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| Cover of the book Assembling Landscapes |
Assembling
Landscapes is an anthology of writing by artists. Many of them who have
contributed to this volume showcased their artworks as part of the exhibition featuring
Indian and Korean artists at the Korean Cultural Centre earlier this year.
The book
draws on the theme around which the month-long exhibition was put together. Its
overarching theme is the world around us – in the forms of landscapes, spatial
as well as temporal – and how it has been progressively disintegrating due to
various challenges such as climate change, war, Covid and others.
The
exhibition, aptly called Synthesis of Difference, was curated by B. Ajay
Sharma, an Indian painter and performance artist, and Jihyoung Park, a South
Korean installation and performance artist with the help of younger artists
Vanshika Sareen and Harsh Kumar, both currently pursuing their degrees in the
Fine Arts. The book has been edited by Anish Cherian, a writer and multi-media
artist. Cherian was also the assistant curator of the exhibition
The most
notable works in the exhibition, according to this reviewer, and for many
people who visited the exhibition, were by the reputed South Korean artist Lee
Lee Nam. Lee Nam’s work – consisting of a series of animated LED screens –
depicted the world as we know it, threatened by war and destruction. Huge
missiles floated over the screens which depicted mountains, forests and rivers,
along with cultural wonders such as Rodin’s sculpture of the Thinking Man, and
the statue of Tutankhamun, Egyptian Pharoah. The minute detailing of the set
pieces, intricate and layered, made the viewing of the work intensely
rewarding. In the book, Lee Nam sets out his objective behind the work by
suggesting that he is a student of “the meeting of classics and modernity,
humanity and nature, the East and the West, and creation and cloning”. “Through
the reinterpretation of the complex digital technology of the moving pixel
world…Lee Nam sees the possibility of a closer relationship between the artist
and the audience in a virtual world.”
The works
by another well-known Korean artist Lee
Jeong Lok were on display too and made for a very interesting viewing
experience. In the book, Lok provides the source of inspiration behind his
work.
“You would
know the hidden realm
Where all
souls dwell.
The journey’s
way lies
Through death’s
misty fell.
Within this
timeless passage
A guiding light
does dance,
Lost from
conscious memory
But visible
in trance.” (Journey of Souls, Michael Newton).
The mystic
core of the above-mentioned verse is well-captured by the camera of Jeong Lok.
All his works at display feature what Nuzhat Kazmi, academic and art historian
from Jamia Milia Islamia rightly calls Noor or Divine Light in Urdu/Persian,
with surreal landscapes featuring mountains and lakes. In his work, one gets an
idea of Spinoza’s concept of divinity residing in nature.
Kazmi’s
piece provides a succinct overview of the exhibition. She writes: “The
exhibition here of art works of ten artists, Korean and Indian, seeks to find a
space that allows to understand the synthesis of difference/s and to put into
public domain, each artist’s concerted creative projects, to either dissolve
the apparent difference, as a keenly deliberated endeavour…”
On Jeong
Lok’s wrok, she comments: “I carefully looked at the art of Lee Jeong Lok and
discovered an ability to appreciate the artist’s visual mystical experiences using
the powerful, universal understanding and experience of the phenomenon of
light, the concept of noor, as would be referred to in much of sufi traditions…”
The works
of Haru K. also provided food for thought (pun-intended) through his depictions
of landscapes suffused with food items. As he comments in the book on his work:
“My work stems from an attempt to solve contemporary people’s perceptions of
nature and the ideals that emerged from Eastern thought from a modern
perspective.” His work has a certain playful quality, and the use of bright
colours makes it even more so. In a way, his work amounts to a deconstruction
of ideas surrounding nature and to find a synthesis among the varied way in
which nature is viewed: a resource for human beings from which we draw physical
sustenance, as well as a sacred landscape from which we draw spiritual succour.
Haru K. suggests through his works that nature is all of this, but still
greater than the sum of its various parts.
The
installation by Jihyoung Park stood out in its thoughtfulness and execution.
Her work featured several broken objects, meticulously pieced together by Park,
who titled it as “Fragile_Handle With Care.” The delicate objects on display,
broken but still standing could be read as a comment on the state of the world
itself, battered by the onslaught of Covid, Climate Change and wars, but still
displaying enough fortitude to go about its business of existing. The other
project that Park undertook was equally poignant, in the sense that it allowed
people to scour for memories of Covid and to pick one physical object which
reminded them most of the pandemic. This object was to be put in a jar which
you could collect first from Park who spent most of her time at the venue of
the exhibition, distributing them to all who came. As she noted in a social
media post later, most of the jars were returned by the people who took them
home.
The exhibition
consisted of the works of Sharma too, largely in the form of photographs of his
many performances over the year, which had an apocalyptic vividness to them, in
terms of choice of location and the props that he used in the course of them. The
carcass of a cow, worn over the head in the dilapidated Malcha Mahal of Delhi was
one of them, a comment on the spate of cow-related lynchings in India. Another
featured him in a costume resembling that worn by members of the Fascist
organisation Ku Klux Klan of America, holding a rabbit in his hands, upside
down. Yet another featured the biggest garbage dump in Delhi near Bhalsawa
Dairy, with a fire raging over it, titled The Burning Land.
Other
notable works featured included those of Paribartana Mohanty, who depicted
through a video installation the slow drowning of a town in coastal Odisha. Inder
Salim’s essay on modern art, culture and society, through a play on the word
Meta is a delight to read due to the author’s irreverent take on many social
and philosophical constructs. The poems by Vinod Bharadwaj, noted film critic,
and Sarvesh Wahie, a young scholar and writer, are noteworthy additions to the
book.
All in all,
an insightful book to match the profundity of the artworks displayed at the
exhibition. Here is to many more such exhibitions by the curatorial team!
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