Moscow — Seoul: Common Ideas
13.08.2021 - 7.11.2021
Press release
ASKERI GALLERY presented the works of world-famous Korean artists Jae Yong Kim and Kwang Young Chun at the Moscow Museum as part of the group exhibition "Moscow — Seoul: Common Ideas".The project was organized by the Museum of Moscow together with the Triumph Gallery, the Moscow City Tourism Committee, and the official Moscow tourist portal Discovermoscow.com and the digital travel service RUSSPASS and presented the works of contemporary Russian and South Korean artists whose creative trajectories are somehow connected with the two capitals. The project was timed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between modern Russia and the Republic of Korea and twinning relations between Moscow and Seoul.
The curatorial solution of the exhibition was based on a paired demonstration of the artists' works. Inside the exhibition space, representatives of Moscow and Seoul were in dialogue on topics close to them: the correlation of global and local, personal and national identities, space and memory, traditions and modernity. The artists of each pair are united by being in the common semantic field of today's culture and modern life. At the same time, their work has obvious technical and genre differences due to many factors. The result of a close spatial and semantic comparison of works is new connections between them, new optics for the perception of each work and the art scene as a whole. Moreover, this "optics of ratios" turns out to be very complementary for the Moscow art scene: it successfully withstands comparison with the Seoul one, one of the most striking and recognized in the world.
Most Korean artists were shown in Russia for the first time, and for some Moscow exhibitions became the debut museum projects — an important marker for a conservative and inclined to strict hierarchies of society. Korean contemporary art is understandable, close and commercially successful in Moscow - almost all the exhibits are taken from large private collections. Thus, the exhibition "Moscow - Seoul: Common Ideas" creates an interesting precedent, offering a look at Korean art and culture, settled in the collections of a foreign, though sometimes similar country.