At the Seoul Museum of Art’s Seosomun Main Building, the group exhibition “Scoring the Words“ will be held from September 1 to November 20, 2022. The exhibition will be part of the museum’s exhibition series, which began in 2014, engaging with non-Western regions. This year, the series will focus on Asia.
The exhibition includes drawings, collages, videos, performances, workshops, and radio transmissions created by fourteen artists, curators, researchers, and musicians who are based in Asia or deal with various issues surrounding the Asian region.
The Asian identity addressed in the exhibition is not limited to countries, races, or ethnicities; and neither does it attempt to search for a single regional identity. Rather, the exhibition hopes to become an open space to share thoughts based on the different experiences that can only be encountered in the Asian region and to further question if particular thoughts could be considered “Asian.”
The exhibition begins with a poem, where each word and phrase is excerpted from works on display or rephrased from the artist’s words in the works. The exhibition is a song for a collective and a language of resilience, and a medium that surveys the collective phenomena happening in Asian culture.
Each participating artist has observed the current political, social, and cultural movements happening in Asia that are vestiges of its dynamic modern history of colonization, authoritarianism, and great development, and created works that encompass these cultural phenomena. Through these artistic practices, the artists examine how Asia could be connected to form a new network and explore the possibility of that connection as a collective.
Korean artists participating in the exhibition are Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977), an artist who reinterprets Korean traditions from a contemporary point of view and redefines painting through video, sculpture, and installation; Young In Hong (b. 1972), who focuses on discussing “equality” and breaking down the power of hierarchy through installation, performance, sound, drawing, and embroidery; Yezoi Hwang (b. 1993), an artist who works with photography to explore the various perspectives of how society views women or love; and A-Melting Pot (Daham Park & Boyeon Marta Shin), a project to create a sound network of experimental/improvised/independent music in Asia.
Other participating artists include CAMP, Hera Chan & Edwin Nasr, Duto Hardono, Dusadee Huntrakul, Sasa Karalic, Jompet Kuswidananto, Tiffany Sia, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Koki Tanaka, and Jason Wee.