Leeum Museum, Seoul. Rotation of the museum’s contemporary collection, October 8 2021 to July 20 2022. Show page.
The exhibition I walked into on my first Leeum visit, May 2022 - the one that opened the museum for me.
Grows from
- Leeum Museum - the venue. This is the show that earned the seed.
The door - why it matters
The collection wasn’t hung by chronology or movement. The curators cut it into three named rooms: Black, Blank (the color black pushed until absence becomes the subject), Ephemeral Gravity (the non-material, art that leaves the object behind), and Strange Planet (a curiosity shop of imagined creatures and mirrored worlds). More than half of the 76 works had never been shown publicly before.
Two stayed with me: Black, Blank and Strange Planet. The first is the seed of 留白 meeting me on Korean ground, black as a full emptiness rather than a lack. The second is the opposite pole, the room where Olafur Eliasson’s crystal spheres handed me back to myself inverted and Lee Hyung-koo’s invented fossil insisted that imagination leaves real bones. The curation is what opened the museum: it told me the collection could be read by feeling, not by date.
(personal landing still to deepen: what each room did to me, standing there.)
Encountered (reconstructed by room)
Rebuilt from press coverage and visitor reviews, not the official checklist, so attributions need a memory-check. Works marked (captured) are ones I photographed myself.
검은 공백 / Black, Blank (2F) - black pushed until absence is the subject, contemporary set against tradition
- Richard Serra - Esna, etching (captured)
- 송수남 - Meditation (I), ink (captured)
- Chung Sang-hwa - Untitled 86-2-28, hung beside the Joseon porcelain 백자청화 운룡문호
- Tony Smith - sculpture
- 최만린 - 玄 (Hyun)
- Isamu Noguchi - Solitude
- 최욱경 - Lady and Swan, her black-and-white register
- Paul McCarthy - Snow White Dwarf (Happy)
- 구본창 - Breath (숨), photographs
- 곽인식 - Work 83-A-B, Work 86-KR (captured)
에테르의 중력 / Ephemeral Gravity (1F) - the non-material, light and transparency
- Robert Irwin - Untitled, the four-leaf-clover shadow
- Anish Kapoor - Proto Proto
- Lee Bul
- Olafur Eliasson
- Louise Bourgeois
이상한 행성 / Strange Planet (B1F) - crash-landed on an alien planet
- Lee Hyung-koo - Canis Latrans Animatus, the fossil of an imagined creature
- Olafur Eliasson - Your Unpredictable Path, crystal spheres that hand the viewer back inverted
- Anish Kapoor - Double Vertigo (captured)
- Gerhard Richter - Grey Mirror, hung next to the Kapoor mirror (captured)
- Frank Gehry - Untitled (Los Angeles I), (Los Angeles IV), near the Kapoor mirror (captured)
Related
- Leeum Museum - the seed this show confirms.