Artspectrum 2012.

Special exhibition for young Korean artists who were selected for their potentials for future growth regardless of their age and of the genre and subject of their work. Just like the title of the exhibition explains itself, it reveals small part of the contemporary art scene in Korea. I liked it the way I liked the Nuit Blanche in Toronto.

'Some Watchtower' and 'Mass of Scaffolding' by Ji Eun Kim

"Human lives are formed in buildings and structures that surround us. In particular, the urban environment provides us with facilities of comfort while operating as a determining factor in our lives. Korean cities, which continuously change despite their old histories, give Kim Ji Eun an insight into manmade environments and into those that lie beyond them such as institutions and desires. The incompleteness and disorder of a construction site may be temporary conditions. At the same time, they constitute our quotidian reality marked by endless redevelopments and reconstructions. These structures also reflect a social structure, where secret surveillance and control through invisible regulations, and resistances and battles against them repeat endlessly."

'A Capital City of a Thousand Years' by Jang Boyun

"Jang Boyun explores our shared memores through photographs abandoned by others. The photographs collected by the artist are documents of our time containing cherished memories of the past that used to belong to anonymous people. Gyeongju, an important city in Korea's ancient history, used to be an even more personally meaningful place for many who visited there on their school trips and honeymoons- two important rites of passage- before overseas travels were deregulated. Although young students and married couples captured the famous tourist sites of Gyeongju in their photographs in order to preserve them in their memories, the photographs holding those precious moments ended up being thrown away. By recuperating personal traces left by others, the artist shows us the dim and disappearing shared memories whose realities are no longer graspable."