Collage is virtually omnipresent in our lives. From TV to internet, newspaper to smartphone, signboard to media facade, everything we see is an assemblage of fragments with varying points of views. Now, the flow of information moves in a non-linear way and people use multiple windows to see the world that defies any unifying system of perspective.You can say that the world of contemporary life is a collage per se. However, this does not necessarily mean that there is no ruling perspective, but rather the value of many smaller viewpoints can win a bigger one. Nothing is more superior or inferior to something else forever. Smaller value systems exist in parallel and moreover, they are growingly mobile and their meanings are in transition to survive in the new platform of the globalized world.

 Globalization and its effects on contemporary arts have been 8a central issue for the last decade. The current reemergence of collage as technical and philosophical methodology in the contemporary art practice has its root in the globalism and its new social, political, and economical conditions. These unprecedented conditions have continuously generated‘world-is-flat’phenomena. They are de-nationalizing of artistic movements, inflation of“being international ”, and homogenization of different culture values. Some people thought globalism might kill local identity. But in reality globalization fails to conquer local values. Instead, artists in local context enjoyed ever-increasing chances to expose their voices to the international stage. And they begin to rethink their own individual identity, history, culture in the geoaesthetic situation where the national label is quickly disappearing. 

In this context,“Collage of Memor ies, ”the exhibition of contemporary Korean art, redefines the concept of‘collage ’ through 10 artists who have unique understanding of media, history, private memories, culture, and globalism&identity. Their interpretation of the methodology unmasks the very natures of the changed society. This means we need to see more than a physical technique or a marriage of heterogeneous materials from the exhibition. What becomes more important is a philosophical attitude that can spread over any expressive medium. Those 10 artists commonly arrive at an aesthetic position that makes not only a methodological bridge between art, novel, poetry, architecture, and motion picture, but also a chronological link between the present and the past and even to the future. We need to see collage as not a form but an attitude to open, link, and mix the seemingly incomparable multitude. I subdivided the attitude of 10 collage artists into five categories.

1. MEDIA

PARK JungHyuk clips images from diverse contexts such as newspapers, advertisements, porn sites, and movies to complete his landscape <Park ’s Park Series>. His work is based on the good understanding of the nature of media where stories need to be controlled and even manipulated to deliver one big message. Original meanings of the clipped images are camouflaged and easily sneaked back into the media. His work clearly shows that media communication provides a new context to the original image and thus a new meaning can be born.

MOON HyungMin’s primary concerns have been on various media arts often by using photographs. Ironically, the pristine clean completeness of his work speasks of conflics between personal taste and social expectation. His somewhat‘dry-kunst ’methodology with vivid color collage seemingly delivers elite taste but close scrutiny reveals that the immaculate formal completeness simply works as a designed signboard or a messener to convey his very private stories.

2. HISTORY

The precision with which a myriad of details by charcoal drawing are arranged is to mix history, nostalgia, romance, identity, family, and spirituality into one single frame. CHO DuckHyun ’s higly controlled nature of installation painting works to preclude the preoccupation of hierarchies and conflicts of Asian histories. His understanding of history relies on an aesthetics of symbolic exchange, rooted in generosity and sustained through intimacy. And the result presented to the viewer successfully transforms mundane subject into fantastical and thus obviously fictional history of future.

AHN DooJin enjoys a kind of absurd confrontation between the sacred and the comic. Unpolished and coarse light-heartedness infiltrates into a holy structure of the sanctified historic scene. This heterogeneous collage is to attack the strict dichotomy between the artist ’s private realm and history ’s public space. His critical pun encourages interaction in these seemingly incomparable arenas while encompassing a wide range of dialogic and artistic encounters.

3. MEMORIES

There are four animals in CHOI WoolGa ’s painting. They are fox, wolf, dog, and hyena. They also simbolize the hidden instincts of human beings. From paris to New York and to Seoul, the artist ’s nomad life has changed the previously bright colors to darker and more vehement ones. His painting is collage of personal memories that have strongly implanted in the desire to survive as an artist in the different cultures. Although the overal color of the painting is dark and black, the viewer still sees the artist ’playful emotion.

There is only one color in KIM DongGi ’s painting. That color is black. He uses it because he needs to collect old memories from oblivion. His black paintings are somewhat disturbing, but beautiful, and above all, full of narratives pulled out of private memories to produce visually arresting, highly original work. His action- oriented brush strokes refuses to be a self-contained image that are disconnected from the ways in which the people see reality. His image presents space where memories are expressed for their won sake, where sensation lives and experiments to make his collaged world intriguing.

4.CULTURE

LEE LeeNam ’s work is an impossible attempt to mix history, culture, landscape, and people between the West and the East. He often uses old master’s painting from the eastern art history and its counterpart from the western. The dead classic images are reborn as animated contemporary images in the virtual space that covers the history of human civilization. His animated collage exchanged between the West and the East, past and present successfully delivers a critical pun toward the binary system.

We might need more than two windows to see KIM YongKwan ’s imaginary world. He uses the notion of‘parallax ’which means two images viewed by a spectator from two different perspectives of an object. Its innate exclusive nature never allows coexistence of each viewpoint. The artist ’s mission is to reconstruct this contradictory relation and change to an horizontal space where conflicts of histories and cultures are melting down in a parallel way. His works involve intelligent reflections on pictorial form, architectural space, the nature of representation, and our attempt to see culture with a single window. 

5.GLOBALISM&IDENTITY

JANG SeungHyo plays a Dadaist joke. His work eliminates the national label and belongs to any culture. While travel between New York, London, and Seoul, the artist is breathing life into a highly calculated use of photo-collages that are more commonly associated with his personal experience than the vocabulary of serious high art. His work plays perceptual games that depart from the sculpture of the past. Humor and playfulness become crucial to analyzing his work that takes a structure whose forms and images are dictated by his old memories in different cities in the world. Pictorial tricks, puns, illusions and allusions are overt to the point of audaciousness. Viewing his work is an officially invited voyeurism to his private memories.

LEE JiYen’s collage is not depicting a space but accumulating different times. In other words, multiple time-zones create an imaginary space where fragments of different times exist in the same space. The result is an amazingly spectacle view that denies boundary between beginning and ending, center and periphery, individuality and collectivity, private space and public space, and local identity and global identity. 

In the short essay about the reemergence of collage as an attitude, I have persistently interrogated the nature of the medium. We are forced to accept so many different viewpoints from so many different context. Collage is everywhere. It works as an thinking system to reflect different values and viewpoints. Yes! That ’s right. We are living in the collaged world.