Poetic Paradise presents works of contemporary art that have been inspired by poetry and fiction, including literature of the Jeolla provinces, or created in collaboration with writers. The four contemporary artists participating in this exhibition perceive and express the world in their own unique ways.

The works of Yuri An (b.1983) feature poems by female poets of different nationalities—Sadako Kurihara, Wisława Szymborska, Maya Angelou, and Korean poet Goh Jung-Hee from Haenam, Jeollanam-do. The four poems are about the oppression of people by the Nazis and Soviet Union, the American civil rights movement, the Gwangju democratization movement, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, respectively. They also cover the history of war and violence as well as love and courage. Driven by their belief in themselves, the poems’ narrators pick themselves up and press on. Even though they are frustrated by their own existence and the weakness of their language, they never lose hope.

Filmmaker and artist Im Heung-soon (b.1969) newly presents in this exhibition “A Hundred Years Inn,” a work inspired by the novel of the same title by Wando-born writer Lim Chulwoo. A Hundred Years Inn is a novel that features the families of the victims of the Jeju April 3rd Uprising, Gwangju Uprising in 1980, and Bodo League massacre in 1950 as the main characters, who gather together on the fictional island of Yeongdo. Im Heung-soon focuses on the sense of guilt, one of the feelings shared by the novelist who appears in A Hundred Years Inn and the book’s author Lim Chulwoo. Viewing his artwork as an extension of the novel, Im Heung-soon contemplates the subjects of his sense of guilt or responsibility as an artist and invites them to a time of healing with tea.

Maelee Lee (b.1963) is an artist from Gangjin who excavates the strata of history. Her works in this exhibition include excerpts from the Bible and the poems of Ezra Pound and William Blake. Lee writes in gold dust excerpts from Ezra Pound’s poetry collection The Cantos, which contains the story of civilization, just like the Bible. She tells of the people wandering in the wilderness, finding the promised land and losing it, building a city, seeing it destroyed, and the history that is still being carried on by the remaining members of humankind. Also written in gold dust is William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem,” which reveals a strong conviction to make England a “green and pleasant land.”

Lee Ming Wei (b.1964) is a Taiwanese artist whose works center on the keywords ‘communication’ and ‘relationship.’ In this exhibition, he presents his new artwork The Tourist, which he created after traveling to Gurye with Jeong Ji-a, a Gurye native and author of My Father’s Liberation Notes and The Partisan's Daughter. Presented alongside The Tourist is The Letter Writing Project, which is based on the experience of personal loss. Through this work, Lee invites the audience to a space of empathy and contemplation. By entering a small space alone and writing a letter to someone who is absent in their life, the viewer becomes a writer who writes something that does not exist anywhere else in the world and experiences a moment of healing and meditation.

Art is silent poetry, and poetry is a picture that cannot be seen. These two types of art reveal a number of moral beliefs. Even in the midst of pain, frustration, and guilt, the beliefs of the four contemporary artists contain hope and sympathy for humans and life. Like poetry that renews and expands the meaning of language and like a poet who perceives the world from his own unique perspective, each artist sees the world in their own way with passion and intensity and speaks in a voice that has never been heard before. Longing for reconciliation and holding on to hope despite absence, destruction, death, and pain, they invite us into their own poetic paradise; a utopia where you can enjoy happiness free from worry.

Yuri An, Im Heung-soon, Maelee Lee, Lee Ming Wei