HOME > Exhibition > Ongoing exhibition

Ongoing exhibition

List

Collection Highlight 2 _ All of Us Were Great Loners

Period 2020-07-17~2021-10-03
Work Type Internal
Artworks Count 20
Place 3F
Contact 051-744-2602
Publication

Content
Installation Artworks

Content

Collection Highlight 2 _ All of Us Were Great Loners

Collection Highlight 2
All of Us Were Great Loners

All of Us Were Great Loners is an exhibition of Busan Museum of Art’s collection, focusing on figure paintings after 2000. The figures of ‘human’ in the works in the exhibition are embedded with the social conditions and symbols. They are the ‘speakers’ that reflect the artists’ world view. The world seen by today’s artists or humans is filled with consumer capitalism, spaces of authority and institution, ideologies, and intense daily life. The humans in such a world are represented through artists’ unique expressive ways with subjects ranging from the restoration of humanity, materialization of desire, division and isolation, and struggle. As such, the current exhibition aspires to show how humans depicted in contemporary art reveal, resist, and are hopeful for the world.

All of Us Were Great Loners presents three themes. Firstly, the exhibition presents how self-portraits by contemporary artists have shown the changes in the ideas and status of agency, showing what the artists wanted to tell to the world. The changes in the ideas of agency in figure paintings reflect not only the artists’ inner minds but also the social conditions encompassing the culture and social practices.

Secondly, the exhibition presents how humans are recognized as mere components of the social system, suffering isolation and division. This show how humans in the diversified and sophisticated informational media society delve into existential questions.

Lastly, the exhibition presents humans who make progress while recognizing the unreasonable institutions and absurdities. If the human history is made of a continuation of the results of visible or invisible struggles, artists are seismometers that sense such series of movements.

In All of Us Were Great Loners, the Korean poet Gi Heyongdo’s ‘poems,’ which tacitly amuse nihilism and tragic romanticism, represent the exhibition’s themes. The title of the exhibition also appropriates the poet’s words. Poem is an art form that can reach the essence of the world by not describing everything. In this sense, art and poem are the same yet different. In All of Us Were Great Loners, these two genres encounter with each other and agitate their counterparts, opening a pathway towards a new world.

The world is constantly drifting and changing. However, we continue to live and exist. With the exhibition All of Us Were Great Loners, it is hoped that we render the words that sing that we were all great loners as the poet Gi Hyeongdo has written.

Work Introduction