THE COLLECTION OF THE FONDATION CARTIER POUR L'ART CONTEMPORAIN AT THE SEOUL MUSEUM OF ART

Jean-Michel Alberola
Eclairage en groupe (2014)

Through his work, Jean-Michel Alberola reflects on history, religion, mythology, the artist’s role, and the power of the painted image. A genuine meditation on the world, his painting often extends into multiple modes of expression, such as sculpture, objects, texts, and films. In the interwoven “signs” and scattered references of his canvases, the abstract jostles with recognizable forms, and words encounter color. For the Fondation Cartier’s exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art, Jean-Michel Alberola created a special project for the museum’s main lobby, a wall painting visible from every floor. Picking up from the work Éclairage en groupe, commissioned in 2014 for the Vivid Memories exhibition, celebrating Fondation Cartier’s thirtieth anniversary, it refers to a community of artists, such as the one at the Fondation Cartier.

Chéri Samba
I love Color (2010)

Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Exit (2008 - 2015)

Created in 2008, at the initiative of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain for the exhibition Native Land, Stop Eject, and inspired by an idea of the French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, EXIT was conceived by the American artists and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with artist-architect Laura Kurgan, statistician-artist Mark Hansen, with a core team of scientists from different disciplines. It is made up of a series of dynamic maps generated from statistical data. This immersive installation depicts human migrations and their primary causes in a 360° projection. The continual rotation of a globe around the room displays different migratory data visually, in the form of maps, texts, and routes using six different scenarios: Population Shifts: Cities; Remittances: Sending Money Home; Political Refugees and Forced Migration; RisingSeas, Sinking Cities; Natural Disasters; and Speechless and Deforestation. In 2015, to mark the United Nations climate conference (COP21) organized in Paris, the work was comprehensively updated, revealing the alarming evolution of data since its first presentation.

Lee Bul
Heaven and Earth (2008)

Lee Bul is one of the Korean contemporary art scene’s major figures, known since the 1980s for her radical and committed work on the body and provocative performances with extravagant costumes she designs. In 2007, she presented a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The work she conceived for that exhibition was as a reflection on the transparence of the building of the Fondation Cartier. Her research work on architecture in this context took on a particular scale, resonating with the building and Korean history. Her work, Heaven and Earth, touches on the paradoxes of history. “The title is taken from the name of the lake in the middle of Baekdusan, which is kind of a holy mountain in Korean national myths. It’s located in what is today North Korea, so for generations of postwar Koreans in the South, it exists only in their imagination. For them, it is a kind of ideal image, almost an abstraction. In this work, the seedy-looking, oversized bathtub, filled with dark ink and ringed by snowy mountain ridges, functions as a visual synecdoche, evoking an entire period, ideals and ideological battles, and the use of torture to suppress free thought.”

Lee Bul
Sternbau No.16 (2008)

Cai Guo-Qiang
The Earth Has Its Black Hole too (1993)

Cai Guo-Qiang
The Vague Border at the Edge of Time/Space Project (1991)

Cai Guo-Qiang
White Tone (2016)

In 2016, for the exhibition The Great Animal Orchestra, he created the immense fresco White Tone, which recalls the rock art adorning cave walls. “This is one of the most detailed drawings I have ever created. Animals are like humans in the sense that they have so many expressions and forms, muscles, bones, fur, etc. You have to go very much into detail when you apply the gunpowder to represent the movement of the animal bending down to the water. And the gunpowder drawing itself remains a very fragile technique, due to the ignition process. I imagined this place being the sole remaining vestige of nature on earth, the final legacy for animals. So they no longer fight against each other but they are modestly bending down to drink the last sip of water. Like in a fairy-tale world, the depicted scene is a beautiful and moving vision, but at the same time it conceals a dark emotion. The pond is still and quiet: it is a vortex, a white void swallowing all its surroundings, creating a silent nothingness, an image from which all sound has disappeared or is about to.”

Raymond Depardon et Claudine NougaretHear Them Speak (2008)

In 2008, with French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, Raymond Depardon devised Native Land, Stop Ejectfor the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. For that exhibition, he realized the filmHear Them Speakwith Claudine Nougaret. In this work, dealing with the question of roots and the relationship between a population and its lands, language, and history, we see nomads, farmers, islanders, and Indian expressing their attachment to their native land in their endangered mother languages.

Daido Moriyama
Polaroid Polaroid (1997)

A major figure in Japanese photography, Moriyama Daido began inventing his frenetic and tormented visual language in the mid-1960s, privileging blurring, graininess, and a distortion of the real. Witnessing
the spectacular changes in postwar Japan, his photographs express the contradictions
of a country where a secular tradition persists in contemporary practices. Often blurred, set at vertiginous angles and full of close-ups, these images are about proximity and a distinctive relationship with the subject. His photographs of Tokyo, particularly the narrow streets of Shinjuku, o er a raw, hard vision of the urban world, illustrating the constant flux of Tokyo life. The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has presented two of Moriyama Daido’s solo shows, in 2003 and 2016. The installation Polaroid Polaroid offers a reconstitution of the artist’s studio through 3,262 Polaroid images. This unique work is an intense, intimate, and detailed view of his creative space. Several of his iconic artworks are recognizable in the installation, scattered around his studio between everyday objects and his work and research tools.

Alessandro Mendini
Il Cavaliere di Dürer (2011)

From his 2002 exhibition Fragilisme to his participation as artist and exhibition designer in several group exhibitions, Alessandro Mendini is a major figure in the history of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Its Collection holds many monumental works by this artist, architect, and designer, such as Il Cavaliere di Dürer.. They were presented in a solo exhibition at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul in 2015.

Marc Couturier
The Third Day Drawing (2017)

Marc Couturier
The Fourth Day Drawing (2017)

In his work, Marc Couturier reflects on the passage from the material to the immaterial. In sculptures and drawings imbued with spirituality, he constantly alludes to the dialogue between nature and the divine.
The bond between Marc Couturier and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has remained strong since his artist’s residency in 1987. For the exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art, Marc Couturier created several wall drawings reminiscent of his series,, begun in 1991, but regularly enriched, and today comprising several thousand drawings. Verging on abstraction, the drawings evoke the day on which nature was created according to Genesis; having been created before the moon and sun, the drawings of nature stay rigorously black and white.

Marc Couturier
The Third Day Drawing (2017)

Ron Mueck
In Bed (2005)

Solitary, pensive figures are a recurring subject in Ron Mueck’s work. Ghost, 1998; Seated Woman, 1999; and In Bed; are key examples. Each is captured in a moment of solitary reflection, with their eyes open but focused inwards.

Ron Mueck
Woman with Sticks (2009-10)

By contrast, Woman with Sticks is intent and purposeful. She is focused on her task, the meaning of which remains deliberately ambiguous.

Ron Mueck
Woman with Shopping (2013)

This is a moment from modern life, but the real subject appears to be the complex relationship between a mother and the newborn child that she is supporting.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has organized two solo exhibitions of Ron Mueck, firstly in 2005, and then in 2013 after which it toured to South America and was seen by some 1.4 million people.

Jean-Michel Othoniel
Loving Landscape (1997)

The paths of Jean-Michel Othoniel and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain crossed during his artist residency in 1989. The sculptures that the Fondation Cartier holds in its Collection illustrate the artist’s different creative periods, shaped by his research into new forms of iconography and his discoveries of new techniques and materials. Accordingly, Jean-Michel Othoniel’s first works explored unusual materials, like sulfur, which could be hollowed out and become a work and the cast for a work that does not exist. His more recent works were made either at Marseille’s CIRVA in the South of France, or in Murano, near Venice, where local artisans still practice traditional techniques. Jean-Michel Othoniel’s works evoke and elicit desire, such as Paysage amoureux, a glass-beaded curtain, whose heart or ring-shapes suggest ex-votos or erotic objects.

Jean-Michel Othoniel
The Unicorn (2003)

His extravagant and baroque sculpture, L’Unicorne, is reminiscent of a processional canopy and an absent body, oscillating between the theatrical and the religious. The Fondation Cartier presented these two sculptures in the artist’s solo exhibition, Crystal Palace, in 2003.

Sarah Sze
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1999)

For her solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 1999, Sarah Sze, then a young artist, broke away from the usual scale of her art. Having worked till then in small spaces, she chose to create a huge installation for the building of the Fondation Cartier, exploring architecture, transparency, and the relationship between inside and outside. With Everything that Rises Must Converge, she transformed a multitude of daily objects into a whirling suspended construction. As constellations spreading out around a space, her sculptures change shape and reconfigure themselves for each installation. She designed a new configuration for the Seoul Museum of Art, suspended over two floors and visible from every point in the building.

Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists (UVA)
The Great Animal Orchestra (2016)

In 2016, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented the exhibition The Great Animal Orchestra. Inspired by the work of American bioacoustician, scientist, and musician Bernie Krause, this exhibition invited an aesthetic meditation, both aural and visual, on the natural world, now increasingly under threat from human activity.
Over nearly fifty years, Bernie Krause has collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural habitats, including more than 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from all around the world. Bernie Krause’s approach is unique: he contemplates the natural world as a poet, listening to animal vocalizations as a musician, and through his recordings, he studies it all scientifically.
The graphic representations, or soundscapes, of his recordings reveal that the sounds of the animal world, often perceived as nonsensical noises, are actually as carefully orchestrated as the most complex musical scores.
The London collective, United Visual Artists (UVA), imagined a visual translation of Bernie Krause’s soundscapes. They designed a three-dimensional electronic installation, transposing the data from the recordings into light particles, thus highlighting the beauty of the sound environments presented. Featuring seven soundscapes, recorded in Canada, the United States, Brazil, the Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, and the oceans, this installation simultaneously o ers a completely original aesthetic experience and a precise tool for knowledge. An interview with Bernie Krause, filmed by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret and shown at the beginning of the installation, reveals the extraordinary personality of the author of these recordings, which immerse the visitor in the beauty, complexity, and diversity of the language of wild animals.

Exhibition View, second floor

Exhibition View, second floor

Claudia Andujar
Identity, Wakatha u

In the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar met the Yanomami Indians in the Amazonian Brazilian rainforest and decided to abandon her career as a photojournalist to live with them. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY), she played a key role at the side of the Yanomami to secure the Brazilian government’s recognition of their land. In 1975–76, after the construction of the Perimetral Norte road, she lent her support for a health center and realized the series of portraits Identity, Wakatha u, intended as a census of the Yanomami population. During this time, she also photographed scenes of daily life and shamanic sessions. Claudia Andujar’s meeting with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain was the catalyst for the exhibition Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest in 2003, which compared contemporary artists’ visions of the world to the shamanic wisdom of a Yanomami village.

Exhibition View, second floor

Juana Marta Rodas
Ceramic Sculptures (1993)</o>

In Paraguay, mothers pass onto their daughters—and they in turn to theirs—the secrets of clay and beautiful forms created by hand. Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isidrez are two of the most renowned contemporary ceramicists in Latin America. Their art marries the Guarani tradition with Jesuit influences from colonization. Juana Marta Rodas and Julia Isidrez have both developed an original style and personal language. Although they come from the same repertoire of techniques and traditions inherited from their ancestors, their ceramics introduce unexpected zoomorphic traits and rounded contours that move the works away from utilitarian function, turning them into genuine pieces of sculpture.

Julia Isidrez
Ceramic Sculptures (2013)

Alessandro Mendini
Vase visage (2002)

Regarding his ceramic Vases visages, the artist states: “For millennia there has been a fascinating history of anthropomorphic objects. From jewelry to architecture, from refined styles to popular art, humans have reproduced themselves in the objects they have made, modeling them in their image to make them their friends. These vases, resembling faces, fix us with their profound, archaic gaze, and can be found in any civilization you can think of.” Alessandro Mendini realized the exhibition design of all the ceramic works presented in the exhibition Highlights at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Takeshi Kitano
The Animal and Flower Vases (2010)

A director with a filmography laced with violence and melancholy, a TV figure and painter, Kitano Takeshi is a multifaceted artist. In 2010, he created a solo show for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain titled Gosse de peintre, an unprecedented and extraordinary project in which his imaginative vision and inventiveness were given full rein. For this occasion, he created a series of zoomorphic vases associating a flower with an animal—a playful twist on the art of Ikebana.

David Lynch
Blinder Works #1 and #2 (1970-2006)

Rained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and known primarily for his films, David Lynch is the author of a body of work that is at once polymorphous, poetic, and troubling and which blends painting, sculpture, drawing, and installations. Between 1970 and 2009, the artist made an outstanding collection of 259 drawings using a diverse selection of materials, from books of matches to Post-it notes. These Binder Works entered the Collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2011.

David Lynch
Blinder Works #1 and #2 (1970-2006)

David Lynch
Blinder Works #1 and #2 (1970-2006)

David Lynch
Untitled (2007 - 10)

In 2007, during his exhibition The Air is on Fire at the Fondation Cartier, David Lynch discovered the lithography studio Idem in the Montparnasse area of Paris. He fell completely in love with this traditional technique, which is slowly disappearing. From that point onwards, David Lynch spent long sojourns in Paris, quickly acquiring this skill. He participated in the life of the studio, making his own lithographs each year, in which his inspirations, somber style, and black humor are evident.

Patti Smith
The Coral Sea Room (2008)

In 2008, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented Land 250, a solo exhibition of artist and musician Patti Smith, which revealed the many facets of her artistic production: photographs taken with her old Polaroid Land 250 camera, films, and her personal afinities with certain important French literary figures. In that exhibition, Patti Smith presented The Coral Sea Room, an installation in which she paid tribute to the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 and who was one of her closest friends and mentors. This installation consists of a poem by Patti Smith, a soundtrack created with Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), and a dual projection of powerful images of nature, shot by filmmaker Jem Cohen under Patti Smith’s direction. “After his death, I wanted to o er him something else other than tears, so I wrote the ‘Coral Sea,’” explains Patti Smith about Robert Mapplethorpe.

PARKing CHANce
Decades Apart (2017)

The artist duo PARKing CHANce is made up of two brothers, Korean lmmaker Park Chan-wook and Korean media artist Park Chan-kyong. Their family name, “Park,” and the shared first syllable of their given names, “Chan,” are used in their team name, “PARKing CHANce,” which literally means finding a place to park. True to their name, PARKing CHANce is on the lookout for opportunities to work on special projects that are not part of their usual work as individuals. As a team, they are interested in unique projects with a more experimental and artistic focus such as short films, documentaries, and music videos. For the work Decades Apart commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain for the exhibition Highlights, PARKing CHANce has conceived an original immersive 3D sound and image installation. Based on the set of Joint Security Area (JSA) (2000), a movie by Park Chan-wook, new images were filmed for the work and sound treated in a very surprising way to give the visitor a total experience: “As opposed to the somewhat hopeful mood around the time when the lm Joint Security Area was released, North and South Korea’s relationship has deteriorated in the past seventeen years. As if reflecting the current situation, the Panmunjeom set built for the lm’s production has become a decrepit sight, and even this is soon to be demolished. Through the use of 3D cinematography and the montage of the original soundtrack, we wander around this ghost house that feels like both a reality or a dream, somewhere in between the present and seventeen years ago."

Jean Michel Alberola
Cédric Villani's Hand (Cercignani's conjecture) (2011)

For the 2011 exhibition Mathematics, A Beautiful Elsewhere at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Jean-Michel Alberola shot the film Cédric Villani's Hand (Cercignani's conjecture), featuring the French mathematician Cédric Villani presenting Cercignani’s conjecture on a blackboard, the problem that gave him his first significant results. Cédric Villani sketches out the problem sequentially, arriving at a final pronouncement, proof, and implications.

Sunwoo Hoon
The Flat is Political (2017)

Sunwoo Hoon debuted as a webtoon artist with his work Damage Over Time on the South Korean web portal Daum. In 2015, he won the Emerging Artist Award from the Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival (SICAF). That same year he won the best cartoon/animation critique award from the webzine critic M. Sunwoo Hoon is an active critic in the world of cartoons. Damage Over Time describes the survival story of an individual in a closed, cliquish Korean military camp. Sunwoo Hoon places isolated military troops in an environment rife with zombies, depicting the collective military lives of young South Korean men in an extreme way. In terms of form, he appropriated the quarter view (isometric view) and dot graphics used in computer games. The title comes from game terminology referring to consistent damage a character inflicts over a period of time.
For the exhibition Highlights, Sunwoo Hoon imagined a project for SeMA’s lounge spaces titled The Flat is Political. The work presents new webtoons, representing today’s Korean society and featuring ambiguous images and dialogues. The webtoons deny a linear or chronological narrative; instead they use the existing forms of webtoon narrative style and suggest diverse ways of reading images and dialogues. They also maintain the artist’s signature style: an insightful message contained in the most general stories of our times.

Tadanori Yokoo
113 portraits (2014)

First an illustrator and master of Japanese graphic design, as well as a designer of Kabuki sets and costumes, after seeing a Picasso exhibition in New York in 1980, Yokoo Tadanori decided to devote himself primarily to painting. Openly referencing Western painters, he cultivates “a great variety of genres and styles,” making eclecticism his pictorial signature. In 2006, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain organized Yokoo Tadanori’s rst exhibition in Europe.
In 2014, on the occasion of Fondation Cartier’s thirtieth anniversary, he was entrusted the creation of more than one hundred portraits of the artists, thinkers, and scientists who have marked its history. Executed in different pictorial styles, these portraits draw attention to the fact that behind every piece of work and every exhibition, exists a real face, a real presence, and a real relationship. It underlines the sense of continuity, loyalty, and the strong and enduring links forged by the Fondation Cartier with each of these people over more than thirty years of patronage.

Exhibition View, second floor