“Earthy and pungent, with a hint of fruitiness” aren’t the descriptors one usually expects when recounting the scents wafting through a white-cube museum’s lobby at the heart of a densely packed metropolis.
How can a 21st-century visual artist, who seldom leaves the confines of his studio, become a 19th-century plein-air painter who seeks out his subjects in the great outdoors?
Multimedia artist Park Chan-kyong is set to hold his first solo exhibition at the Smithsonian s National Museum of Asian Art this fall to inaugurate the museum s new modern and contemporary galleries.
A room is suspended in midair, furnished with period doors, windows, wooden panels and a radiator in one corner. While perfectly enterable, it s not a solidly rendered space; rather, it s a spectral cast of the architecture - or, as Swiss artist Heidi Bucher (1926-93) put it, the “skin” of it.