KMU Fineart Graduation Exhibition 국민대학교 회화전공 졸업전시

Seoul, December 3 – 22, 2015, http://kmufineart.com

As the title says, this was the graduation exhibition of the Kookmin University Fine Arts Department. Each student received a roughly equal space, a small art fair booth-like compartment in which s/he presented his/her works. There has been a lot of paintings, many of them trying to develop one specific personal-signature like technique or style of painting. Then there have been numerous attempts at post-internet art-like works, where the technique of painting has been used to assemble miscellaneous references from both on-line and off-line works, combining miniature drawings, expressive gestures and duplicated comic book snippets. There have been also some figurative painting attempts, mostly with a layer of nostalgia, referring to photographs or other memory-related artifacts. And there have been also a few outliers, which tried to do something different:

김진주 / Jinjoo Kim‘s installation has probably been the most strictly conceptual: Different media ranging from painting to furniture, playing card and video have all been held together through the concept of goal oriented behavior and motivational approaches, creating a surprising link between such different realms as school, sport, hobbies and workplace

함연정 / Yeonjung Hamm‘s sculpture and media installation also presented a range of works that were all bound together by an abstract concept, in this case calibration / balancing / optimization.

우지현 / Jihyun Woo‘s work looked interesting, as it seemed to work with statistics and predictions, but it unfortunately was not working during my visit, and it was also too much Korean language based for me to understand.

This is not to say that other artist’s works would have been less good – it’s just my personal bias towards conceptual art. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the output, while not that much surprised about a certain uniformity of the works that can be traced back to the Korean customary crowd behavior and love for looking alike. Here some other artworks that caught my attention: