Calls grow to establish Nat l Museum of Modern Art after late Samsung chairman s art donation
Posted : 2021-05-30 17:21
Updated : 2021-05-30 17:47
Kim Whan-ki s Women and Jars (1950s) is part of Lee Kun-hee s art collection donated to the MMCA. Courtesy of MMCA
By Park Han-sol
The news of the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee s massive art collection being donated to state-run museums across the country has arguably been the most exciting topic in Korea s art circles in recent months. With some 23,000 pieces of art and cultural artifacts at hand, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is mulling over a plan to build a new museum to house the collection.
Rolling Stone
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“This is a very serious and deep question,” says RM, the 26-year-old leader of the world’s biggest band. He pauses to think. We’re talking about utopian and dystopian futures, about how the boundary-smashing, hegemony-overturning global success of his group, the wildly talented seven-member South Korean juggernaut BTS, feels like a glimpse of a new and better world, of an interconnected 21st century actually living up to its promise.
BTS’ downright magical levels of charisma, their genre-defying, sleek-but-personal music, even their casually nontoxic, skin-care-intensive brand of masculinity every bit of it feels like a visitation from some brighter, more hopeful timeline. What RM is currently pondering, however, is how all of it contrasts with a darker landscape all around them, particularly the horrifying recent wave of anti-Asian violence and discrimination across a global diaspora.
By Park Han-sol
To Lee Jung-seob, one of the most iconic modern painters of Korea, a cow was much more than a common farm animal found in rural communities. Serving as one of the central themes in his work, the creature was a symbol of Korea s ― or Joseon s ― national identity and spirit under Japanese colonial rule.
The cattle in Lee s White Ox straining to take a step forward describes the unceasing sacrifice and labor of the people of Joseon. Among Lee s only five known surviving paintings of white bulls, the said piece s whereabouts had been unknown since it was on display in the early 1970s.