On December 31st we woke up nice and early at the StayKorea Guest house and headed out into Seoul. Ellen took us to "Leeum : Samsung Museum of Modern Art" using some tickets that her uncle had given her. The gallery is owned by the Samsung family and is a spectacular gallery. As one might expect from a gallery that bears the Samsung moniker, the technology was wild. We got (free with our corporate tickets - thank you Ellen`s uncle!!) a digital audio guide that hangs on a chord around your neck. Now, audio guides are nothing new, but these digital ones were amazing. They had a touch-screen that you activated in your choice of over half a dozen different languages. As you aproached any particular work an infra-red sensor in the floor would trigger the guide to begin speaking about that individual piece. You could pause, stop, go back or skip any part of the guide by simply walking to another work and standing near the little black circle in the floor. The only flaw in the system was that if you wanted to wander off a bit from the work you were hearing about and pehaps got a little too close to another one, the guide would switch to the new piece suddenly, causing me to backtrack a few times to hear something to its conclusion. The audio guide also allowed for a lot more detail on each piece and its importance in teh exhibition. We went through two separate wings of the gallery. One was housing a special exhibition of traditional Korean pottery and a whole room filled with fascinating Buddhist artifacts of cultural and historical importnace to Korean Buddhism, something which interests me greatly but that i know little about. The other gallery was dedicated entirely to "modern art" - installations, abstract painting and multi-media works, mostly by Korean artists heavily influenced by or influential to Western artists. The gallery`s purpose seemed in large part to show the tandem between Western and Asian (especially Korean) modern art. Hubert pointed out, and rightly so i believe, that this shows that success in art, at the end of the day, is essentially marketing. Many of the Korean works were just as impressive and just as pioneering, though most of the names were new to me. I did recognize most of the Western artist names, though. The audio guide proved itself invaluable in this section since modern art remains somewhat esoteric to laymen like myself who enjoy but cannot even pretend to understand. My favorite piece in this wing was a massive painting by Choi Wook-Kyung from 1977, "Untitled". I might see if i can find some of her work online to put in a future blog post.
After the gallery we went down to Myeong-Dong to have a superb Bibimpa (mixed rice bowl) lunch and wander around shopping and checking out the city. Here are some odds and ends from the day:
Outside the gallery there were these two spidery sculptures. Alas, i forget at this moment the artist`s name but some of his (her) work in this spidery series are also installed outside Roppongi Hills in Tokyo.
This is Hubert and Ellen in one of the only photos i was allowed to take inside the gallery.
Bibimpa lunch (i`m sure i`m spelling the dish name wrong but oh well...)
Seoul Tower, which made me rather homesick for the CN Tower - something i never really expected to feel!
The crowds in Myeong-Dong looking for cheap goods. I didn`t see anything that seemed worth buying, but i wasn`t looking for discount brand name bags or jewellery. I did buy a nice ring, though. Cost me about 4 bucks Canadian.
This was an interesting sight. In preparation for New Years Eve festivities, some people were selling roman candle fireworks on the street super cheap. Later on we would watch on TV as hundreds of thousands of people would gather in the downtown area for concerts and the Countdown. Many of these people would be holding these fireworks over their heads and firing them into the air, right smack in the middle of downtown, between the skyscrapers. In this picture you can see they are left unattended in front of some phonebooths while the vendor is just out of frame negotiating the price with some customers.
There were also a rather surprising number of street vendors like this one selling LOTS of stuffed animals. Either Koreans are somewhat obsessed with cutesy stuffed dolls or this is a key date spot that i was unaware of. The same thing appears in Osaka (though not quite so many of these vendors) in places where guys are likely to be convinced to buy something soft and cute to impress a girl they are in need of impressing.
And this is the East Gate. The one you have likely seen in pictures of Seoul is actually the South Gate, but the East Gate is certainly also dramatically impressive (if somewhat smog-stained) as it squats amongst the equally massive shopping centers and disused Olympic stadiums, a quick-moving river of traffic swirling around it.
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