Tashkent in January. The Museum of Arts. An exhibition of contemporary South Korean art, which we had not in the least expected to find there.
Contemporary art seldom manages without a manifesto. These sculptures manage.
A Tangible Emptiness
The first thing they provoke is an almost childish urge to touch. To run a hand along those exaggerated curves, to feel the cold mass that somehow looks soft. The sculptures have no faces—in their place are small apertures, through which the air seems to circulate. Sculpture here does not clutter the space; it becomes the organ through which the space breathes.
Rhymes Between Cultures
We came to this exhibition directly from Bukhara and Samarkand, and the sequence turned out to be perfect.
Brown and turquoise—warm, earthen bronze and jade lit from within—are a direct echo of the architecture of the Silk Road: fired terracotta brick and the celestial blue of domes. If the jade Femininity is silence, the bronze figures put me in mind of wind instruments. Their forms seem blown outward from inside by some powerful current of air—like the bells of karnays, those long ceremonial trumpets of Central Asia, caught at the instant of their highest note.
Light Through Stone
Photographs miss the essential thing: how the jade shifts its tints from green-blue to nearly transparent as you walk around it. The light does not simply bounce off the stone—it becomes entangled inside it, producing the effect of living, warm skin.
In these flowing shapes one glimpses at once the ancient mother-goddesses of Anatolia, the Rubensian triumph of flesh, and the earthly gladness of Renoir’s bathers. The sculptor seems to have cleaned all these images of everything extraneous, leaving nothing but vitality behind.
One breath
In the halls of the Tashkent museum, these Korean “visitors from elsewhere” were entirely at home. The language of roundness resonates perfectly with the ancient geometry of the East. The Silk Road was about precisely this: not about goods, but about the way different ways of thinking about the world suddenly recognise one another.
Time may come in many kinds. Its breath is one.
