Exhibition reveals artists' fundamental inspirations through drawing

(ATTN: photos available)
By Shin Hae-in
SEOUL, Feb. 19 (Yonhap) -- While contemporary art continues to captivate in new
and unimaginable forms and mediums, the most fundamental element of all art
remains to be "drawing."

Eighteen artists from across Asia and the Middle East have come together in an
exhibition in Seoul, displaying their works of drawing -- a basis of varying
artistic genres they pursue.
"Drawing is not the type of art that artists work on with specific goals. They
would draw an idea on a piece of paper, and later forget about it," said Kenjiro
Hosaka, a curator at Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art, as he introduced the
exhibition to reporters in Seoul Thursday. "It made the exhibition so much more
interesting because we could display works that even the artists themselves had
forgotten about."
The exhibition "Emotional Drawing" was first held last year at Tokyo's National
Museum of Modern Art, which also co-organized the show, traveling to Seoul's SOMA
Museum of art this month.
Japanese and Korean curators have collaborated to reconfigure the drawings so
that they address a Korean audience, with two additional artists being added to
the show from the previous exhibition in Japan, organizers said.
Although the exhibition portrays artists from Asia and the Middle East, the
regional framework is "meaningless," Hosaka said.
"You will not know which country the artist is from just by his or her works,
because many participating artists, including Iranian-born Avish Khebrehzadeh,
who lives in Washington D.C., and Japanese artist Leiko Ikemura, who has long
lived in Germany, have various backgrounds," he said.
"In the contemporary art world, showing works within the framework of
'nation-states' has become incongruous. You should keep in mind the overall theme
instead of trying to find distinction among the works."
The exhibition of nearly 200 drawings and sketches from animated productions
reveals the latent power when an artist puts ordinary pencil to paper to convey
their deepest and most complex emotions.
Leiko Ikemura, a Japanese artist known for her red pastel works of haunting
human-like trees, says drawing allows her to expand her ideas freely without
defining the destination. The German-educated artist is widely-recognized in and
out of her native Japan for her sculpture and painting.
South Korean artist Kim Jung-wook uses traditional Korean ink on hand-made paper
to present portraits of expressionless young girls. The portraits, pitch black
with large, empty eyes, resemble porcelain dolls that appear both Korean and
non-Korean at the same time.
Pakistan artist Nalini Malini's animation runs through the repetitive drawing and
erasing of lines that form shapes of bodies, suggesting the erosion of borders
between good and evil, life and death, material and nonmaterial to onlookers.
The exhibition, co-sponsored by the Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation and
the Japan Foundation, will run from Thursday through April 19 at the SOMA Museum
of Art, located in Seoul Olympic Park.
For more information, call 02)425-1077 or visit the website www.somamuseum.org.
hayney@yna.co.kr
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