ART-PRESENTATION: Bahc Yiso-Memos and Memories

Bahc Yiso has played a momentous role in the development of Korean Contemporary Art. As an artist, curator, and critic from the 1980s through early 2000s, Bahc Yiso brought New York art scene’s major discourses and exhibitions into Korea while also contributing and participating in numerous exhibitions that introduced Korean art to New York, serving as a bridge between the two art worlds.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo MMCA Archive

The exhibition “Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories” aims to trace the path of Korean art history by spotlighting Bahc Yiso. Bahc’s introduction of “in-between art” to the Korean art schools, that had just entered a detente after the antagonism between Minjung art and modernism at the time and his artistic style that conjures neither positive nor negative paradoxical emotions to broaden the scope of interpretation (such as the slogan “We Are Happy”) had an enormous influence over the next generations of artists, diversifying and enriching Korean contemporary art. The exhibition is a large-scale retrospective built around extensive archives and representative works donated by Bahc’s family in 2014 at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art-Korea. The donation amounts to over 200 pieces and approximately twenty years’ worth of the artist’s notes, drawings, lecture materials, exhibition records, and articles that represent Bahc’s full-fledged artistic career from 1984 to his death in 2004. The exhibition is composed of two intersecting axes, one of which extends in the form of a timeline or a chronicle, laying out the artist’s major works, drawings, and archives of the twenty-some years of his career, branching from New York to Seoul. Viewers can examine the chronological transition in the artist’s philosophy and works along this axis. Cutting across the timeline is the other axis comprised of three concentric layers: Surrounding a center of the artists’ notes, which could be seen as the seed, are a ring of sketches and archives, and then the final works are displayed as the outermost layer. The 21 volumes of artist notes are detailed process-records of Bahc’s works produced since his graduation from Pratt Institute in New York in 1984 up until just before his death in 2004, containing everything from his contemplations on self-identity as a minority and the cultural differences experienced during his time abroad in New York, to initial sketches of “Your Bright Future” (2002), one of his major latter works. The large number of installation drawings produced during the mid-to-late 1990s, when his paintings expanded and transitioned into three-dimensional and installation works, show such a high degree of completion that each one could be considered a finished piece. His detailed installation directions and descriptions are as meticulous as blueprints, examining various environments and their effects on the installations in order to perfect his concepts.

Info: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), 313 Gwangmyeong-ro, Gwacheon-si, Gyeonggi-do, Duration: 24/7-16/12/18, Days & Hours: March-October: Tue-Fri & Sun 10:00-18:00 Sat 10:00-21:00, November–February: Tue-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:00 Sat 10:00-21:00, www.mmca.go.kr