Rhee Seundja: Road to the Antipodes

The exhibition, Rhee Seundja: Road to the Antipodes, which marks the 100th anniversary of Rhee’s birth, is organized as a part of special exhibition of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea to focus on women artists, beginning with the exhibition, The Arrival of New Woman, held in MMCA, Deoksugung. When many Korean artists dreamed of working in France in the 1950s. Rhee Seundja (1918~2009) was the first one to go to France by herself and learned the basic of painting. She was recognized as an artist in France earlier rather than Korea, and also her work was collected first by the French. She passionately spent 60 years, creating oil paintings in Paris, prints in Tourrettes, and ceramics in Korea.

Rhee, only Korean who did not major in art before going to France at that time, followed techniques of French art, but she painted Korean motifs, based on her personal experience. She tried to create the new artistic world that could coexist through the harmonization of opposites, including the East and the West, material and spirit, nature and artificiality, and Life and Death.

This exhibition categorizes her oeuvre into the four periods. Exploring​ Forms in the early 1950s, she learned the basics of painting and worked on abstract art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In Woman and Earth she, as a mother of three children, painted the earth as if she farmed the land. Yin and Yang is that she expressed city of layered buildings. Lastly, in Road to the Antipodes, she depicted nature, universe and poles that she looked down in the airplane going back and forth between Korea and France. Through her interactions with Georges Boudaille (1925–1991), Henri Goetz (1909–1989), Alberto Magnelli (1888–1971), Michel Butor (1926–2016), Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), and Seo Jeongju (1915–2000), the viewer can deeply understand Rhee’s works, and examine Korean art history from multiple perspectives.