Reveling in my Oegukery

This is my photographic masterpiece, called, "It was Very Early. And Cold."

A 외국인, or 外(國)人 in Korea is a foreigner (literally, outside-country person). Last weekend, I embraced that part of my Korean identity, with the help of my Korean friend H from work (and of bamboo forest fame). We headed up to Seoul at what seemed a distinctly unnatural hour of the morning on Saturday, there to do the things that tourists do. We started our day at a museum in an effort to be cultured, and Internet, boy were we cultured! We got three hours of cultured. (H has a fancy phone, which takes quite nice photos, and she is something of a photo hound, so there are rather more pictures of myself on this day than I absolutely like or planned for. Apologies all around). First we saw the sculpture outside the museum proper.







Then we spent some very necessary time in the museum café.

Perhaps it is not so bad as all that.

Morning is the devil's time.

I will drown my sorrows.

The museum was architecturally very swanky, and had boatloads of both traditional and modern art. Museum 1 (which reflects a saddening lack of creativity on the part of the curators, I feel), was our first destination. We flashed our tickets at their fancy ticket-reading machine and took an elevator to the 4th floor, through which we wandered, ogling pottery of the distinctive green whose name I have now forgotten but is a tell-tale sign of ancient Koreans artists at work. The technique of making it has sadly been lost, but about 800 years ago, they had it down real well and made some extraordinary pottery.  One doesn't really fancy them for immediate contextualization in the modern home, but they are very pretty. Once completed the circuit of display cases, we found ourselves in one of the museum's famed architectural spaces.


It feels very like being in a sci-fi movie with heavy-handed genetic symbolism.

If I could be an enzyme, I'd be DNA helicase... just kidding. Obviously, I'm much more of an Adenine.


Anyway, we went around and down this to the next floor, which was full of white pottery from a slightly different era. Not to knock the work of guys who can pot much better than I could ever hope to, but these were very different in aesthetic, to the tune of looking like they'd been painted by zealous elementary schoolers, rather than adults with artistic inclinations. Old pots. What are you gonna do?






Below the pots were scrolls and paintings. The particular exhibit up at the time was for a famous brush artist whose name escapes me at the moment, but who did some awesome work. I love screens and brush paintings in general, and these were very neat to look at. There were a few that surprised both H and myself - they were apparently Korean brushwork answers to the Kama Sutra, displayed right along next to nice mountain scenes totally devoid of human life. They were... different.

After paintings, we got into nifty metalwork and the fancy science of the day, namely bells and locks involving bars you slid across doors to keep bad people out. There were gold slippers, beautiful wrought things of tremendous complexity in their design, that seem utterly un-fun to wear in every way. I believe them to have come from the mind of one of my sister's previous incarnations. Her present one tells me we all suffer to be beautiful, and I can think of nothing else that so well embodies that sentiment.

That finished off the first Museum, and we moved on to Museum 2, the abode of the modern art. A great deal of modern art fails to speak to me, generally, and I had about the same ratio of success to failure of appeal here that I have experienced elsewhere. There was a really interesting piece that was nothing but an enormous case with a mirrored back on the wall, about two inches deep, filled with little shelves on which were arrayed all manner of pills. Each was a real-life replica cast in resin. It's kind of unsettling to see how many pills we've created and that people take, especially knowing some of them are things like Viagra. It brings the concept of Big Pharma home in a pretty visceral way. There were a few other pieces that were interesting, but the best part was definitely Museum 3, where we came upon some awesome new stuff.

I... I just thought this was funny. The awesome is below.

This is actually a sculpture, made from hundreds, maybe thousands, of photographs all varnished onto an underlying sculpted form. There were several different such forms around the open floor of Museum 3, all of them landing somewhere close to the Uncanny Valley, but in a cool way.













In another part of the exhibit not seen here, there was a poster on the wall that said, "New Year's Resolution: less biting." Art, man, it's crazy. This shiny fellow had some fantastic insights on the artistic process.








This was a cool thing on the wall that didn't photograph wonderfully. Enjoy!

Man, that was a lot of art. We couldn't take a lot of photos of the other art outside of Museum 3, but if you want to check out the museum further, you can peruse what it's willing to put up on its site.


I'm seeing that this is really long, so I'm going to make a different post for the other stuff of the day. It's markedly less artisty and more touristy.