Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art presents its Collection Exhibition 2023 titled How Are You Feeling Today?. This exhibition will summon the works related with the theme of ‘consolation’ amid our collection formed through 15 years of collecting history at GMoMA.
How Are You Feeling Today? examines the ways of ‘consoling’ all of us who live our lives filled with strong emotions and are oftentimes let-down. Wherever we stand, there is no absolute security guaranteed for us in this disaster-clad era, thus we need to convene our thoughts on how we should live the current time in which disaster has become a daily event. Through the Collection Exhibition of GMoMA, we will ponder on how the meaning of each disaster is felt for us individuals, and the related pain, anxiety, fear, loneliness. Roh Jae Oon, Yangachi, and Ham Yang Ah whose works are in the GMoMA collection, participated in the exhibition to talk about the purity of art trying to criticize incessantly about the social system, and the fierce artists who strive to be aware of what is happening in this era. Through their stories, they introduce their ‘way of consolation’ in which art empathizes and relates with contemporary issues. Other invited artists are Yang Soon-Yeal and Collective Ahnn+Young who share their ‘way of lyrical and sentimental consolation’ that captures daily experience through art. We are delighted to present to the viewers through their works, moments of recovering the original purity of human beings that had depended on nature, and of becoming honest with oneself, the inner child who ‘wishes to be consoled.’
John Ruskin(1819~1900) was an English writer, art critic and economist of the Victorian era. In his book The Political Economy of Art, 1869, Ruskin wrote that art should be viewed as a common asset for the community members. He understood art as being one of the steps to self-realize in one’s life, not a grandiose practice. That is, art is not something created by a special being that has genius, but what everybody can enjoy, what should exist amid people’s lives. This is why Ruskin asserted that art should be expanded onto the level of public value.
“Unto this last as unto thee”; and when, for earth’s severed multitudes of the wicked and the weary, there shall be holier reconciliation than that of the narrow home, and calm economy, where the Wicked cease — not from trouble, but from troubling — and the Weary are at rest.- Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy, 1860, John Ruskin
Therefore this exhibition questions ‘if any genuine consolation could exist?’ We are usually fiercely attached to another being, the other, and whenever we realize we are not the principle actor in this world, we tend to believe the other is the only saviour. Even so, we strive to praise this world through contemporary art works and poems, asking ourselves including artists, ‘how are we feeling today’ through this time of resonating together.
