As signaled by the exhibition’s subtitle, “Art of Our Time Viewed from Various Narratives,” Four Ways to Look at Art explores the possibility of opening up vastly different narratives in addressing art after the end of art. The show addresses the convention of the great narrative ingrained within the modernist aesthetic that has led to the suppression of individual stories. Resisting a priori aesthetic rules, it investigates ways in which contemporary art deals with its identity crisis. One primary way is to understand art in its cultural context. The artistic genres on display in the exhibition range widely from modernist approaches in abstract painting to more contemporary works in video, conceptual photography and text, found objects, and multimedia installation. These works not only invite viewers to think about various cultural, social, political, psychological, and aesthetic issues, but they also help tie together the exhibition’s four disparate sections: “Echo of Lines and Colors,” “The Beauty of the Ordinary,” “The Slogans Written in Water,” and “Imaginary Crevice, Becoming a Monster.” Each of these was curated by a separate curator (Jung-hee Choi, Hye-sook Yang, Ju-hyun Cho, and Hyo-yeun Kang), who grouped their artists’ work under senior curator Min-han Jang’s selected theme. The accompanying catalogue has one hundred and five color illustrations and five essays: one by Jang commenting on the theme of the exhibition, and four by the different curators explaining the thematic context of each group and describing each artist’s work. Each essay’s summary was also written on the wall at the entrance to each section.

Four Ways to Look at Art is the third SeMA exhibition since its initiation in 2004, held biannually at the Seoul Museum of Art. A growing number of exhibitions in Korea have recently introduced the country’s young contemporary artists at major public art museums. Whereas other exhibitions focus on introducing contemporary artists, the SeMA exhibition features thematic presentations of young and relatively unknown artists in keeping with its acronym: Selected eMerging Artists. This year the exhibition represents twenty-five artists, mostly in their late twenties and thirties.

In the first section, entitled “Echo of Lines and Colors,” the viewer is guided to revisit modernist paintings. Six painters show their commitment to the medium of painting, focusing on pictorial elements such as color, line, composition, and spatial illusion. Reacting against the postmodernist claim that painting is dead, they try to evoke an emotional or visual response from the viewer by holding to a purist aesthetic. The majority of the work employs geometric forms and a reductive aesthetic that eliminates representation. Along with other abstract paintings on canvas, Yun-hee Kang’s Assembly Drawing (2004), a series of geometric drawings projected on a corner of the wall at a specific angle, refers to the painter’s task of dealing with spatial perception.

“The Beauty of the Ordinary” consists of six artists’ work magnifying mundane routines and uneventful memories of everyday life. This section is also arranged in a quite spacious room, allowing for the presentation of several works by each artist. The artists’ particular attention to small details embedded within the quotidian subtly undermines conventional ways of looking at things by questioning general assumptions used in understanding daily reality. Dong-joo Lee’s video work is the first to greet the viewer. It presents rotating views of a sushi bar in Hamburg, Germany. By installing a video camera on a sushi plate moving along a conveyor belt, he captured two panoramic views of the restaurant—one facing outward showing the customer’s side, the other facing inward showing the serving staff. The two separate views are edited into one larger view consisting of two horizontal bands. Recorded sound is played simultaneously, and mixes with the murmur of the restaurant crowd’s conversation. This work brings to mind Jacques Lacan’s remark concerning the gaze of a sardine can: a sushi plate looks at the guest. Suk-joon Jang’s work transforms mundane urban environs into poetic brilliance. After taking numerous digital photographs of walls, doors, and storefronts with signs, Jang combines them by hue to make abstract monochromic works. Printed on transparencies, the fragments are displayed on a light box. The light in turn illuminates the otherwise dull and barren fragments culled from ordinary life. The accumulation of small pictures in order to form a large monochromatic view is reminiscent of Minimalism’s practice of repeating identical units. Yet each unit in Jang’s work is full of the irregular details of daily life experience; some signs and scribbles included in the snapshots reveal slices of urban cultures in Korea.

While referencing recent Western art history and critical issues in art, the artists represented in “The Slogans Written in Water” manifest their interests in social, cultural, or political issues. In his paintings of paper currency, Ki-woun Shin points to the problematic relation between art and capitalism, and of desire in capitalist society. Covering the ground with pages torn from difficult art theory books and the Artist’s Guide to Selling Your Work, Shin makes paintings of a U.S. dollar bill, a U.K. £20 note, and a South Korean 10,000 won bill with ketchup, steak sauce, and soy sauce, respectively. Similar to its critical comments on the commodification of artwork, this work disapproves of institutionalized art-theory criticism, which frequently defies comprehension. In a similar vein, Jun-yong Lee presents World Map (2008), Tears of Joy (2008), and Art=Money (2008): a big world map, a Lichtenstein cartoon figure, and the text “Art=Money” are created out of mold in order to challenge the unchanging criteria of art and the eternal value imposed on art objects. By maintaining proper temperature and humidity, the mold colonies grow, reproduce, and decay until turning dark by the end of the exhibition. Working on his documentary video We Also Have the White House (2008), Yoon-suk Jung starts with the fact that the Korean translation of the words for White House, the symbol of U.S. authority and power, is often used as the name for restaurants, wedding halls, bars, and karaoke places in Korea. A series of random interviews with owners and customers at these establishments reveals that people associate the name with privilege. The work implies that U.S. imperial dominance has been reflected within Korea’s collective psyche. Jae-woo Oh’s installation, photography, and poem suggest that contemporary artists find inspiration in quotidian experience. Like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, stacks of enlarged cigarette packages are displayed on the floor (Cigarette Project, 2008). On the wall, Oh presents a set of poems and photographs of the package installation. Drawing on the Futurist and Dadaist practice of writing poems with randomly chosen words, he writes poems by employing brand names of cigarettes.

Despite their apparent disparity, the works included in “Imaginary Crevice, Becoming a Monster” relate to one another in their suggestions of the body: biomorphic images, anthropomorphic creatures, plants and insects with human hair, etc. The seven included artists’ work pushes the boundary of the socially acceptable body, and in the process generate the grotesque. Some works border on the decorative. Jae-Ok Kim’s Variation (2006), Mental Cell/desire (2008), Lovers (2007), and Five Siblings (2008) show one version of the aesthetic transformation of the grotesque: a body with three legs, a strangely enlarged organic part (Variation 1 and 2), several people melted to form a tile-like pattern (Lovers and Five Siblings), and neurons made of cotton (Mental Cell/desire). The unnatural colors and the stylization of forms in fact camouflage the grotesque. A closer look at Jee-Hyun Yoo’s enlarged photographs of flowers (Tongue-Lily, 2005; Strange Petal, 2008), tree branches, and insects (Strange Forest series, 2008) disrupts the viewer’s familiarity. The shiny surface of the spotlighted enlarged subject is sparsely covered with human hair that originally belonged to the artist. These small details dislocate a perception of normalcy in a disturbing way.

Altogether, Four Ways to Look at Art is well organized and gives an overview of the diverse practices of young contemporary Korean artists. The exhibition’s strong point is its inclusion of emerging Korean artists employing different strategies and working in a variety of aesthetics, from the cutting-edge to the decorative. A diversity of perspectives suggests the difficulty in forming a coherent canon of contemporary art. The exhibition features work that successfully integrates adopted Western concepts and media with local experiences of Korean people by inserting subtle traces of familiar daily routines. Yet, given the exhibition’s position of breaking down the conventional boundaries between mediums, art, and life, the inclusion of the reductive abstract paintings in the first section weakens the exhibition’s theme, since the autonomous aesthetic position of the group excludes other narratives. Considering the increasing number of contemporary Korean artists endeavoring to connect art to its audiences, the inclusion of more experimental works employing newer media would have further expanded levels of viewer interaction. Despite the wide range of the themes and media, the majority of the selected works are paintings displaying an aesthetic polish that tames the vitality of their artistic experiments in form and themes.