Date: 2010.11.20 — 2011.1.2

Reception: 2010.11.20 4:00pm

Collage is virtually omnipresent in our lives. From TV to internet, newspaper to smartphone, signboard to media facade, everything we see is an assemblage of fragments with varying points of views.  Now, the flow of information moves in a non-linear way and people use multiple windows to see the world that defies any unifying system of perspective. You can say that the world of contemporary life is a collage per se. However, this does not necessarily mean that there is no ruling perspective, but rather the value of many smaller viewpoints can win a bigger one.  Nothing is more superior or inferior to something else forever. Smaller value systems exist in parallel and moreover, they are growingly mobile and their meanings are in transition to survive in the new platform of the globalized world. 

Globalization and its effects on contemporary arts have been a central issue for the last decade. The current reemergence of collage as technical and philosophical methodology in the contemporary art practice has its root in the globalism and its new social, political, and economical conditions. These unprecedented conditions have continuously generated ‘world-is-flat’ phenomena. They are de-nationalizing of artistic movements, inflation of “being international”, and homogenization of different culture values. Some people thought globalism might kill local identity. But in reality globalization fails to conquer local values. Instead, artists in local context enjoyed ever-increasing chances to expose their voices to the international stage. And they begin to rethink their own individual identity, history, culture in the geoaesthetic situation where the national label is quickly disappearing. 

In this context, “Collage of Memories,” the exhibition of contemporary Korean art, redefines the concept of ‘collage’ through 10 artists who have unique understanding of media, history, private memories, culture, and globalism&identity.  Their interpretation of the methodology unmasks the very natures of the changed society. This means we need to see more than a physical technique or a marriage of heterogeneous materials from the exhibition.  What becomes more important is a philosophical attitude that can spread over any expressive medium.  Those 10 artists commonly arrive at an aesthetic position that makes not only a methodological bridge between art, novel, poetry, architecture, and motion picture, but also a chronological link between the present and the past and even to the future.  We need to see collage as not a form but an attitude to open, link, and mix the seemingly incomparable multitude. I subdivided the attitude of 10 collage artists into five categories. 

Bund number·Pacific Hotel Shanghai Digital print 2008

city18 photograph 2008

Curator: LEE DaeHyung

2010    “Korean Eye: Fantastic Ordinary”, Saatchi Gallery, London, Singapore, Korea

2009    “Korea Eye: MOON GENERATION”, Saatchi Gallery, London, England

2008    “BLUE DOT-Asia”, Seoul Arts Center, Seoul, Korea

2005    “3 Faces & 3 Colours”: Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang, Gallery ARTSIDE, Seoul, Korea

             "Zeng Fanzhi - Unmask the Mask”, Gallery ARTSIDE, Seoul, KoreaArtist:

Artist :

AHN DooJin, CHO DuckHyun, CHOI Woolga, JANG SeungHyo, KIM DongGi, KIM YongKwan, LEE LeeNam, LEE JiYen , MOON HyungMin,PARK JungHyuk

Venue: 

Soka Art Center (Creative Square westward 100meter),798 Art District,No.2 Jiuxiaoqiao Road, Chaoyang District,Beijing,China 

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