ㅇ Exhibition title: 2024 Collection Curatorial Exhibition Map Reading of Painting
ㅇ Exhibition period: Apr. 9 (Tue.) - Aug. 18 (Sun.), 2024
ㅇ Exhibition venue: Daegu Art Museum Gallery 1
ㅇ Exhibiting artists: 44
ㅇ Exhibition scale: 82 paintings from the Daegu Art Museum Collection

For its 2024 collection curatorial exhibition, the Daegu Art Museum is presenting an exhibition spotlighting paintings, comprising nearly 78% of the entire collection the museum has built since opening in 2011. The Daegu Art Museum owning paintings of a portion representing a great majority shows the museum’s will and character of reading contemporary flows while simultaneously embracing its local region and artists as a regional art museum representing a cradle of modern painting. 
As if interpreting information held in a map, this exhibition studies the various indices Daegu Art Museum’s painting collection, which has been building up across different regions and nations, possesses and notes the new context and direction shown through them. It is an attempt to, by inspecting the works’ uniqueness and formation process in detail, read the connecting points and new perspectives Daegu Art Museum’s collection items come together to create under the discourse of painting’s crisis since the 20th century, rather than fitting the artworks to the dimensions of a general history or theory of painting. The physicist and technology critic Ursula Martius Franklin once said “A map has a purpose. It must aid travelers and be useful for filling the gap between the known and the unknown. The map is evidence of collective knowledge and insight.” The Daegu Art Museum seeks to have an opportunity to reflect on the art collecting path it has been on while meditating on the original perspective and story of each painting from its collection, and collectively contemplate the future direction predicted through this, as one finds their way while reading and interpreting a map gathering vast indices in their totality. We hope it will be an occasion to paint, like a journey along the paths of possibility a map holds, a new topographical map of painting through knowledge and insights discovered within works of painting. 

1. Geography of Imagination
One climbs a mountain with a painterly map in their hands. Just as humans and nature are in an inseparable relationship, the main object of painting has been nature since the past. Modern painters absorb and imagine nature while connoting their own perspectives, messages, and experimental desires and wishes instead of simply transferring nature’s appearance onto canvas as it is. Nature is a source of inspiration for artists that never dries up. They use nature for their subject matter but continue painting’s diverse experiments with a specific geographical approach or, sometimes, reflect on themselves via sympathy and correspondence with nature, and, at other times, they express nature’s movements and grace as if walking with an ascetic attitude. Nature’s appearances each artist views are as infinitely numerous as the possibilities the great earth holds.    
JUNG Taekyung, who captured intuitive instantaneousness by joining drawing with natural imagery, CHUNG Zuyoung, who expanded and modified a part of Joseon-era landscape painting to newly build an image of mountains, SONG Myungjin, who experimented with green mountains existing on flat surfaces and three-dimensional illusions, and KIM Jongbok, who expressed the mountain’s mighty energy with intense brushstrokes and colors, all read the mountain’s geographical characteristics through their own painting methods. KIM Jiwon and AHN Doo-jin’s works appear to have utilized nature as a means for imagination. They symbolize human vanity or desire with comparisons to the cockscomb and search for the relationship between our imagination and the plastic arts. Further, they end up pursuing the artist’s mind and attitude, i.e., intrinsic meanings, through expressions of abstract nature, and YOO Youngkuk’s works look into the objects’ essence as if contemplating the mountains, and CHA Kyusun directly uses clay to listen to the stories nature presents. Also, one can feel an Eastern and Western beauty that is like both abstract and landscape painting in SHIN Kyungchul’s landscapes emphasizing the painterly qualities brushstrokes reveal, KIM Sunhyoung’s abstract landscapes based on characteristics of Eastern landscape painting, and YOUN Myeung-ro’s works including the great earth’s universality with cracks and brushstrokes in which almost no formative aesthetics of nature remain. 

2. Journey Traveled with the Heart
Unplanned trips taken along a mental map are abstract. Unlike journeys along predetermined paths, abstract travels follow interior subjective demands and sometimes bring unforeseen joys. Abstract art, which formed a main axis of 20th century Western art, avoided portraying nature’s specific objects and composed works in abstract forms by the artist’s will. Like taking a trip without plans, each painting’s subjective individuality is emphasized and unexpected new effects and sensations are roused due to the artist’s emotions and breathing held in the brushstrokes in works of abstract painting.  
PARK Daa Won, OH Seayoung, and RO Eun-Nim’s works, reminiscent of ancient artifact excavation sites or rock murals, reveal a primitive aesthetic while conveying traces of life and, simultaneously, a musical rhythm. KIM Youngjoo, who pioneered a Korean character abstraction, HWANG Changbae, who built his own painting method even while adhering to traditional brush-and-ink techniques, and LEE Youngryung, who is called a pioneer of local abstraction, continued experimentation not losing the essence while searching for their own individualities connected to a Korean naturalism instead of simply following the West’s abstract painting. Also, the impassioned abstract paintings of KWAK Hoon and LEE Yeul, who emphasized an action aspect reminiscent of action painting, fuel the viewer’s dynamic adventurism and lead them to feel a sublimity caused by non-natural expressions holding the philosophy of energy. Finally, works by LEE Kang-So and LEE Bae, who emphasized an Eastern aesthetic of margins and a condensed simplicity, flaunt peerless aesthetics among contemporary art of abstraction and two-dimensionality. Like in a journey embarked on alone with a sense of adventure, if one inspects the forms, colors, and textures of the abstract paintings closely, they will be able to feel a primitive purity and the energy of a newly wriggling entity.

3. Azimuths Beyond the Canvas
Flatness, which Clement Greenberg mentioned as a part of Modernist painting’s essence, emphasizes physical labor and a self-critical awareness as basic formative elements, pure dots, lines, and planes, are arranged and accumulated within canvases, at times inducing a spiritual sublimity transcending flat surfaces. Although the end of painting was declared since the 20th century, painting is still in progress through various experimental attempts as temporality, spatiality, and, further, the artist’s labor and aesthetic elements accumulate. Notably, Daegu is a city that hosted the Daegu Modern Art Festival, a festival of modern artists around the country, in the 1970s and was early to reflect diverse thought trends of contemporary international art, including the experimental installation art, monochrome painting, Minimalism, and conceptual art of the time. The forms infinitely expanding in various azimuths without being limited to the canvas imply an immeasurable spirit of experimentation and ultimately return to fundamental shapes. 
LEE Ufan’s brushwork, carefully stroked downward by an artist valuing its relationship with the margins, or CHOI Myoungyoung’s repetition of verticals and horizontals appears as a kind of strokes rather than something painted, and this completes Korean monochrome painting by building up performative layers on the works as the artist’s reflective attitude, vis-à-vis the brushwork and breathing, operates as an important element. One can sense a struggle between infinite expansion by repetition and the aesthetics of restraint in works by KIM Yongsoo, PARK Doo-young, and LEE Kyojun, who valued mathematical division, proportions, and relationships. Also, works by SON Ah-yoo and YOO Hee-Young, in which one can fully enjoy the color fields’ depth, appear to be keeping an Eastern touch via blotches or dribbles if one earnestly looks at their color fields. The visuality thus purely restrained sharpens the paintings’ inner sensations. Like basic forms starting from dots and naturally progressing to lines and fields (colors), it leads one to walk an aesthetic path leading from the essential to the spiritual, i.e., transcending the canvas and heading inside. 

4. Scaled Indices Modern Life
Charles Baudelaire explained in a book titled The Painter of Modern Life that modernity is “bringing out from trends what is a beginning fashions can include within the historical, drawing out what is eternal from the transitory.” In other words, paintings possessing the modernity Baudelaire emphasizes must be lively as the era’s features, eyes, and smiles are included, in order to keep history alive to the present. This is also meaningful in indications of a collection an art museum has garnered over extended time. By appreciating a museum piece, we can spread out a scaled image  of multilayered lives while freely moving across time and space, to everyday scenery including the artist’s eyes, a historic past and the present, and Korean tradition and images of life abroad, etc.    
We can imagine common (or individuals’) narratives hidden in the reality of the real world in works by AHA Jisan, HONG Soun, KONG Sunghun, LEE Myungmi, and Hilary Pecis, who present images familiar yet strange to us. Meanwhile, we seek an expansion from past memories to the present, and from art to daily life (reality), while reflecting on South Korea’s history and zeitgeist in works by PARK Jahyun, AHN Changhong, CHOI Minhwa, RIM Dongsik, and SONG Chang. Also, BAE Yoonhwan, Robert Combas, Jonathan Gardner, SUNG Paik-joo, JUNG Kangja, and HAN Unsung visualize foreign life images and classical stories, as viewed from an artist’s perspective, and expand the indices of space and time. Having been collected via various routes and in-depth methods and safely landed in storage, the works contain their own eras, eyes, and smiles. Painting possessing modernity lead us, living today, to meditate on the present life indications and period awareness of “Where am I currently?” and, further, the present era’s future we should move toward, and this is also an act of assigning a new eternity to the works.