Let us go straight to the point. 《Monumental》, as its title suggests, summons the monument. Why the monument? What does the act of summoning a monument intend?

Today, monuments are being dismantled. Across the world, protests continue to damage statues, and armed clashes have even broken out between those who support their removal and those who oppose it. Frequent news of such incidents suggests that the monument today has become not something to look up to, but something to be torn down.

In art, the monument evokes the purity and absoluteness of a medium sealed off from the outside world, capital-H History, and its uncritical continuation and acceptance. Some may think of vertical sculptures striving for eternity, paintings grounded in the trust of flatness, or realist art that disseminated, instigated, or propagated ideals. These monuments of art are both historical and problematic. Modern and contemporary art have often regarded the very monuments they produced as objects for deconstruction and reexamination. It would not be an exaggeration to say that certain discourses and practices have devoted themselves entirely to the dissolution of monumental form.

Here, we call forth 《Unmonumental》, a partner and counterpart to 《Monumental》.[1] The exhibition 《Unmonumental》, held at the New Museum in 2007, centered on the question of what contemporary sculpture/art is and what its new “form” might be, responding to a moment in which the duties of art and the museum were being critically questioned. Marking the reopening of the New Museum as it moved from SoHo to its current location on the Bowery, the exhibition—as the title declared—identified the non-/anti-monumental as the defining characteristic of contemporary art, betraying the formalism accumulated by monumental art of the past.

Part 1 of the exhibition focused on sculptures and installations marked by assemblage—a mixture of everyday objects. Part 2 added collage-like two-dimensional works onto the surrounding walls of the gallery, enveloping the sculptures from Part 1. Part 3 overlaid sound onto the previously installed works. Part 4, “Montage,” streamed video works utilizing found footage online. In this way, its four parts—beginning at different moments—overlapped and accumulated, ultimately forming a single assemblage.[2]

The works in 《Unmonumental》 rejected or overturned the monumental and heroic “form” by mixing disparate materials, substances, and content into heterogeneous combinations. The exhibition’s introduction explained that the methods of collage, assemblage, and montage revealed the fragmentary, multilayered strata of each artwork’s components—connecting these not only to artistic form but also to the broader dismantling and re-emergence of history, society, and subjectivity itself.[3]

The methodologies that underpinned 《Unmonumental》 can also be found in today’s a-temporal, fragmented modes of artmaking. And several of the critical questions raised by 《Unmonumental》 remain relevant today. It is clear that contemporary art never converges into a single style; its tendencies grow increasingly schizophrenic in their divergence, while at the same time becoming meticulously formalized. Furthermore, these forms are often understood within specific art-historical genealogies.[4]

At this point, some may express direct skepticism toward works that raise the banner of formlessness or propose supposedly new forms. The claim might be that such tactics are no longer new, that they do not actually violate the condition of “becoming form,” and that rather than dismantling the monumental structures of capital-H History or canonical art, these practices may in fact inherit another kind of monument, or reenact the very art of the past that once dreamed of deconstruction.[5] More radically, one might argue that this is not the dismantling of problematic monuments at all, but a clumsy eclecticism—a patchwork that obediently serves the demands of consumer society, stitching together alibis for art that has become, simply, mediocre.

So, has the monument truly collapsed today? Is monumental art form nothing more than meaningless debris to be discarded? It is around these questions that 《Monumental》 and 《Unmonumental》 are placed face to face. Held in Seoul in 2023, 《Monumental》 recalls past attempts to illustrate contemporary art through the logic of deconstruction and repositions them not as dismantling, but as monuments once again. It proposes that reconsiderations of existing histories and perceptions, expressions of marginalized individuals/bodies, skeptical questions toward art, and reinventions of media can function not as vehicles for deconstruction but as new, clarified supports—as a kind of mutated monument.

The methods observable in this exhibition—attaching and layering, uncontrolled chance, experimentation with new materials and substances, the use of found footage and photography—share certain intentions with earlier examples while simultaneously cutting across artistic forms that have become an avoided inheritance. Moving between the bent, twisted uses of these forms, the exhibition constructs its own kind of monument.

Here, the works inherit the surface of painting, the verticality of sculpture, and the absolute authority of the maker—but inherit them as problems. In an era when diverse on/offline media constantly influence one another and the very form of art is subject to doubt, these works reveal what they dismantle and what they assemble through their chosen supports. They show how artists move away from unconditional fixation on long-standing styles and the purity of traditional media, carving out their own particularities and constructing their own contexts.

The quest of 《Monumental》 begins by recognizing its temporal, physical, and cultural distance from 《Unmonumental》. The exhibition identifies subtle fissures created by the shared suspicion and doubt running between “then and now,” “there and here,” and recalls the problematic, historical forms, media, and monuments of art once more. Through its misaligned experiments—revisiting the past to imagine the present—it reflects on the near past saturated with attempts to dismantle the monument and assesses the conditions and practices of contemporary Korean art today.

Korean art, having passed through (and perhaps continuing to pass through) a fleeting modernism, reexamines what can be (re)discovered from monumental art forms. It investigates the common grounds those forms assume and the distances they negotiate. In a time when everything is entangled with virtual space, the exhibition asks how monumental art reveals matter, image, and body—and how a Korean monument appears within the present landscape dominated by Western art in major art institutions.

《Monumental》 does not seek to restore the absolute authority of past art or form. (Perhaps it cannot.) The exhibition acknowledges that the days of singing hymns to art lie far away in a distant time-space. Rather than preserving or reaffirming the past, the exhibition asks whether self-transformation can still be a radical condition. It attempts to construct a monument that mutates—one that feeds on temporal gaps and discontinuities. And we look up at this monument, just slightly.

Kwon Sejin’s places and landscapes evoke an indescribable sense of melancholy and nostalgia. Among them, “water surface” is an experiential and conceptual space that the artist continues to explore. In her work, it appears as the surface of a vast world, a membrane reflecting the outside, or a site for testing the flatness of painting.

For instance, in 2,223 Drawings That Make Up the Sea (2020), she visualizes an expansive water surface by connecting numerous small ink drawings. Composed of countless drawings of even quality, the overall image recalls the shifting viewpoints of traditional scroll paintings and East Asian landscape painting. This approach continues in Yellow Line (2021), where the shaded sections—created by rubbing ink as if making a rubbing—correspond to the widely painted base color, like a print, completing a single pictorial plane.

Kim Sung Soo’s large steel sculpture installed at the outdoor courtyard recalls heroic monuments such as equestrian statues of generals. Yet the process of hand-working stainless steel and copper plates—cutting them, hammering them to form curves, welding each piece together—reveals the traces of meticulous craft and intense physical labor rather than grand, polished monumentality. The forms and narratives of the figures mounted upon animals derive from a storyboard the artist developed himself.

By borrowing elements from comics he drew as a child or fairy tales he read frequently, he constructs fiction to parallel the present. These works, composed by piecing together fragments of memory, experience, and imagination that constitute his past and present, circumvent the heroism of monumental sculpture grounded in singular grand narratives.

Kim Sulki observes with curiosity the present state of objects that traverse time and the narratives they carry. Using acrylic, MDF, plaster, and other materials, she creates dragons—animals from East Asian mythology—and refigures familiar fountain motifs commonly found in public squares, as well as ancient reliefs. In doing so, she intersects different temporalities of culture and narrative.

Although the contemporary objects she constructs appear to be elevated like spiritual totems, they simultaneously reveal distinct stories and layers, representing the volatility and relentless pace of image-producing urban civilization. The forms and materials shaped by the artist’s hand and body evoke eternity and transcendence, transporting old narratives and beliefs into the present while also recalling the fetishized status and function of commodities in contemporary consumer society.

Hyewon Kim’s paintings appear at first to be engrossed in the reproduction of digital images. Working from photographs taken on her smartphone, she sets up a manual and process that minimizes dramatic brushstrokes or personal emotional expression. Her motifs—public telephones and vending machines in subway stations, the interior of city buses—are scenes too ordinary and faint to seem worthy of being framed.

Yet her works reveal the surface, materiality, and even the events of painting, differentiating themselves from the pixels and resolution of digital photographs. Beginning with a watercolor base and layering gouache mixed with gum arabic onto the surface, she produces painterly (and even craft-like) forms and strata that release the work from strict representation. This detachment draws attention to the processes and experiences of painting—color and materiality, viewpoint and distance, the movements of the hand and body.

Yoon Jeong-e experiments within sculpture by combining two modes of sculptural operation: carving, which removes material to create form, and modeling, which adds and builds up material. Her sculptures, where masses of material intertwine with traces of cutting, slicing, and kneading, disturb the legibility of both subject and process, gathering peripheral afterimages and spatial gaps.

Moving between parts and wholes of the body, between plane and volume, between small pieces and large ones—and through the firing of clay in the kiln—her work focuses on the very process of temporal shifts and transformation, incorporating them directly into sculptural practice. The sculptures that stand upright in the exhibition do not present fixed forms or content; instead, they traverse the boundaries between inside and outside, skeleton and flesh, self and object, materializing the intervals where form melts, displaces, and resists completion.

Lee ByungHo, drawing on Rodin’s methodology, has long presented human figures assembled from parts—bodies that cannot become a singular whole. Rather than treating existing works as definitive originals, he has cut, duplicated, and recombined them into new works, extending this methodology beyond the body into his entire practice. This has expanded further through digital replication and 3D printing.

Since 2020, for Eccentric Abattis, he has scanned his previous works in 3D, adjusted their scale, detached certain parts into abstract forms, or merged them into assembled masses. In Eccentric Scene (2023), shown in this exhibition, he reverses the process by bringing back the original body—the one already duplicated and recombined—and again merges it with scanned and modified components, reaffirming a perpetual cycle within his own methodology.

Lee Sojung’s paintings intersect different worlds—sometimes even contradictory ones. Over time, she has experimented with ways of using ink that exclude its accidental effects, and has layered automatic, chance-generated images over familiar symbols. Her recent works translate situations in which pigment bleeds and seeps uncontrollably into inevitable images, likening these uncontrollable situations to personal experiences.

She wets previously used paper with ink and presses it onto the surface to reproduce chance; she organizes forms using acrylic paint alongside traditional East Asian pigments. She also utilizes wax so that patterned structures on the back of the canvas and accidental forms on the front appear simultaneously. Moving across different painting methods, materials, and concepts, her works coordinate the proliferation of images that transcend fixed media and spacetime—an expanded condition of the pictorial plane.

Jun Hyerim adopts the iconography and compositional methods of her earlier paintings as a kind of open-source material. From Chinese landscape paintings depicting idealized spaces, to Arcadian scenes from Greek painting, to brightly colored ukiyo-e, barbershop paintings, and even the Japanese manga One Piece, Jun’s work invokes painting styles and techniques from various cultures and eras.

Yet rather than faithfully following the brushwork or ideas embedded in each source, she focuses on appropriating them as-is, ultimately producing paintings that seem awkward, unrefined, or intentionally “unskilled.” The reinterpreted Guo Xi, Koo Young, and Tiepolo are dismantled and revived within her chosen frameworks of excess temporality. In doing so, Jeon simultaneously signals the historical nature of each source while betraying established hierarchies and positions, allowing a multidimensional temporality to surface.

Choe Sooryeon presents subjects commonly regarded as classical or traditional in strange and uncanny forms. The celestial maiden from East Asian folklore does not appear in her work as a graceful and virtuous woman, but rather as a haunting, sometimes sorrowful figure. Beyond this, Choe faithfully studies and manually transcribes fantastical folk tales—even the absurd ones—and also recreates scenes and lines from the (mostly Sinophone) dramas and films she has enjoyed.

Through this, she lays bare the structures of traditional images and narratives from Korea and East Asia, as well as the rigid preconceptions that support them. Although her practice seems to learn and imitate inaccessible subjects—Chinese characters, classical imagery, myth—the work simultaneously reveals the atemporality and absurdity embedded in what is considered universal or self-evident, ultimately summoning the not-so-distant faces of the present like ghosts.

 
Curating/Writing: Kwon Hyukgyu

 
[1] 《Unmonumental》 was co-curated by Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, and Massimiliano Gioni.
[2] The four-part exhibition unfolded as follows:
– 1. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (2007.12.01–2008.03.30)
– 2. Collage: The Unmonumental Picture (2008.01.16–03.30)
– 3. The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio (2008.02.13–03.30)
– 4. Montage: Unmonumental Online (2008.02.15–03.30)
[3] Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century (London; New York: Phaidon in association with New Museum, 2007).
[4] In relation to this, critic Roberta Smith noted that 《Unmonumental》 could evoke anti-art movements such as Dada and Surrealism insofar as it rejects completed form and marketability. She also observed that the rough finishes and deliberate “un-skill” found in the works—rather than polished surfaces and spectacle—could be linked to Arte Povera, and that the use of found images for reproduction and recombination could be associated with Pop Art.
Roberta Smith, “[Art Review: ‘UNMONUMENTAL’] In Galleries, a Nervy Opening Volley,” The New York Times (Nov. 30, 2007), https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/arts/design/30newm.html
[5] Laura Hoptman, one of the curators of 《Unmonumental》, also described the exhibition as following the genealogical line of MoMA’s The Art of Assemblage (1961), curated by William Seitz, which presented assemblage as a defining trend of contemporary art of its time. Interestingly, Hoptman later curated Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World (2014.12.14–2015.04.05) at MoMA, a show that revisited the tradition of twentieth-century painting to present the state of contemporary painting.

References

• 《모뉴멘탈 (Monumental)》