Guerlain's Upcoming Art Exhibition Explores the Land of the Morning Calm

Guerlain’s 17th contemporary art exhibition “Good Morning Korea, In the Land of the Morning Calm”, delves into the South Korean art scene.

This year marks the 17th iteration of Maison Guerlain's enduring collaboration with Art Basel Paris, featuring Good Morning Korea, In the Land of the Morning Calm. The exhibition will feature South Korean artists from diverse backgrounds, including the late Nam June Paik, Lee Bul, and Anicka Yi, among others.

In addition to advancing the realms of perfumes and beauty, Guerlain is committed to the ideals of heritage and innovation. Guerlain is dedicated to provide a platform for artists to exhibit their talents, since it believes that art possesses the distinctive capacity to inspire and convey memories, whether personal or collective. Consequently, it is unsurprising that South Korea was selected as a focal point this time. South Korea's influence as a creative inspiration for the Western world exemplifies this attitude, showcasing its abundance of artistic concepts that reflect the viewpoints of an emerging arts and culture nation.

 Artistic Representation of South Korea

Good Morning Korea, In the Land of the Morning Calm, curated by Hervé Mikaeloff, enables visitors to explore memory through a multi-sensory experience, featuring an olfactory journey that interlinks many pieces, discreetly integrating visual and scent-based recollections.

The exhibition showcases the deep connections South Korean artists maintain with nature, technology, and modern societal concerns, illustrating the timeline of South Korea's cultural evolution and its rich, diverse legacy.

Nam June Paik

 Nam June Paik, a seminal figure in performance and technology-driven art, was the inaugural artist to exhibit abstract forms on television by employing magnets to manipulate pictures. He notably pioneered the utilization of portable video cameras, today commonly known as "digicams." He strongly believed that technology will transform the methods of artistic creation and dissemination, anticipating a future characterized by camcorders, live-streaming, and social media. Nam adeptly integrated Eastern and Western influences, converting our introspection into an unceasing technological pursuit.

Lee Bul

Lee is recognized for her audacious, genre-defying creations that examine themes of beauty, corruption, and decay. A trailblazer in South Korea's art landscape, she perpetually motivates emerging artists with her groundbreaking performances and multi-sensory installations, challenging the limits of visual art. Her work has been showcased in solo exhibits at prominent institutions globally, including the Hayward Gallery in London, Berlin’s Martin Gropius-Bau, and Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, among others.

Good morning, Korea. In the Land of the Morning Calm will showcase Lee's oeuvre that explores concepts of perfection and the warped reality of contemporary identity, merging feminine shapes with robotic components to construct cyborgs.

 Anicka Yi

 Anicka Yi investigates the concealed politics and connections of olfaction by crafting distinctive scents and integrating scent into sculptures. She perpetually transcends the limits of science, technology, and art, striving to produce novel, disconcerting, and avant-garde experiences that interrogate conventional perceptions of her creations. Her art has been exhibited at esteemed sites such as the Tate Modern in London and the Art Science Museum in Singapore.

 Yi employs algorithms to produce holographic paintings, integrating patterns from her previous creations (her “visual DNA”) with themes derived from both organic and technological sources, prompting inquiries for the evolution of art in the digital era.

Omyo Cho

“Barrel Eye”, 2022, by Omyo Cho.

Omyo Cho commenced her career as a novelist and has since developed artworks that embody her literary origins, encompassing sculptures, installations, and VR movies that manifest as nonlinear occurrences on an alternative plane. Cho's artworks have been exhibited in several group exhibitions, including the Surim Art Center, Ulsan Contemporary Art Festival, and Osan Museum of Art. Cho's exhibition piece, "Barrel Eyes," compels the audience to contemplate a future in which memories manifest as tangible entities in real time, so reinterpreting our comprehension of time and memory.