Marking the start of the year’s final quarter, the month of October is typically a time when people lament the time that has gone by so quickly and the moments they failed to seize. But with 2020 proving more difficult and trying than others, the changing seasons and passage of time come as a great source of solace and strength. In a year that saw so many exhibitions and events cancelled both in Korea and abroad, preparations have finished on a collection of art and culture events in spite of all of the troubles: the Changwon Sculpture Biennale, a festival of sculpture that seeks to combine lightness of form with flexibility of content; the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, with its opportunities to glimpse nature art and contemporary art practitioners coming together; the Taehwa River Eco Art Festival, with its exploration of the role of visual culture amid rapidly changing new phenomena; and the Gwangju Media Art Festival, a “festival of light” where media art is enjoyed as a game of sorts. “When time bruises, simply make jam with it,” the poet Ahn Hee-yeon has written. “Memories can become sweeter when you boil them down for a while over a weak flame.” Hopefully, our tired and worn-down hearts can draw a renewed spark from the flame of art and culture.

  

Jesse Chun interrogates systems of power, which necessitates an interrogation of language. English, the “common” or “universal” tongue, is often at the forefront of Chun’s practice.

  

Returning this year with its first virtual edition, SWAB Barcelona Art Fair (1-15 October 2020) will highlight four Seoul-based galleries as part of Focus Korea: One Four, Art Delight, Gallery Absinthe, and g.gallery.

  

On the heels of her recent, atrium-filling installation at the newly refreshed Museum of Modern Art, New York, Haegue Yang yet again flexes her plurimedial wings in this first survey of her work ­­­in North America. Spanning the arc of Yang’s robust career from 1994 to the present?and including two new commissions?the exhibition features more than seventy of her installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, prints, and performances, which engage with histories of art, culture, and science without being subordinate to them. Moving deftly beyond Duchampian tactics of recontextualization, Yang’s works look as if they might have lives and wills of their own?a piquant reminder that the world belongs as much to inanimate things as to their animate counterparts. An extensive monograph, with contributions from Vlas, art historian Lynne Cooke, and the Seoul Museum of Art’s director, Jee-sook Beck, accompanies the show.

  

Magok, located in a far western area of Seoul, 10 minutes from Gimpo International Airport by car, is emerging as a new hot place for arts and culture as well as high-tech industries. A fortnight ago, Kolon Group opened an art museum named Space K Seoul in the area, after the conglomerate relocated the headquarters of its major affiliates to its new building Kolon One & Only Tower in Magok in 2018. The new museum, designed by Korean architect Cho Minsuk, is a five-minute walk from the Kolon One & Only Tower, designed by American studio Morphosis Architects. The fan-shaped museum building, whose area totals 2,044 square meters, has a sloped roof covered partly with grass and partly with wide steps, which can be used as an auditorium for small-scale concerts and performances. People can approach the roof space through another staircase directly from the adjacent small park on the ground level. "Cho designed the museum to play the role of not only a cultural space but also a park for the residents and workers in this area," explained Hwang In-sung, a curator of the museum. Cho, founder of the Mass Studies studio, curated the Korean Pavilion exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture, which won the prestigious Golden Lion award.

  

Haegue Yang, who is now one of the world's most influential contemporary artists, but often faces complaints that her works are too difficult to understand, expressed the view that her works are not actually erudite but are "ambiguous." The ambiguity is inevitable because of the complexity of the world, which gets "harder to explain in summary if you have more understanding of it whether in terms of knowledge or information," the Germany-based Korean artist said in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Monday morning.