Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, 10/11 – 12/22 (Asia Code), 10/11 – 10/27/13 (Changhoon Lee) www.somamuseum.org www.somadrawing.org
The handout of the show announced the theme of “Zero” (空 – Chinese character for emptiness) identified as the specific feature of ‘Asian’ art. Works in the show were related to this concept, taking up the theme from different angles: Boomoon’s photographic sequences of clouds taken on flights between continents; Seunghee Hong’s sculptures extruding from white walls; Subodh Gupta’s brass vessels with infinite-looking pitch black insides; Tatsuo Miyajima’s number shadow play created by stickers on the museum’s panoramic windows; Keunbyung Yook’s multi-screen video installation about ‘nothing’ – just fleeting moments in time; Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s underwater new year celebration reenactment; Go Wantanabe’s expressionless cyborg-like portrait; Taiho Kim’s ‘lanscape’ consisting only of flat granite surfaces in horizontal and vertical position – almost as a primordial Cartesian grid; Sangkyoon Noh’s op-art like embroidery constellations on canvas; Gao Lei’s miniature photo-dioramas – simulations of photographs in an exhibition space; Fang Lijun’s paintings of a God-like hand holding a naked baby in between clouds; Suzann Victors’s moving chandeliers; Yukinori Yanagi’s deconstructed neon-light sign referring to the Article 9 of the Japanese post-war constitution forbidding any future military capability deployment. Each of the works in itself was a meaningful and inspiring artwork, proved by time and history of exhibitions. However on the whole, I had a similar feeling as last time when I visited the museum: While everything seemed perfect, it all seemed a bit too much of a simple illustration of a certain concept. The artworks, each a masterpiece in itself, seemed to have come together in a way similar to a keyword search in the museum’s database. For me, even though the overall museum ‘visitor experience’ was a very pleasant one, it was the element of surprise that was missing – something to kick start you thinking about what one is actually looking at.
In the lower level of the museum, another show took place. This was a show in the series of the SOMA Drawing Centre. The show by Changhoon Lee consisted of four pieces: A lettering on the roof of the museum spelling PARADISE; a traffic signage board from a highway thrown inside of the museum’s atrium; a record player playing a piece of classical music at an extremely reduced speed (think of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, but as a Mozart record on a modified record player) and lastly a series of TV screens, each showing one movie, where all the frames (or most?) have been overlaid on top of each other, resulting in a blurred pastel-color image that was slowly changing. I was quite fond of the latter work – the overlapping pointed toward a different way of experiencing the time of a movie, as well as the overlapping memories left behind in memory afterwards. I saw a connection to Hector Rodriguez’ Theorem 8 (also based on movie imagery) as well as to my own research which I conducted as part of the Movement Series (which was however based on site-specific photo sequences). The rooftop signage also resonated quite well with the environment of the park surrounding the museum. 
So, in the end, Changhoon Lee’s show provided the sense of discovery and surprise that lacked in the Asia Code _ ZERO_ 空 show – a nice rounding up of the overall visitor experience, which nevertheless stayed too smooth for me.