Archives: Exhibitions

The exhibition features nine contemporary artists working primarily in paint. Their work doesn’t just float between pure abstraction and abstract art that takes something from the world as its starting point. Instead it negotiates this complex space and creates something new from it – processing past languages while adapting new visual information and contemporary experiences as they unfold. Far from being reductive, the work of these artists is dynamic and diverse.

The artists in this exhibition employ techniques from folk art, ideas from performance art and borrow the language of post-war abstract expressionism as readily as those of digitised computer motifs and popular culture. By adapting these different visual languages, the artists in Abstract America Today create an exciting range of work celebrating the legacy of Abstraction. Like America itself, their work is epic and expansive, loud and confident, reflecting the simultaneous brutality and romance of the big city and the big country.

On 30 January the Saatchi Gallery’s second show, Unveiled: New Art From the Middle East opened, presenting the work of over 20 of the region’s most exciting artists. Dedicated to the flourishing contemporary Arabic art scene, the exhibition offered a cutting edge survey of recent painting, sculpture and installation.

Despite a long-standing visual tradition going back several centuries and a fiercely independent creative mindset, new artists from the Middle East have been largely overlooked internationally because of the widespread political conflict that dominates the region. However, in recent years the contemporary art scene in Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, Jordan and Dubai has become more vibrant and active than ever before. In about five years Abu Dhabi will be the home of one of the most dense concentrations of cultural resources in the world, while artists from the region are shattering tidy preconceptions to present an extraordinarily diverse range of artistic expression emerging from the Middle East and its Diaspora.

China has emerged as the next frontier for contemporary art. Chinese artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Wang Guangyi, and Shen Shaomin, are producing some of today’s most provocative new work. With China set to host the world at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World’s Fair, enthusiasm for recent Chinese art continues to grow.

Royal Academy of Arts, London, 6 October to 4 November 2006.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia 24 October 2007 to 13 January 2008

A survey of the exciting new art being produced by the generation of emerging artists working in America, from the Saatchi Gallery collection, selected by Norman Rosenthal of the Royal Academy.

Metamorphosis will showcase the work of Korean artist Oh Myung Hee and draw attention to the constantly changing relationships between past and future, tradition and innovation showcased in her unique paintings.

The artist’s central themes of change, renewal, nature and the search for one’s true self will be appropriately displayed via both a unique installation offering a multisensory experience and a traditional wall display.

This polar relationship between the modern and traditional in Oh Myung Hee’s art is born out of her conflicting views of Korean society. On the one hand she has a sincere and deep passion for its traditional, but restrictive, values; on the other, and particularly as a woman, she has an equally strong desire to challenge the status quo. Recurring themes in her art are flying scarves, falling petals, birds – all metaphors for spiritual and physical freedom.

If contemporary Korean artists disdain the past and celebrate high technology, she is unique in continuing to reference and celebrate the historical, simultaneously drawing it into the future. Her poetic world is rooted in her country’s long and prestigious narrative, but her message is a precise observation of the difficult balance between what has gone before and what lies ahead.

Her technique, too, exhibits a dichotomy, this time between Western methods and Oriental ones. She uses lacquer, the centuries old Oriental technique that Westerners admired and tried to imitate. In this sense, she draws from the past – but then she experiments, adding oil pigment, bending the limits of lacquer painting, often using an unusual canvas support, building so many layers that details detach from the background and enter space, adding a marked three dimensional aspect to some of her works which become sculptural. She also adds unusual or precious materials, like mother of pearl, eggshell and gold leaf.

In some works she employs old photos of Korean streets and begins to work around them and on them, building up surface and colour as if they were the encrustations of time and mental reflection. In others, a traditional Korean appreciation of untamed nature as the ultimate expression of perfection is presented.

Gwangsu Oh, art critic and director of SAN Museum, calls Oh Myung Hee’s contemplative and evocative art the place where “the current and past subtly overlap, bringing the dimension of time into space, to mix reality and memory.”