Sweet Talk at Museum of New Art (MONA)

Saturday, 17 September 2005 10:11

PONTIAC, MICHIGAN.-The Museum of New Art (MONA) is pleased to announce the launch and exhibition of ‘Sweet Talk’, a major new project by five artists curated by Hyun Jung Kim. The show consists of sculpture, painting, installation, fashion, drawing and photography, from artists who now live and work in New York, Chicago, London, Los Angeles and Detroit. During the nineties, the South Korean art market benefited from a protectionist currency policy aimed at keeping money at home by imposing stringent taxes on outgoing funds. This, along with a deeply ingrained respect for art and culture, has created a thriving market for contemporary Korean artists within the country. The downside, of course, is that it is virtually impossible to meet these prices in the West. According to artist Nam June Paik, the power structure of the Korean art world explained why major shows of Korean art were slow to happen in the West. Thus the most successful Korean artists rarely exhibited in Europe or the U.S. Today, the explosion of the visual arts in China, Japan and Korea has obviously opened up to the world and brought with it new ways of seeing, not only these young artists' work, but invigorating the vision of art itself. The highly sensitive use of common materials used uncommonly by these five artists, and the resultant complex structures span a bridge between Asian and Western pictorial and sculptural traditions, yet the work always remains uniquely Korean.

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