Asia has firmly established itself as an important incubator for the international art world over the last few decades. Asian art is also a field where Opera Gallery has dedicated particular energy, focus and expertise in order to best represent the exciting diversity and vitality of this energetic continent. We have achieved this through a programme of curated exhibitions across our international network of galleries for the benefit of eastern and western art connoisseurs and collectors worldwide. Our endeavour has firmly established Opera Gallery as a leading proponent of Asian arts working in a huge diversity of theme, scale and media.
Opera Gallery Monaco is proud and excited to present The Art of Matter, a curated group exhibition featuring 7 key Asian artists. Each artist has rigorously pushed and developed their practice to the aesthetic and technical limit enabling them to idiosyncratically render before us their unique vision of the world. Some (Yoo Bong Sang, Lee Gil Rae, Hwang Ran, Son Bong-Chae and Seo Young-Deok), employ a figurative approach, whereas others (Cho Sung-Hee and Zhuang Hong Yi), create more meditative abstract artworks. However, what transpires through this selection is not just a superficial snapshot of Asian rooted themes promoted through these artworks but a broader reflection of the evolution of creative materiality itself through the sophisticated and alchemical handling of media. In turn we witness a metamorphosis where something more ephemeral, perhaps spiritual, is evoked through the mastery of mere material.
The Art of Matter offers you the opportunity to join us on an eastern odyssey of discovery, through the surface of this ecclectic selection of artworks and beyond.
Contemporary artworks created by Asian artists are greatly influenced by its contact with Western traditions, techniques and discourse. Artists such as Cho Sung-Hee and Yoo Bong Sang use oil or acrylic painting, a good example of vivid and long lasting colours introduced from the West that differed from the monochrome or aged silk paintings from the East Asian tradition. Other works exhibited depart from the flat surface to construct a vision of the world in three dimensions or with light, seen notably in those of Hwang Ran and Song Bong-Chae. They are on the cutting edge of experimentations with matter in all its possibilities.
Through the turmoil of the past century, generations of Asian artists have come to study in Paris, London, Rome or the United States and in turn brought back home with them what they have encountered abroad. They introduced and adapted the techniques to their working repertoire. Most of the artists exhibited here have studied or live abroad. Their understanding of the world is nuanced and formed from different vantage points.
Nevertheless, we are not talking about the superposition of one artistic tradition over the other. Take the motif of the tree for instance. Pines welded by Lee Gil Rae and trees painted on polycarbonate by Son are doubtlessly inspired by literati paintings, a millennial tradition that has established its hegemony in East Asia since the 10th century. In a sense, even abstraction is not unfamiliar to Chinese and Korean artists. Their high art style has always been extremely expressive and abstract works on paper that emphasised on the artist’s gesture and artistic ideals rather than representation. Monumental ink landscape on paper can thus be reconciled with its heirs.
Contemporary art in Asia, or East Asia specifically in this case, rapidly went through different phases, sometimes inevitably related to historical events. Art was employed for government propaganda, such as by Japan during WWII or during the Cultural Revolution in China, and later replicated in parodies by artists. We have also seen the establishment of institutions – art academies and museums - and their styles. Nation building and patriotism aside, more recent art movements produced modern masters and founded the backdrop which give rise to today’s lively art scene. In Korea, the 1960s Monochrome Art (Dansaekhwa) Movement attempts to distil through artistic knowledge a unique way to depict the world. Japan’s ‘Superflat’ theory, initiated by the famed Takashi Murakami, is a humorous but scathing criticism to the conditions and predicaments of modern life.
However, it would be too simple if we settled on the model of the meeting of Eastern and Western art. Artworks we see now are not mere blends of motifs and technical prowess. The artist presents to the viewer his or her own sincere version of the world and each of these should be examined with their individuality and particularity in mind. The world as they experience now is an integrated whole shaped not only by Art History but also technology and modern socio-political concerns. Seo Young-Deok uses the ubiquitous mass-produced metal chains as the medium to render the human body in its various states at rest or in anguish.
This selection of works of art of the age of mechanical reproduction both recognise their context but also try to surpass it. Each artist presented is a master of matter and manipulates it to communicate an aspect of the world around us. The use of paint and traditional Asian rice paper is present in Cho and Zhuang Hong Yi’s works, both abstract artists, but their approaches to occupy space are entirely different. Yoo Bong Sang, Lee Gil Rae and Seo Young-Deok all use metallic parts to reconstruct and assemble images – the nail, the ring and the chain respectively. Objects that should evoke maddening industrial repetitions and noise are tamed and reborn to incarnate tranquility and nature. Similar to Yoo’s labyrinths of a thousand nails, Hwang is also a disciple whose goal is to recreate nature via the sheen and the shape resulting from mass and mechanical reproduction. Nature is again symbolised as a tree, but Son encapsulates it with the wonders of modern chemistry.
None of them is remotely like the other, yet this kaleidoscope of the art of matter is what gives the new arts of Asia its depth and variety. The exhibition reunites them around the subject of matter through a journey in and out of themes that crafted their evolution.

Opening: 17 May 2018 from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm
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mpefm MONTECARLO/MONACO art press release