Material and Immaterial in Korean Modern and Contemporary Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art

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• Date Friday, April 28, 2023 - Sunday, October 22, 2023
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The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes almost 45,000 objects and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. Having recently completed an ambitious, multi-phase renovation and expansion project across... more

This thematic display explores how artists have manipulated materials and techniques as affective modes of communication to voice their thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. Lee Bul, a leading contemporary artist, is known for exploring issues of gender, oppression, and inequity. In her recent work Perdu CX (2021), Lee challenges the binary categories of organic and artificial and free-style drawing and crafted texture through her manipulation of lacquer and synthetic acrylic. Yun Hyong Keun’s Umber-Black (1975), one of the museum’s most recent acquisitions, on the other hand, illuminates how materials and processes echo the energy and psychology underneath: here, suppressed anger and frustration about South Korea’s postwar dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, Lee Ufan, known for his minimalist sculptures and paintings, in Dialogue (2016), poetically explores the interrelationship between materiality, abstract concepts, and processes.

Umber-Black (detail), 1975. Yun Hyong Keun (Korean, 1928–2007). Oil on linen; 93.5 x 113 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 2022.142