Artertain Gallery - South Korea Director Gustav D. Yim
Sol LeWitt in Korean Contemporary Art Korean contemporary art has undergone rapid changes and development since the Korean War. Particularly, alongside the political and economic efforts to rebuild society after the war, art also began to express the pain and futility of life in the post-war era. This societal atmosphere created a natural foundation for abstraction and expressionism to take root in Korean contemporary art. Confronting the emotional turmoil and existential uncertainty stemming from the war, the anxious emotions led artists toward expressionist techniques, while the inability to remain content with reality drove them to embrace abstraction. Thus, Korean contemporary art emerged from significant emotional upheaval and reflections on an uncertain future. As Korea underwent further societal changes, efforts to restore the social function of art materialized in the form of "Minjung art," a uniquely Korean genre. This movement sought to counter the dominance of modernism—characterized by abstract and expressionist art—that had defined the peak of Korean contemporary art until then. However, as the fervor for democratization subsided, Minjung art naturally gave way to subsequent artistic trends, fading into the background of Korean art history.
With the emergence of rapidly evolving media, genres such as media art and performance art began to combine diverse elements, delivering multidimensional messages. These developments provided a platform for Korean contemporary artists to engage more actively on the international stage.
The conceptual art and minimalism of Sol LeWitt offered a new challenge for Korean contemporary art, which had been rooted in expressionist and abstract interpretations. One might reasonably ask: what distinguishes conceptual art and minimalism from the abstract art pursued in Korea? This is a valid question. However, Sol LeWitt’s conceptual art demanded a fundamental reinterpretation of art by separating the artist's actions from their thoughts. He argued that art was not solely about direct expression; rather, it was about sharing and exchanging ideas. To think and share itself, he claimed, could be another act of creation.
This approach had a profound influence on 20th-century Korean contemporary art, particularly in expanding the scope of thought. Korean contemporary art, which had largely focused on material outcomes—the tangible results of expression—began to delve into the realm of spirituality and introspection. While artistic expression is undeniably important, it became increasingly clear that an artist’s work must be grounded in a clear philosophical foundation: why one creates and what one seeks to convey. In this sense, Sol LeWitt’s influence on Korean contemporary art was not about teaching how to draw but about teaching how to think. He introduced a process where ideas naturally manifest as results, akin to the concept of "Wu Wei" in Eastern philosophy. LeWitt continuously posed the question of whether art is truly the sole domain of the artist, suggesting instead that genuine artistic communication arises when countless spectators recognize and engage with the artist’s thoughts.
Artertain Gallery Director Gustav D. Yim January 2025
Artertain Gallery Team L-R. Gustav Yim Director Irene Barberis Artist-Curator Yiwon Park Research Manager Sol LeWitt Project, Korea, Curator Heeseung Hwang
Notes from Korea 12.01.2025.
Artertain Gallery, Seoul, South Korea.10.01.2025
The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt: Core Artists: Ten Countries: South Korea (4/10)
It was such a pleasure to collaborate with Artertain Galleries, in Seoul, South Korea, in January 2025. Their hospitality and professionalism were exceptional, and the marvellous possibilities that opened for the research in Korea, spectacular.
I would like to warmly thank Yiwon Park, our research manager, Korea, for all her hard work, Artertain Director, Gustav Yim, and Artertain’s Curator, Heeseung Hwang.
It was an eighteen-hour journey from Melbourne to Seoul, via China, then an almost immediate installation of ten hours. The exhibition opened on the 10th of January, a very strong show in the heart of one of Seoul’s arts districts. Gustav was the instigator of this arts precinct. His was the first gallery in the area and now at least fifteen galleries are established there: what a terrific history. I particularly responded to the central urban dynamic and the down-to-earth, everyday bustle surrounding the gallery. Architecturally, the space is divided into three galleries; the front space, which opens directly onto Hongyeon-gil street in Seodaemun-gu area, is busy and fragrant - there is a sandalwood factory on an adjacent corner – this perfume finds its way into the exhibition, adding yet another invisible patina to the project. Down the congested side street at the end are Galleries 2 and 3 where you step down into Gallery 2, and up into Gallery 3. It retains a sense of the original architecture, though now cleared of anything extraneous, all is painted white, floors, walls and ceiling. Upstairs in Gallery 3 the ceilings are heavier and lower, but the space exudes its histories.
Janet Passehl, Wilma Tabacco, Fransje Killaar, and my pieces work tremendously across the three levels of the gallery.
Gallery 1. Fransje Killaar’s two new works glow and loosely hang, inviting viewers to contemplate not only their colour and process, but the ‘other’, transcribed in the title – The Intuition 1 & 2. The fluorescent orange and yellow images on paper are centrally placed and attached to the screen-printed fabric by pins. They are inscribed by a fine tool, perhaps a metal scraper or a pen or pencil, and create an other-worldly stillness, albeit in extra strong colour; one enters an alternate space of kneeling draped figures in open rooms. Passers-by were fascinated, peering and standing endlessly in front of the window, looking and then reading the vinyl-cut texts of the show’s title.
My 70 cm stripe is a location work on walls, floor, and ceiling, and is part of the Architectonics series, #17. This band of fragmented 30” grids circumvent the same main window of Gallery 1 creating a multicolour juncture between the movement on the street and the stillness of Fransje’s hanging works. Intuitively placed from my responses to both the architecture of the place (interior and exterior) and the movement of colour complexity within the tapes, it creates a multi-sequence of possibilities. I could extend this process exponentially and eventually cover everything! However, it is the ‘hidden geometry’ that continually pulls me in, the notion of one gesture leading to another – one step to another – colliding languages and harmonious positioning, a choreography of both space and colour.
Down the tiny laneway we pass the big red, blue and black banner for the show that Gustav and Curator Hwang have had fabricated. Gallery 2 is down three stairs. Curator Hwang’s music envelopes and ‘lifts’ anyone who enters. To the left is our catalogue list pinned to the wall – no wall labels are seen, except for Janet’s instructions to those who will participate in her ‘unweaving’.
Janet Passehl’s works are minimal and draw you down into the space; one of her new works is interactive - there is now unravelling to do - the audience participates in the slow and hard work of systematically taking the weaving apart, line by line, a meditative and focussed process. Her instructions state:
1. Begin again, 2024, hand-woven cotton, aluminium, cotton string, the body of the work is 218.5 cm (height of bar from floor) x 66 cm x variable depth (as cloth drapes onto floor). Dimensions also include the space defined by the string from which the rod hangs.
Size details: full length of cloth is about 472 cm and about 56 cm wide. This work is intended to be unwoven by gallery visitors during the show.
An invitation to unweave
Gallery visitors are invited to unweave Begin again. Please spend as much or as little time as you wish and unravel as much or as little as you wish. Feel free to come back another day and continue. You will of course begin where the last unweave left off, on either side. When you come to the end of a thread, just let it drop to the floor. Unweaving will become more difficult the farther into the cloth you go. The piece can be unwoven from each end simultaneously. Please work gently enough to avoid pulling the entire piece down. If enough of the cloth is unwoven, it might be necessary to adjust the cloth over the aluminium tube so to keep the weight balanced. Feel free to do so.
Many visitors chose to participate in the ‘unweaving’, and most were very surprised at how arduous it was, and how intensely focussed you had to be. It also became evident that the threads needed to be broken to get to the next thread. The materiality of both object and process melded into one. Any preciousness of the beautiful artwork went out the window, as they all, in my observation, struggled to know just how to get around the act of taking apart the hand-woven, off-white, cotton fabric, line by line. The pulled threads were randomly dropped to the floor, creating yet another minimal type of ‘collective drawing’.
Next to Janet’s work, Wilma Tabacco’s paintings located us in Korea. Beautifully painted in acrylic and pigment on Korean Hanji paper, ‘In tandem’ is pattern, architecture, archaeology and fractured language all in one - mirrored. Likewise, her other two sets of works. Wilma says of her work,
Then and Now
The three types of plant-based papers I have used for the works in this exhibition differ in their constituent fibres, weight, tensile strength, surface quality, potential for absorbing liquid and durability and it is these qualities that have guided my varied methodologies in determining how to best accentuate their attributes.
In tandem 1- 3 are painted in many layers of diluted acrylics on double-leaf Korean Hanji paper which I purchased in Seoul in the late 1990s during my 3-month AsiaLink residency at Kookmin University where I was granted a studio and living space while I taught drawing classes to groups of delightful art students. These sheets are almost the last from my vast collection of Korean papers that I acquired while there. Now, all these years later, how wonderful to be able to return the paper back to its home infused with my current imagery and ideas!
For Dust and Stone 1-4 I have used a 300-gsm cotton-rag French paper made by Reeves BFK. I purchased several packs of this paper during my art student days in the early 1980s! and have used it for many projects over many years. The title of these works, amongst other allusions, is an oblique reference to the ground pigments and mica powder (mixed with acrylic paint) that I have used.
The 12 works titled Diluvium – a Latin word describing a flood or deluge of water – is painted in acrylic on 1000-gms French cotton-rag paper bequeathed to me by a dear friend. Its thickness and distinctive texture are perfect for incising linear marks that are intended to suggest high water levels, while the dark shapes imply floating islands, or post-event debris.
All the abstract imagery I use is conceptually grounded in my long-time obsession with archaeological remains and their causation through natural phenomena, historical events or both.
Stone is eroded to dust by water or wind: water submerges the land formations created by seismic activity. Reflecting on this ‘in tandem’ duality of creation and destruction is a means for speculating on the past and for imagining the future.
Unlike the other three artists in this exhibition, I did not know Sol LeWitt personally. I have however been familiar with his varied abstract works for decades and so share with him abstraction’s potential to hint at confluences beyond time and place.”
Upstairs to Gallery 3 and my ‘Choreographing Colour: as long and as wide as Sol’s table’ is up. This work is my response to one of Sol’s thirteen music tapes he left in his studio in 2007. Being the first artist, apart from family, to reactivate his Chester studio in 2019, I had the greatest privilege in experiencing and recording all his processes and his ‘being’ in the space; the obvious and the minutia of the studio. I have left the work made in his Chester studio and installed in Korea, 3/4 unfurled, it is rolled and raised a few inches above the floor.
Installing Choreographing Colour; I can still feel the sound of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Iberia, playing loudly in the Chester studio, it is tape 3184 of over 4,000 music tapes that Sol (as a pre-eminent musicologist) recorded and constructed. Stravinsky composed this orchestral piece for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe Company in 1913, and the ballet was choreographed by Nijinsky, for the same years Paris season. Iberia is the second of three ‘images’ Debussy composed between 1905 and 1912, in this grouping, he wanted to “incorporate ideas of juxtaposing elements of the visual arts in musical terms”, along with an innovative use of ‘incomplete progressions’, both ideations have been part of the narrative of the Choreographing Colour series. Choreology Notations reverses the process of dance choreology. Rather than being a written notation and a recording of steps in the development of a ballet, this artworks choreology transcribes the short marks of paint already completed, into sinuous lines of pristine colour dotted with tiny icons that mark each location of movement, reflecting in a sense, the medieval use of page architecture and the locative structures of figuration in the illuminated manuscripts. In these works, I am juxtaposing musical responses into the visual arts, creating ‘incomplete progressions’ which are compositions of layered, separated and overlaid grid structures, playfully and intensely examining perceptions of the serialisation, systems, and modular units intrinsic to my practice.
A media section in Gallery 3, showcased the artist’s moving images, documentaries, podcasts and publications.
As one leaves the Artertain Gallery, (me to the small apartment rented for the project) for home, a transposing of the above ideas and responses occur. The propositions and questions raised in Korea, transform when presented in Hong Kong, the UK and Australia, and will change again when presented in the Netherlands in July 2025 at 37PK, Netherlands, and again at the University of Dundee and Drawing Projects, Scotland in November and December 2025.
All the artist’s works have originated from their studios; Janet’s from the USA, Fransje’s from the Netherlands, Wilma’s from Australia, and my work from Sol LeWitt’s Chester studio, and all have been placed within alternate cultural contexts to commence the research of Sol LeWitt’s influence across the selected countries. The works are carried across the globe in my suitcase, underscoring the mobility and flexibility of this intercultural project.
It is with great excitement that I announce that John Hogan and Anthony Sansotta of NYC, will be joining our Core Artists exhibitions from this point on. Both John and Anthony worked closely with Sol for over 30 years and have headed up (ongoing) the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings, in all their manifestations around the world.
‘The Concentric Influences of Sol LeWitt’, Korean research has commenced. The e-catalogue will be available on www.thesollewittproject.net in the coming weeks.