with paint actually laid on a canvas,” said Kim Hyun-joo, who heads the museum’s exhibition planning team, during a press conference at the museum in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Tuesday.

The centerpiece show, on floors three and four of the main building of the museum, is “I Long to Paint the World Within,” a retrospective marking 30 years since the death of impressionist painter Yim Jik-soon (1921-1996).

The title comes from the painter’s own words. Yim is usually remembered as "the painter of flowers and women" — girls seated in studios, roses crowded into vases and jars — and the exhibition has plenty of both. But it also brings out landscapes that have rarely been shown to argue for a fuller painter than the usual label allows.

The museum calls the new show the largest of Yim’s work yet, with some 80 oil paintings alongside drawings, watercolors and prints, more than 30 personal belongings including palettes with paint still hardened on them along with brushes, easels and furniture. It also intends to improve on the 2022 centennial exhibition at the Gwangju Museum of Art, a 75-painting affair that left visitors wanting more.

The works run chronologically from the 1960s, when Yim settled in Gwangju and turned to the southern landscape and Mount Mudeung, to the mid-1990s, when, fighting kidney disease from 1988, he stripped away more and more of the subject until mostly line, color and thick brushstrokes were left.

Some of the most affecting material shown at “I Long to Paint the World Within” is domestic and household-related. In his most productive years in the 1980s, Yim painted a model in the studio in the morning and, after lunch, a still life of flowers — flowers his wife kept ready for him. The vases she filled are displayed beside the paintings they appear in, as is the rattan armchair he liked to seat his models in.

There is also a long series of two trees standing side by side, a composition Yim returned to from the late 1980s until his death. The painter first painted clouds behind the pines, then one day filled the background entirely with yellow and left only the trees, according to his family.

On the second floor of Seokpajeong Seoul Museum’s main building, the group exhibition “Somewhat Agree Disagree” borrows its title from the six-point scale of a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test, “which may have gone a bit out of fashion,” curator Kim noted. People with strong opinions tick “strongly agree” or “strongly disagree,” but most of us do not.

“We thought that maybe many people sit in that middle ground — it seems so, and it also seems not — and that those people might actually relate more,” Kim said.

Twenty-eight artists and some 150 works, mostly in painting but also sculpture and video, occupy that middle ground. Kim Su-young paints building facades around City Hall at a range so close that the walls become records of the city. Moon Ho lays paint thick in what looks like a computer screen breaking into pixels. Another artist works on jangji, a traditional Korean paper, the only one in the room using Eastern painting materials.

“We set out to gather painters who paint well on canvas,” Kim said. “Near the opening, however, we decided to include one artist making video with AI, not so much making something new as choosing among countless options and generating from within them.”

The museum’s motto has not changed since it opened: to be “a museum with a low threshold,” where visitors feel they “could feel art comfortably for a day” rather than puzzle over what a work is supposed to mean, according to Kim.

The third show, “Handaesari: Gathering into Being,” in the museum’s annex building, is the smallest. Handaesari refers to living together in one place, and three sculptors, Kim In-tae, Lee Il and Cho Jin-kyu, start from the same material, stainless steel, and arrive at butterflies, plants and feathers, small parts gathered into a single form.

“A single material does not necessarily mean a single shape,” Kim said.

“I Long to Paint the World Within” and “Somewhat Agree Disagree” run through Feb. 14 next year, while “Handaesari” closes on Dec. 27. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Adult admission is 20,000 won ($14.80).

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]