When the idea is the artwork: MMCA opens exhibition of Korean conceptual art

Here is conceptual art in a sentence: The idea is the artwork, and the object on the wall is just the manifestation of the idea. You may never have knowingly seen a work of conceptual art, and that is fine. A lot of it was built to be hard to spot. A written instruction, a single gesture, a dictionary definition — any of these can be the artwork, because what these artists were after was the thought, not the thing.

A new survey exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's (MMCA) Seoul branch, “This is (Not) Conceptual Art,” which opened Friday, is a good place to be introduced to the genre — and, just as much, the argument that Korean artists were making this kind of art all along. That is the point of the show: A survey exhibition that gives a sweeping overview of a certain theme.

The new MMCA exhibition brings together 28 Korean artists and some 140 works — paintings, photographs, videos, objects and performances, as well as archival material — and the parentheses in the show's title are deliberate. The “(Not)” keeps Korean conceptual art from being fixed to a single definition, and signals that it was never quite the same thing as its Western namesake. 

The genre of conceptual art started out in the mid-1960s in the West, where a handful of artists asked whether the idea for an artwork really needed the object, decided it mostly did not and let the words and instructions that modernism had shut out come back into the gallery.

“Conceptual art isn’t about the visual — the dots, lines, planes and materiality that art usually talks about, or the polish of a finished object, are less important here,” explained Bae Myung-ji, curator of “This is (Not) Conceptual Art,” at a press conference at the MMCA Seoul on Thursday. “What carries the weight is the artist’s concept, the thinking done through language, the idea. It is an art that touches the brain, not the eye.”

The famous gag of viewers being confused at what is actually the artwork has become real, and the new exhibition at the MMCA has Korean versions of it. Artist Kim Beom’s 1995 canvas gives you nothing but a sentence telling you to look at a blue sky, some trees, a river flowing past — with none of these things actually painted. The scene is left for you to form yourself, with your own  eyes.

Where American artist Joseph Kosuth once set a chair beside a photograph of that chair and the dictionary entry for “chair,” Gim Hong-sok swaps the chair for “friend”: a definition, a portrait and a real person at the gallery who turns up to be the artwork itself. This “friend” is for the viewer for the afternoon. This is art that talks back, and which sometimes talks to you.

What the 28 artists in the MMCA’s new exhibition share is less of how the artworks look than a state of mind. Further, the show argues that the Korean version of conceptual art never went all the way to the bloodless finish of the Western model — the idea and the material stayed in the room together.

In a representative work by Lee Kun-yong, made in 1975, the artist drew a chalk circle on the floor and pointed at the same spot from inside it, outside it, and with his back turned — shouting “here,” “there,” “over there” — showing that the words and meaning shifted with the speaker. Language and abstract ideas were the key for such works, as outlined by the curators of the exhibition.

“If you actually walked into the studios of the conceptual artists of the 1970s, there would be books on language piled in the middle of the space, and that surprised me,” curator Bae said. “Why did they want to study the philosophy of language? Why try to fuse it with physical action? Looking at the work from that angle is worth a great deal.”

Some artists treat words as toys with a sharp edge — when Kim Soun-gui made a television out of ice and filmed it melting, it was named with French play on words, using “vide,” empty, and “eau,” water, together to make "video." Likewise, Joo Jae-hwan filled a canvas with the words “my money” until, read backwards, the syllables become “pay up.”

Others distrust instruments we simply assume are neutral. A world map is cut into three hundred pieces and shuffled into nonsense; or four identical clocks are placed next to each, other calmly disagreeing about the time.

Around 10 works are on public view for the first time at the “This is (Not) Conceptual Art” exhibition since they were originally shown, among them Kong Sung-hun's “Intersection of Concepts” (1992), which runs seven dictionary words through their own definitions until they collapse into one.

Beneath the wordplay is a serious bid to rewrite the record of modern Korean art. For decades, the story of 1970s and 1980s Korean art has been told in just three words — monochrome, experimental and minjung (the politically-charged painting and printmaking movement of the 1980s) — and Bae wants to widen that discussion.

“You could call this a show that re-reads Korean art history through the idea of a conceptual turn, running from the 1970s to the 1990s,” Bae said. “It’s a chance to look at the strands of our art beyond monochrome painting, experimental art and minjung.”

The curators’ larger hope is to set Korean conceptualism inside a global story that reaches from Latin America to Moscow to China, and to get people talking about how it fits. A chronology the length of a wall inside the exhibition space lays the two timelines side by side, and in August, the MMCA will host a symposium bringing in scholars including Alexander Alberro and Reiko Tomii to discuss Korean conceptualism.

For something this cerebral, the artworks themselves are unexpectedly sociable. Several works are finished only when the viewer takes part — writing the letter, answering your own common name when it is called across the gallery, sitting in as a stranger’s friend.

“This is (Not) Conceptual Art” runs at the MMCA Seoul until Oct. 11, across Galleries 6 and 7 and the courtyard. Admission for adults is 2,000 won ($1.30).

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]