Who is Alice?
1 June–24 November 2013
Organized by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)
Spazio Lightbox
Cannaregio 3831, Venice
(Vaporetto Line 1, Ca’ d’Oro stop)
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm;
open Monday June 3 and November 18
T 82 2 2188 6114
Who is Alice?
Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentile hand
Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined
In Memory’s mystic band,
Like pilgrim’s wither’d wreath of flowers
Pluck’d in a far-off land.
Hyung-Min Chung, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) is pleased to announce the exhibition Who is Alice? as an Official Collateral Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia at Spazio Lightbox. The exhibition brings together on a truly fantastic journey the most significant contemporary Korean artists, who reinterpret and transform the evocative, period room of Lightbox into a dream scenery.
The works on display covers different media and include installations, sculptures, videos, paintings and photos realized by 15 artists, such as U-Ram Choe, Young-Geun Park, Hong-chun Park, Hein-Kuhn Oh, Osang Gwon, Yeon-Doo Jung, Myung-Keun Koh, Dong-Wook Lee, Xooang Choi, Jung-Wook Kim, Du-Jin Kim, Hyungkoo Lee, Beom Kim, Haegue Yang, and Myoung-Ho Lee.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s story Alice in Wonderland, the exhibition Who is Alice?, curated by Chu-Young Lee, resembles a dreamlike experience, where the artists create with great spontaneity small unreal and absolutely fabulous worlds. In a city where fantasy and reality at times belong to the same time world, the artworks on display blur the everyday space and time boundaries and invite the viewer to an extraordinary experience, that winds along the ten Lightbox rooms with extraordinary tales.
At the entry of the exhibition space U-Ram Choe’s Pendulum of Secret welcomes the viewer at the beginning of his journey. The mysterious black eyes of the woman portrayed in Jung-Wook Kim’s Untitled work stir up shadows of fear and desire lodged deep inside the viewer, while the luminescent bodies of Haegue Yang’s Female Natives and the photographs of Yeon-Doo Jung’s Bewitched make his childhood dreams magically come true. In the next rooms Hein-Kuhn Oh’s Cosmetic Girl mirrors the curious and restless face of a girl, maybe Alice, while 38 hands intertwine in the ether to give life to Xooang Choi’s The Wing. In front of the sinister and deserted Hong-Chun Park’s To Alice playground and of U-Ram Choe’s whirling Merry-Go-Round, the viewer relives a summer nightmare, that materializes in the gloomy skeletons’ party of Du-Jin Kim’s The Youth for Bacchus.
All works on display at Who is Alice? are part of the permanent collection of MMCA and the exhibition is one of the official collateral events of the 55th Venice Biennale.
Curated by Chu-young Lee, Associate Curator
