Figuration Circuits

Artists: Kong Sung Hun, Kwack Jung-myung, Kim Seeun, Kim Hyunjin, Markus Lüpertz, Georg Baselitz, Park Gwangsoo, Park Jang Nyun, Byun Chong Gon, Shim Hyeonbeen, Lee Seung-taek, Leeje, Jung Kangja, Jung Seokhee, Nadya Jiwa, Han Unsung, Ho Sangun

Ilmin Museum of Art (Director: Kim Taeryeong) is pleased to announce its fall exhibition, Figuration Circuits: Dong-A Art Festival and Its Era (hereafter Figuration Circuits), on view from August 22 to October 26, 2025. Revisiting the Dong-A Art Festival (first launched in 1978), which sparked the discourse of “figuration” in Korean art, the exhibition explores how the aesthetic pursuits of that moment resonate with the current resurgence of figurative art. The exhibition features 98 works by 17 artists, including selections from Ilmin’s permanent collection related to the festival. 

Recalling figuration in the age of the image
Figuration Circuits takes as its point of departure the contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality. In other words, we live in an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality. Under such conditions, the question of how art can lay claim to reality rises with renewed urgency. The exhibition turns to art’s endeavor to devise aesthetic means “capable of directly impacting the real”—what may be described as the “figurative impulse.” This impulse reflects art’s unique capacity to generate slow, weighty images that firmly ground our relation to the world. 

The 1978 Dong-A Art Festival and “New Figuration”
The exhibition opens with works from the 1970s, a period that marked both the culmination of Dansaekhwa and the emergence of a new sensibility toward reality. Amid growing calls to dismantle the institutional aesthetics of the state-run “Gukjeon (National Art Exhibition)”, the Dong-A Art Festival, organized by Dong-A Ilbo Newspaper and Dong-A Broadcasting in 1978, debuted with “new figuration” as its central theme. The term “figuration (hyeongsang),” distinct from “representation (gusang),” then commonly used to describe a realistic painting style, gestured toward an aesthetic pathway that was neither mimetic representation nor pure abstraction. Propelled by the Dong-A Art Festival, the pursuit of figuration emerged as a response to the palpable textures of lived life and the micro-landscapes revealed amid the rapid currents of modernization and urbanization. The fact that major media outlets, such as the Dong-A Ilbo, spearheaded the so-called “Minjeon” reflected the alignment between the press’s mission to mirror new realities and art’s ambitions. This exploration of figuration, in turn, evolved through various experiments and trials in the 1980s, laying the groundwork for Korean postmodern art in the 1990s.

Circuits of figuration between past and present
Figuration Circuits also engages the renewed momentum of figuration today, which shares a similar impetus as the earlier “age of figuration.” Since the 2000s, painting in Korea has developed languages that recompose photographic and screen-based images or interlace inner psychologies with contemporary landscapes. More recently, a younger generation of artists has revisited figuration as a means to address reality across disciplines, including painting. The exhibition presents a comprehensive view of this trajectory through the works of Dong-A Art Festival awardees—Byun Chong Gon, Lee Seung-taek, Park Jang Nyun, Han Unsung, Kwack Jung-myung—as well as their contemporaries— Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Jung Kangja—and later artists whose practices fall under the broader ecology of that moment—Kong Sung Hun, Jung Seokhee, Leeje, Park Gwangsoo, Ho Sangun, Kim Seeun, Shim Hyeonbeen, Nadya Jiwa, Kim Hyunjin. The exhibition’s title, Figuration Circuits, signifies the way that art gains power by connecting with reality and the luminous relay of artistic practices across a network of disparate spaces and temporalities.