Last night, CULTURED partnered with Mastercard™ for an exclusive look at the Hammer Museum’s latest show “Only the Young: Experimental Art in South Korea, 1960s-70s.” Guests stopped for bites and drinks (courtesy of Lulu, the museum’s famed restaurant helmed by chef and cookbook author David Tanis) and select cardholders received a priceless™ experience: a guided tour from museum curator Pablo José Ramírez through the notable exhibition. The show, which recently traveled to the U.S. from South Korea, is the first in North America to examine the work of artists who made sense of the rapid cultural and technological shifts following the Korean War (1950-53).
With more than 80 different works across painting, photography, and installation, “Only the Young” provides a window into how these artists wanted to shift the paradigm of Korean art, taking care to help process the country’s newfound state of affairs. “It was a period of military dictatorship. It is a miracle that we survived as artists through such times,” artist Lee Kun-Yong told CULTURED in the magazine’s latest issue.
Tour attendees, including CULTURED Editor-in-Chief Sarah Harrelson, were guided toward his photographic work, Logic of the Hand, which confronts museum-goers with the personally revealing nature of gestures. “At the time, relationships were determined by a hierarchy of power … I attempted to interpret [that system] and communicate through the body as a primal medium,” he explained.
Physicality and confrontation run throughout the works in the exhibition. The Meaning of 1/24 Second by Kim Kulim juxtaposes scenes of mundanity and violence in South Korea in an expansive collage: a picture of a man playing a flute rests below another figure contorted and asleep on the ground. Untitled (TV Stone Tower) by Park Hyunki stacks a black-and-white TV the size of a toaster between stones, evocative of the cultural influx South Korea experienced once the war ended. It’s an arresting combination of works on its own; for the Mastercard™ users who attended the evening’s event, the curation and presentation was downright priceless.
