Tag: Korean Art
Korean Komparisons
Tuesday, October 17th, 2023 Art Column,Last month, within 24 hours, I travelled from the Sydney Contemporary art fair to two fairs in South Korea: KIAF Seoul and Frieze Seoul. The contrast was striking, as are most cultural contrasts between Australia and South Korea. Sydney Contemporary, celebrating its 10th anniversary, was held at Carriageworks over four days. It featured 96 galleries, […]
Five Hundred Arhats
Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 Art Column,All Buddhists aim to achieve enlightenment but only Prince Gautama, the Buddha himself, attained Nirvana by his own efforts. Everyone else requires help – a spiritual need recognised by both major schools of Buddhism, the Hinayana (AKA. the Lesser Way) and the Mahayana (the Greater Way). The Mahayana has its bodhisattvas – enlightened beings who […]
Koo Bohnchang
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020 Art Column,“In matters of art,” wrote the erudite poet, Paul Valéry, “erudition is a sort of defeat.” The argument is that the freshness of first perceptions may be destroyed by specialised knowledge. Imagine, for example, an expert on ceramics standing in front of a great piece of pottery. There are questions about where and when the […]
The Journey of Time
Thursday, August 2nd, 2018 Art Column,When James Abbott McNeill Whistler defended himself in court by saying that a dashed-off oil sketch represented the knowledge he had “gained in the work of a lifetime” he gave every lazy artist an excuse to feel important, and unwittingly established battle lines between art and craft. Nowadays it’s broadly accepted that one may create […]
Tokujin Yoshioka, Shen Shaomin & Chun Kwang-Young
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, Chinese Art, General Art Essays,There is an emerging trend in town: slipper art, and it has nothing to do with the new Speaker in Federal Parliament. At two venues this week the viewer is asked to slip a protective covering over his or her shoes, so as not to soil the art. This is slightly at odds with the […]
Art and Seoul
Thursday, October 20th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog, International Art,Regular readers must be starting to wonder in what part of the world they’ll find themselves from week to week. I’m starting to wonder myself. Recently I was in Seoul for the 10th Korean International Art Fair, today I’m on a plane coming back from Shanghai. Without wanting to sound glib, the very fact that […]