The common denominator that spans the half-century generation gap between Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) and KAWS (real name Brian Donnelly) is pop art. Pop art is an artistic trend that drew commercial advertising and popular culture imagery onto the canvas, and both artists lowered the threshold of "high art" through cartoon-like imagery and bold outlines.
Lichtenstein enlarged scenes from cheap romance comics and war comics onto canvas, hand-painting even the printed halftone dots. This act of imitating mechanical reproduction by hand pokes at the emptiness of standardized emotion mass-produced by the media. His "Imperfect" is a special work that brought the subculture of comics into the museum while preserving the completeness of painting. KAWS, of the 1990s Neo Pop generation, parodied Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob and created his signature character "Companion," with an "X" drawn over each eye. This character, whose name means companion, began with a figure produced in collaboration with a Japanese brand in 1999. It instantly captivated his contemporaries and also collaborated with BTS. If Lichtenstein was a cool observer of commercialism, KAWS moves across commercial platforms from street graffiti to figures, fashion collaborations and large-scale sculpture.
The Wooyang Museum in Gyeongju has opened a curated collection exhibition, "Otherhood: Close Distances," presenting works by 17 masters including these two artists, as well as Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Suh Se-ok and Cho Duck-hyun. The exhibition revolves around the axis of "resemblance and difference." Through works that appear alike on the surface but harbor hidden differences within, it lets visitors experience the diversity of art that unravels the concerns of the contemporary era through different media.
The Wooyang Museum's former name was Sonje Museum. It was opened in 1991 next to the Hilton Hotel in the Bomun tourist complex by Chung Hee-ja, wife of Daewoo Group Chairman Kim Woo-choong. At the time, it drew attention for presenting overseas contemporary art rarely seen in the provinces, based on private collections, but the museum faced a crisis along with the dissolution of Daewoo Group. Wooyang Industry, which grew out of a fisheries company, acquired it in 2012 and reopened it as the Wooyang Museum the following year, announcing a new start through exhibitions of the beloved national painters Lee Jung-seob and Park Soo-keun. Now, in Gyeongju—famous as a city of museums—it is building a new reputation as a sacred site of contemporary art. When the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was held in Gyeongju last October, U.S. President Donald Trump stayed at the Hilton Hotel, once again drawing the world's attention to the Wooyang Museum.
KAWS's other work, "Space," was launched into the stratosphere at an altitude of 41.5 kilometers, suspended from a large weather observation balloon, during the pandemic in 2020. The artist explained that he wanted to create a work that could be safely viewed even from home during a time of disconnection.
The virtue of this exhibition is that visitors meet artists they had seen in art history books, alongside their representative works. Artists similar yet different, working with industrial materials such as steel plate, are placed side by side. Frank Stella and John Chamberlain stood at the center of postwar American art through a two-person show at New York's Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962. As a generation that rebelled against the emotional excess of abstract expressionism, they turned industrial materials such as automobile paint and scrap iron into art. Their textures are opposites. Stella took the position of viewing his work coolly, restraining and blocking emotional projection. Chamberlain, by contrast, compressed and welded steel plates from junkyards to shape sculptures that seem to explode. Britain's Anthony Caro placed industrial steel directly on the floor without a pedestal, standing it in the same space as the viewer.
The composition pairing Korean and foreign artists also draws the eye. Suh Se-ok's "People" series depicts communal solidarity through human figures intertwined with ink-wash lines. Christopher Wool's black-and-white works reveal the anxiety of the modern city and the breakdown of communication as they collide and slip. German photography master Candida Höfer and Lee Yun-jin also face each other. If Höfer points to the macroscopic power of the Enlightenment in empty Western libraries and theaters, Lee Yun-jin examines individual anxiety by strangely distorting ordinary interiors from which people have vanished.
Separately from Gallery 1, where the collection exhibition is held, Gallery 2 is hosting a special exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of Snoopy's birth, "How Do You Do, Snoopy? 75 Years." The exhibition commemorates the animation Peanuts, born in 1950. It closely presents the friendship and humor that Snoopy and Charlie Brown have conveyed across generations. More than 100 works and pieces of content, 26 Korean and international artists, more than 30 global fashion houses and about 50 original animations are on display. It also targets family visitors coming to Gyeongju during the school vacation. Both exhibitions run through November 29.
