Chung Seoyoung: What I Saw Today

Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA; director Jee-sook Beck) opens Chung Seoyoung: What I Saw Today at the SeMA Seosomun Main Branch from September 1 until November 13, 2022.  What I Saw Today, a solo exhibition by sculptor Chung Seoyoung (b. 1964), presents a total of 33 pieces, including her major works produced since 1993 and nine new works. 

Chung is widely recognized as an artist who played a leading role in promoting the contemporaneity of modern sculpture during the 1990s—the decade in which Korean contemporary art acquired diversity and individuality. To this day, she continues her artistic experiments, which malleably deal with the issue of sculpture across various media and fields including drawing, sound, video, and performance art. The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s long-term habit of writing down the colors, textures, motions that are hard to define yet memorable fine residue at the end of the day. Therefore, What I Saw Today is the title of the artist’s notes on fragmentary thoughts, and a reflection of her formative perception that what we see is both a physical path to discerning the world and a platform for engaging with it.

In the process of the sculpture taking on a single form, Chung focuses on the moment when various elements such as thoughts, emotions and situations change and impact each other and suddenly form a relationship to reveal themselves. The moment is a “sculptural moment,” and the artist has attempted to capture these tangible and intangible elements in the sculpture for the past 30 years. In addition, Chung’s unique language used in the forms of titles or text drawings is an autonomous and independent element, which undergoes the process of collision, conflict, selection, and extinction, and thus further diversifies the context.

In this exhibition, such everyday materials as cloth, sponge, carpet, plastic, and rubber merge with the simple blank space to convey the unique properties of Chung’s art. The status of the objects chosen by the artists has changed significantly over the past 30 years; some materials are no longer produced, while newly adopted elements like light, sound, and text have expanded the realm of sculpture. The usage of traditional materials like bronze and stainless steel wire on most recent works notes yet another expansion—in terms of reinterpreting the classics—in progress. What is even more intriguing is the arrangement of these 33 works. Since the artist places a great emphasis on all the relationships and connections arising from the works on display, her representative works do not follow a chronological order. Rather, this exhibition presents a newly formed relationship between the works, as well as between the works and their locations.

At some point, the artwork itself has been reduced to a momentary object of a camera as we no longer focus on the artwork or experience it directly with our own eyes, and our appreciation of art is often dictated by feedback from others. Amid this phenomenon, which is more prevalent in the internet environment such as SNS, through What I Saw Today, the artist re-examines the original value of art appreciation, “trusting in yourself and looking at the work without being restrained by anything else.”

Participating artist: Chung Seoyoung
Organized by Seoul Museum of Art.
Curated by Seungah Helen Lee.
Coordinated by Yoonjung Oh, Nakyung Lim.