SEATTLE, WA.- SAM’s Asian Art Museum presents Paradox of Place: Contemporary Korean Art, showcasing six prominent Korean artists active in today’s global art scene. The first major exhibition of contemporary Korean art in Seattle in a decade, the exhibition features intriguing new media art in diverse forms—video and mixed-media installations, photography, and sculpture—that all address paradox in Korean society: division and unification, Korea and the world, self and others, past and present, beauty and ugliness, reality and fantasy.

The artists of Paradox of Place share a common ground: they each take the political, social, historical, and cultural situations of Korea fully into account and add their personal experiences to their work. To illuminate this mix of the personal and political, three of the six artists featured—Jung Yeondoo, Lim Minouk, and Yee Sookyung—will travel to Seattle to speak about their work and connect with museum patrons. Artists Lee Yongbaek,,Noh Suntag, and Yang Haegue round out this group of leading-edge artists.

“I’m thrilled to bring this fascinating exhibition to Seattle,” said Kimerly Rorschach, SAM’s Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director and CEO. “It represents a wonderful collaboration between two curators: our own Xiaojin Wu and Choi Eunju, our first in-residence visiting curator sponsored by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.”

Because of its political division, Korea is infused with paradox. While the economically vibrant southern half brings the world “Korean Wave”—cool popular culture—the isolated and militaristic northern half generates unsettling worldwide news daily. The North-South Korea division is not the only sociopolitical context contemporary Korean artists live in; they’ve also experienced military dictatorships and democratization, modernization, and globalization. Their life experiences, however unsettling they might be, provide rich subject matter for their work.

Paradox of Place was curated by Xiaojin Wu, SAM’s Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, in collaboration with Ms. Choi Eunju, former chief curator of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. “Korean artists have been at the forefront of contemporary video art for years,” says Xiaojin Wu, Curator of Japanese and Korean Art. “This show includes incredible examples of video while expanding to display the wide range of new media work these artists are engaging in. There’s also photography, mixedmedia installation, and sculptures created with non-traditional methods— including a piece made with a 3D printer. This group of artists each reveal something personal—but together, they also capture an expression of contemporary Korean life and of the global world we live in now.”