Lim Ok-sang: Here, the Rising Land was organized to spotlight the current activities and artwork of Lim, a figure who started in realist art before broadening his artistic horizons into land art and environmental art. His new works, which make use of MMCA Seoul’s site-specific environment and conditions, offer a new glimpse not only at the essence of his artistic vision but also, in a broader context, at his artistic body of work as a whole.



Born in 1950 in Buyeo, Chungcheongnam-do, Lim Ok-sang graduated from the Seoul National University painting department and graduate school and completed studies at the École d’art d’Angoulême in France. Holding his first solo exhibition in 1981 at the Fine Arts Center of the Korea Culture and Arts Foundation, he went on to present many more. Since the 1990s, he has been invited to present his work at numerous international art events, including a 1995 Venice Biennale special exhibition and the 2004 and 2010 Beijing International Art Biennale events. Beyond the art museum context, Lim has also planned and staged various art practice-oriented participatory programs, events, installations, and performances since the mid-1990s, while further developing his means of communication through public art and programs since the 2000s. Recently, he has presented a form of environmental/land art and site-based performance in an actual rice field on the Jangdan Plain in Tongilchon, a village just outside the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. This approach, in which his art “turns to dirt,” could be viewed as a form of practice based on the complex interweaving of his perspectives on life and art over the years.



For this exhibition, around 40 works of art including six large-scale installations and 130 archival materials have been presented in Galleries 6 and 7 of MMCA Seoul and its outdoor Gallery Madang. With one of the new works, an enormous 12-meter-tall installation titled Here, the Rising Land, as the central axis, Lim’s other installation works have been placed in Gallery 6 and the Gallery Madang and his paintings in Gallery 7, creating a composition where his early and recent works face each other “like clasped fingers.” Gallery 6 presents viewers with Lim’s large installation works. Inside, the soil-surfaced installation The Sound of the Dirt (2022) creates a form that suggests the head of the Earth goddess Gaia as she rests on her side. At one side is an entrance through which viewers can enter this enormous human head. In the dark and cavernous interior, viewers can sense the breath of Gaia, mother of the Earth. Past a long staircase and corridor is another somewhat dark space in which large earthen walls unfold. Here, the Rising Land (2022) is a massive installation work assembled from 36 panels and measuring 12 meters in its vertical and horizontal dimensions. To produce it, Lim worked in a rice field on Jangdan Plain in Paju from 2021 to 2022. The viewer is presented not with “clay” that has been refined for use as an artistic material, but with real “soil,” part of the environment that exists for our survival. Beyond the recognizable forms on the work’s surface, the soil’s texture and color emerge as prominent elements in their own right. In both its materials and meaning, Here, the Rising Land touches on truly fundamental points. The earth taken from the Jangdan Plain reflects its state after the harvest. Its elements seem to touch upon a certain primal unconscious: the stumps of cut rice sheaves, the marks left by passing farmers and farm equipment, the traces of unknown organisms settling on the soil, and the smells of the earth and breaths that remain imbued in the dirt.