Kim Shinhye, Camargue Landscape, 2020 / Image courtesy of Seoul National University Museum of Art
Exhibition view ⓒBang Yukyung
The crew of Apollo 17, who looked at the earth from space, saw the earth and called it ‘The Blue Marble’. However, the global situation we experience today is not ‘blue’. The exhibition ‘Sounds of the Blue Marble: Mourning the Anthropocene’, held at the Seoul National University Museum of Art, asks us to face uncomfortable scenes from the era of the Anthropocene, which has crafted a painful history such as war, environmental pollution, climate crisis, and pandemic. Twelve participant artists of various genres, including painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and video, tried to embrace these issues concretely through their work. Kim Shinhye unfolds a natural landscape printed on the labels from bottles; Lee Soyo traces the history of domestic coloured cactus exported throughout the world through artificial breeding and crossbreeding; An Jonghyun captures a fire that has burned land to ashes but discovers the energy of a beginning rather than extinction. The artists follow the sound of the ‘Blue Marble’ and discover uncomfortable truths in everyday life. However, the reality of ‘sound’ recorded and reconstructed by the artists evokes our senses and consciousness in a different way from documentaries, reports, and news. From the act of carving wood on a toothpick and attaching pigeon feathers to a hairless badminton ball (Song Sooyoung) to the act of visiting the polar regions and capturing the anomaly of melting glaciers (Han Sungpil), visitors can read the attitude of ‘mourning’, that witnesses reality from various viewpoints and distances and silently accepts them. The message of those who want to pass through the era of pain ‘by looking and feeling as it is’ touches our heavy hearts. The exhibition is on show until Sep. 5.