Art Class: Geek Zone @ the K Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul

I wanted to spend some quality time with a dongsaeng of mine. She is the younger sister of one of my closest friends and while he is in the army we decided it would be wonderful to spend some quality time together with or without him. I’ve known her for five years and him for longer so every time I go to Korea I’m always happy to see their friendly faces. I told my friend I wanted to go to an art exhibition because I wanted to see as many as I could while I was in South Korea, so she recommended me the most instagrammable exhibition I’d seen in a long time entitled Geek Zone. Geek zone was a 4-floor exhibition which showcased the work of a multitude of Korean contemporary artists. A far cry from the classical renaissance and baroque pieces I’ve become accustomed to seeing in Venice. Each room showed a different side to contemporary Korean art from the weird, to sexual to political. Each part of the exhibition was cleverly curated to tell an abstract story that we the viewers had to put together. There the message was simple. Normality has no place here. This space is to unleash your inner geek.

The place that stuck out the most to me was the 5th floor of the exhibition which showcased snippets from recent tragedies across the world, re-imagined and re-painted in bold colours with the clippings next to them. Another piece was one that showcased the Korean presidents in morph costumes and they also happened to have some art which highlighted key moments in Korean history, the 1988 Olympics, former president Kim Dae Jong’s sunshine policy, the Sewol ferry incident in 2014. I studied each one and tried to remember every ounce of knowledge from my Korean history classes at university. On the lower basement floor, it included pop-art style graffiti of important figures in Korea’s struggle for independence from Japan in many bright colours and different artistic styles. Yes, they had to make it fun somehow, but they also kept much of the strong political ideals they wanted to portray. Maybe these artists are not as explicit as Grayson Perry or others, but their work speaks volumes about their views on modern Korean society.

The K Hyundae Contemporary Arts Museum is located in Chungdam-dong by Apgujeong Rodeo and the exhibition is ran until  2018. 08. 26 (SUN)

It was an unmissable experience. Hopefully, they will be back soon with another as great as this.