Where the Tide Has Been


Where the Tide Has Been is co-organized by Seoul Museum of Art and the Netherland’s Han Nefkens Foundation. This media exhibition of the two institutions’ collections are based on the modernity that appears from the various parts of the world. The exhibited works pay attention to the aspirations and imaginations of modernists who tried to transform and transfer life and society, and also those marginalized and abandoned.
The TIDE in the exhibition name symbolizes a modern subject. I thought about the generational conflict (which is a topic that is also familiar here in Korea). The passions of fathers’ generations clash with the despair of their sons. The shattered and misaligned sentences express the foam of waves crashing on the beach, then extinguishing, which also conveys the failure of communication.
If you look with a slightly different perspective, the sparkling texture of the sea surface at sunrise or sunset is like looking at the rusted and rough metal surface, which to me is a symbol of modernization. This texture, placed on a black background as if it's falling from a high place, which amplifies the messages of the exhibited works.



- Art direction and design: Jaemin Lee
- Client: Literature Translation Institute of Korea
- Year: September 2020


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