Where Clouds Disperse is the first major museum exhibition in the United States showcasing Suh Se-ok (born 1929), a pivotal figure in Korean Modern art. Key works from Suh Se-ok´s oeuvre reveal his exceptional conceptual and technical artistry as well as his renewal of traditional ink into a modern material.
The exhibition will be on view from January 27 to April 20, 2008 at the Caroline Wiess Law Building.
This highly anticipated exhibition also exposes the American public to the vitality and critical importance of Korea in the history of modern art and 20th-century Modernism and Postmodernism.
Suh Se-ok´s unprecedented abstract ink paintings made a splash in the conservative Korean art world beginning in the 1950s. As the leader of the progressive Mungnimhoe, or Ink Forest Group, he encouraged artists to free themselves from traditional ways and to establish abstraction and simplicity in Eastern painting. Suh Se-ok works not to subvert or abandon the tradition of ink painting, but rather to engage in it with a Modernist sensibility. His abstract works seem paradoxical because even as they appear to be totally breaking away from tradition, he still employs the traditional tools of ink, brush, and paper.
Over his 40-year career, Suh Se-ok has incorporated his traditional training with his Modernist sensibility to create dynamic works that embody his artistic vision. He has been especially transfixed by the figurative form and has continually explored and perfected it until it evolved into powerful formal gestures of simple lines that comprise his definitive pictorial vocabulary. Selections of his figurative works from the 1960s to 1990s are featured in the exhibition.
The picture shows 'Suh Se-ok, Person, 1996, Collection of the artist Suh Se-ok'. -- www.mfah.org
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