Highlights from the SeMA collection, curated to offer gentle comfort

A total of 56 works — landscape paintings, still-life paintings, crafts, and more — from the 1970s to the 1990s

The Seoul Museum of Art (Director Baik Jisuk) presents <Bringing in Nature: Landscapes and Still Lifes>, a highlights exhibition of the SeMA collection, at Project Galleries 1 and 2 of the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art through August 22.

<Bringing in Nature: Landscapes and Still Lifes> is an exhibition centered on the Seoul Museum of Art's holdings. From a collection of 5,387 works, it showcases a total of 56 pieces — chiefly works produced from the 1970s through the 1990s — including landscape paintings, still-life paintings, crafts, and sculpture.

The Seoul Museum of Art set “collecting” as its institutional agenda in 2020, and each year it has presented exhibitions built around the museum's collection, including <Multi-Access 4913> in 2019, <Collection of Us> and <Architecture Collection of Us> in 2020, and <Collection_Open Hacking Mining> in 2021.

Amid a situation in which the COVID-19 pandemic has made ordinary daily life difficult, this exhibition was conceived so that visitors might feel gentle comfort through the museum's collection. It also moves beyond a chronological account or genre-based classification of the collection, inviting viewers to focus on the works themselves and on the interrelationships among painting, craft, and sculpture. Through this, the museum hopes the exhibition will mark the starting point for research into the trans-historical and cross-genre correlations within its collection.

The exhibition is divided into two parts: Part 1 consists of landscape paintings depicting particular places, while Part 2 is composed of still lifes bringing together flowers and ceramics, offering a view of nature seen from indoors.

Kwon Soon-hyung's <Seaside Landscape> is an abstract painting in which the surface of the ceramic is rendered through the harmony of glazes rather than with a brush. The artist bases his work on dolomite glaze, which contains a higher proportion of dolomite than other glazes, and creates color by mixing in oxides such as iron, copper, manganese, and cobalt and firing at high temperatures above 1,300 degrees. The greens, browns, and subtle blue-violet hues that characterize his work seem to render, in abstract form, the shapes of mountains, the sea, and mountains submerged in water.

Kim Byungki, the artist behind <Gladiolus> featured in this exhibition, is well known as an active painter of more than 100 years of age who has built his own artistic world by moving between abstraction and figuration. His landscapes and still lifes do not stop at reproducing their subjects; rather, symbolic imagery infused with the artist's view of his era combines with lines that cut across the picture plane to abstract nature, the figurative subject. The mountains and trees the artist observed can be seen as abstract paintings reconstructed by intermingling the historical facts surrounding him with the artist's own personal feelings about the present.

Baik Jisuk, Director of the Seoul Museum of Art, said, “This exhibition is a valuable opportunity to encounter the later works of leading Korean artists who have been active since the 1930s, drawn from the museum's collection,” adding, “It will serve as an occasion to take a fresh look at works dealing with landscapes and still lifes among the museum's holdings, which have not often been shown until now.”

To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the Seoul Museum of Art operates an advance reservation system through the Seoul Metropolitan Government's public service reservation site (yeyak.seoul.go.kr). Detailed information, including exhibition viewing schedules, is available on the Seoul Museum of Art website (sema.seoul.go.kr), and audio commentary on the works can be heard through the museum's exhibition docent app. The docent app can be downloaded for free by searching “Seoul Museum of Art” on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.