At the Sejong Centre Special Exhibition in Seoul, there is a very digestible retrospective exhibition of the work of Ungno Lee (이응노), 1904-1989, a painter with tapestries and collage.Being as I am beginning to learn to write and read Korean, these strange agglomerations of forms and vocabularies made a lot of sense.
The real skill was in making sure that there was nothing that really reminded us of an actual letter from the Korean of English alphabets in there. Vertical and horizontal suggestions, scatterings of punctuation, mountains of characters unfettered by page-lines, are presented on carpet-textures, hessian materials. The colours are very undemonstrative, very carefully chosen to not get in the way, such that the colour is always there, but isn't the point at all.
In some of the pieces, the characters almost melt into the the texture of the fabric, such that forms and ground are unable to resist each-other, or language and page cannot remain differentiated. Furry art should also be strongly encouraged.
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