The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents the work of the late Nam June Paik, Korean American artist, who is considered to be the founder of video art, during a press preview of his first-ever retrospective exhibition in San Francisco, California. Photo by JOHN G. MABANGLO / EPA
June 12 (Asia Today) — Nam June Paik connected Seoul, Tokyo and New York by satellite in 1986.
His project, “Bye Bye Kipling,” brought Korean traditional dance, American popular music and Japanese avant-garde art together on one screen in real time. The work directly challenged British writer Rudyard Kipling’s famous line that East and West could never meet, presenting instead the possibility of communication across borders and cultures.
That history of encounter and exchange is at the center of “Road movie: Art between Korea and Japan since 1945,” now on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in Gwacheon. The exhibition marks the 60th anniversary of normalized diplomatic relations between South Korea and Japan and traces 80 years of artistic exchange since Korea’s liberation in 1945.
The exhibition features about 200 works by 43 artists and artist teams from both countries. It was jointly organized by the Korean museum and the Yokohama Museum of Art. The show first opened in Yokohama late last year and drew about 37,000 visitors before coming to South Korea.
Featured artists include Nam June Paik, Lee Ufan, Lee Bul, Jung Yeondoo, Koki Tanaka, Jiro Takamatsu and Takashi Murakami, along with other major figures in contemporary Korean and Japanese art.
Paik is one of the central figures in the exhibition. He studied aesthetics and art history in Japan in the 1950s and later built close ties with Japan’s avant-garde art scene. It was there that he met Shigeko Kubota, his lifelong partner and artistic collaborator.
Alongside “Bye Bye Kipling,” the exhibition presents Kubota’s video work “Broken Diary: Korean Trip,” which documents Paik’s return to South Korea after 34 years abroad.
The exhibition, however, does not focus only on well-known artists. Its first section, “In Between: Zainichi Koreans’ Gaze,” examines the lives of Korean artists who remained in Japan after liberation. Cho Yanggyu’s “Sealed Warehouse” depicts a dark, enclosed labor site and reflects both the reality faced by Zainichi Koreans and the wounds left by national division.
The exhibition also explores the growth of artistic exchange after South Korea and Japan normalized diplomatic relations in 1965. Works by Lee Ufan, Park Seo-bo, Yun Hyong-keun, Jiro Takamatsu and Kishio Suga show how artists in the two countries influenced one another as modern art movements developed across borders.
Later works by Masato Nakamura, Takashi Murakami and Lee Bul show how artistic exchange expanded in the 1990s from official institutions to personal networks and collaborative relationships.
Lee Bul’s “Cyborg W5” presents a futuristic but incomplete body, questioning boundaries between humans and machines and between male and female identities. The work reflects the shared concerns about technology and identity that shaped Korean and Japanese contemporary art after the 1990s.
The exhibition’s final section shifts from past exchange to present-day solidarity. Koki Tanaka’s “Vulnerable Histories: A Road Movie” links the massacre of Koreans after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake to more recent anti-Korean demonstrations in Japan, asking viewers to consider histories of discrimination and exclusion.
Jung Yeondoo’s “Magician’s Walk” reflects on landscapes after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and explores the possibility of empathy and solidarity with the suffering of others.
The exhibition also extends to the museum’s outdoor sculpture park in Gwacheon. Six sculptures by Korean artists based in Japan and Japanese artists, including Duckjun Kwak, Quac Insik and Lee Ufan, highlight the museum’s role as an important site of Korean-Japanese artistic exchange.
Kim Sung-hee, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, said the exhibition revisits “historical moments experienced by the two countries and the traces of artistic exchange formed within them.”
Kim said she hopes the exhibition will offer visitors a chance to rediscover “the status and possibilities of Korean and Japanese contemporary art.”
The exhibition runs through Sept. 27.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
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Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260612010003954
