Can a white paper filled with an invisible substance instead of paint and drawings be called art? If the paper contains the most striking idea ever presented, will it change the viewer’s initial perception of the paper?

Viewers at the 12th SongEun Art Award exhibition may confront the moment when they have to answer these questions.

With artists claiming that “contemporary art is not about who draws well, but about whose idea is better,” more and more artists are challenging the boundaries of how art is practiced.

The 12th SongEun Art Award exhibition focuses on new contemporary art practices presented by four finalists. The SongEun Art Foundation, which has presented the annual art award since 2001, has been supporting young, promising artists in Korea, following the founder’s wish to nurture young talent.

The four finalists of the year ― Choi Sun, Ha Tae-bum, Yoon Bo-hyun and Baek Jung-ki ― seek to explore essential elements of contemporary art and connect them with the society they live in.

Choi Sun, 39, who studied painting at Hongik University, showcases symbolic paintings created after watching the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease that swept the country from 2010-2011, which led to the culling of thousands of livestock.

Choi put lard, extracted from slaughtered pigs during the foot-and-mouth outbreak, on a huge white cloth, and painted another large canvas with the pink color from the stamps marked on the slaughtered pigs.

“If you look at them at a distance, you might recognize them as flat paintings, but when you look closely, they are engraved with symbols of the tragic reality,” said Choi at a guided press tour of the exhibition last week. “They are the result of my exploration to find a unique position in contemporary painting,” he added.

Ha Tae-bum, 38, also focuses on tragic events happening around the world, including North Korea’s artillery strike on Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, which killed two Marines and two civilians.

The artist makes miniature models of disaster scenes, shown in a newspaper photo, removes all colors in the process, leaving only white, and takes a photo of the model from the exact same angle from which the press photo was taken.

The photos of the miniature models include several other tragic events such as a bombing in Yemen and a terrorist attack on a police station in Mexico.

“We live in a world flooded with images and where people are becoming insensitive to the images taken in reality as if they were scenes from movies,” Ha said. “The white color shows how insensitive we have become toward those events.”

While Choi and Ha try to link art and social issues, Yoon Bo-hyun and Baek Jung-ki focus on the intrinsic characteristics of the materials they use for their works and try to break the stereotypes people hold about the materials.

Yoon plays with characteristics of glass such as transparency, reflection and distortion and turns such characteristics into something tangible and wearable.

Driven by the language barrier he felt when he first arrived in the U.S., the artist made glass helmets that show a wearer’s reflection on the surface and a person’s facial expression well. 

Using the air pressure difference between one end of a glass tube and the other end, Yoon makes various sounds as if playing a musical instrument.

“My work is to create sound and music through glass,” Yoon said.

Baek, 31, printed pictures of beautiful autumn scenes at Mt. Seorak with inks he extracted from autumn leaves collected from the mountain.

“I’m interested in images and what constitutes the images,” he said. “And I chose the photo as a medium which can best represent the images I would like to create,” he added.

The images printed in “real autumn colors” look incomplete and faded, but the fact that the images are made of the essence of what constitutes the images makes them a true representation of the image.

The exhibition continues through Feb. 28 at SongEun ArtSpace in Cheongdam-dong, Seoul. For more information, call (02) 3448-0100.

By Lee Woo-young (wylee@heraldcorp.com)