Megacities Asia
April 3 – July 17, 2016
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston
Spark Art Management
PR managed for Artist Han Seok Hyun by Young Jeon
Spark Art Management is delighted to announce that Seoul-based artist Han Seok Hyun is participating in the upcoming exhibition organized by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from April 3 to July 17, 2016. Titled Megacities Asia, this exhibition presents monumental sculptures and installations by artists from Asian “megacities,” representing the unique urban realities of Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai, New Delhi and Seoul. Alongside works by notable 11 artists including Ai Weiwei and Subodh Gupta, Han will be presenting a colossal installation, Super-Natural.
Super-Natural is an undulating landscape of green-colored recyclable consumer packaging. Through this installation, Han asks how today's growing environmental consciousness can be reconciled with the ever advancing urban development in large cities around the globe. Also being addressed is consumers’ gullible and impressionable nature, as a nod to today’s supermarkets in which ‘fresh’ products are sold wrapped in green hues, making unhealthy products seem more acceptable. True to the artist’s obsession to create installations that engage and dissolve into their respective locales, Han collected green-colored recyclables through donations from Boston and Seoul residents with which to build Super-Natural. The Boston crowdsourcing was run by the MFA between February 15 and 26, 2016.
For the past decade, Han’s practice has combined elements of installation, horticulture, and environmental activism. Apart from Super-Natural, the Reverse-Rebirth project is another important series of installations among his oeuvre that expands themes around the contemporary perception of “nature vs. natural.” Among the artist’s recent exhibitions that featured his concerns over embracing nature even in urban environments as well as providing a critical view at our current “unnatural” state were Fluorescent Green (Space O’newwall E’juheon, Seoul, Korea, 2015), Instant Scape (Space of Art, etc., Seoul, Korea, 2012), Reverse-Rebirth (Korean Cultural Service NY, New York, USA) and Simply Fresh! (Walsh Gallery, Chicago, 2010).
Han Seok Hyun was born in South Korea in 1975. He kickstarted his career in 2011 winning the Grand Prize in the 11th New-Frontier Award, organized by the prominent Korean art magazine Misulsegye. Since then, Han has been exhibiting widely both locally and internationally, including institutional exhibitions at Buk Seoul Museum of art, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, and Total Museum of Art in Korea. Most recently, Han was announced to be the sole recipient of Arts Council Korea’s one-year grant to participate in the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien residency, Berlin, in 2016.
