New Junk, Old Junk
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
17
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheonan,
Chungcheongnam-do,
Korea Rep.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
All this bric-a-brac seemed out of place in this gallery. Arario Gallery opened in Cheonan in 2002, a sleek and contemporary space surrounded by the hippest department stores in downtown Cheonan (which are also Arario-owned). Since then the Arario project has expanded, opening galleries in Seoul, Beijing and New York. The Arario 'small city' in Cheonan is full of monuments to consumerism, to commercial viability. Among the giant handbags and toys and the wrecked cars stand the centrepiece figures, a couple of sculptures by Damien Hirst, the world's highest selling artist.
Hirst and his junk belong here; they are bold, high-gloss, machine-produced, utterly empty artworks. Surrounded by department stores and fast food franchises, they look very much at home. Couples sit in their shadows, eating donuts by the dozen and photographing themselves.
So with all this pretty, polished new junk surrounding the gallery, why fill the inside with such musty old junk?
These old relics have been collected by Jinyong Lee, and he uses them as the subjects of his enormous paintings. Hanging from the walls of the gallery are monumental stacks of oil-on-canvas suitcases and books.
Giant handbags outside, giant suitcases inside; perhaps there is no difference between the old junk and the new after all?
There is more to this exhibition though. In between the suitcase stacks and colossal cameras are huge photo-realistic faces, a giant clock, American city scenes. And at the centre of gallery is a massive wall of drawers, painted to look like the spines of books. Every subject is covered by these painted titles; from Harry Potter to the Palaeolithic, from psychoanalysis to the Bible. A few timid visitors tug on the drawers, and find that they slide easily open and are filled with even more old junk; keys, watches, miniature pyramids, photographs, musical instruments. The Palaeolithic draw contains a replica Neanderthal skull, set in resin. There is something fascinating about all this old stuff.
It must have taken a long, long time to paint the thousand or so books onto these drawers. It must have taken a lot longer - an entire lifetime - to collect the roomfuls of antique junk that are every bit as important to Lee as his paintings. Over the course of his thirty-odd year career he has earned a reputation for the superhuman amount of time he dedicates to his art. The appeal of this art extends back further than this one career though. Two centuries worth of junk fill the rooms of Arario Gallery, a great repository of discarded memories that have been preserved by Lee; that he has adopted and made his own.
Opening and closing drawers, wandering among the battered old relics; Lee's art takes forgotten, commonplace objects and invests them with an exotic attractiveness. They belong to different times, but also to different places. The fading words on the book spines are in English, German, Mandarin, the stamps on the suitcases bear names like Madrid, London, Savoy, the stamps and addresses on envelopes are American.
Opening and closing drawers, wandering around the collection, you could explore the past two hundred years of world history - both personal and international history. At first Lee may seem like an antiquarian, fixated on preserving the junk of the past, but it is this spirit of curiosity and exploration, of finding the exotic in a battered old suitcase, that makes him so attuned to contemporary Korea. He belongs to the new Korea, the Korea of open borders, and to the new, internationalist generation of Koreans, that cross those borders and step out into the world.
Lee has explored the world and retrieved its memories, and now he has brought his discoveries back to Korea. His art and exhibitions, his collections offer a tantalising glimpse of the richness of the world out there; each opening and closing of another drawer is another tiny exploration. It is difficult to walk away from the drawers until every single one has been explored, and even then, the curiosity isn't satisfied. Lee's art taps into that powerful yearning expressed so often by so many people around Korea; the yearning to break free, to explore and understand and engage.
When I had scrutinised every drawer, every piece of junk, I walked out of Arario Gallery and across the sculpture park, past the giant handbags and into the nearest department store, past many more handbags, and up to the bookstore on the top floor. Others had had exactly the same idea as me; a knot of people were gathered around the travel literature, opening and closing books, scrutinising pictures, planning trips. Their faces were filled with wonder and fascination, delighted by the exotic junk of the world.
This article was written for the July 2008 issue of Korea Sun..
