Art Busan 2026 (CONNECT): Fair

The Currents of Being

For Art Busan's Connect sector, Gallery LNL presents an installation of sculptures and drawings by Suh Yongsun that showcases the artist's expansive narrative of the foundations and unfolding of modern Korea. Widely regarded as the leading figurative painter of his generation, the presentation opens with Suh's inquiry into agrarian society as an ontological basis of modern life, distilled into the imposing contrast of two carved wooden figures: the 'farmer' and the 'soldier'.

The sculptures are human figures carved from wooden boards and painted. These divide into soldiers, richly coloured in yellows, army fatigue greens and blood reds, and farmers, in the contrasting simplicity of white outlined contours. Whilst the soldiers stand in twos, the farmers are held in an almost acrobatic pose, symbolising their interdependence and hardships.

Suh sees the contradiction between our desire for independence from the material conditions of life and our ontological dependence on them as founding the agrarian society. To protect what they sowed, agrarian communities required structures of defense against the other, as well as the organisational support to survive through the pre-harvest and in case of famine. Together these marked the end of nomadic culture and the beginning of a people of farmers and soldiers.

If Suh's narrative of the agrarian society's beginning appears distant from the all-pervasive urbanism and globalisation we encounter today, Suh maintains that these sober realities still guide how our world operates.

Not interested in a merely universal reflection, however, Suh is interested in the distinctly Korean form and history of the farmer and the soldier. Their history is the history of Korea, from the political intrigues of the royal dynasties, to the still pervasive trauma of the Korea war, into the urban contingencies of the present. This history is not a sequential progression of events, but the recurring expression of the same universal desires for freedom and dominion across the ages.