Rockefeller Center plays host to new Korean art exhibition and 21-foot outdoor sculpture

A bird’s eye view of Lee Bae’s 21-foot sculpture, called “Issu du feu,” installed at the Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens as part of a new, special exhibition featuring modern and contemporary Korean art.

Courtesy of Johyun Gallery

A new, special exhibition focusing on modern and contemporary Korean art, including a 21-foot-tall sculpture outside — is now on display at the Rockefeller Center. The exhibition, the first celebration of Korean culture at the Rockefeller Center, is called “Origin, Emergence, Return” and explores three generations of Korean art from the 20th century to the present.

The exhibition, which opened on June 8, is part of the summer-long “Celebrate Korea at Rockefeller Center,” a celebration that will end with a week of festivities spotlighting Korean culture, art, cuisine, and fashion from July 19 to 23 at the Rockefeller Center. The Korean art exhibition and celebration comes on the heels of the Rockefeller’s annual “Mexico Week: Día De Muertos” at Rockefeller Center. 

“Origin, Emergence, Return” features more than 70 works of art and showcases artwork from Korean artists Park Seo-Bo, Lee Bae, and Jin Meyerson. The three artists investigate and challenge the notions of abstraction through unique materials such as traditional Korean paper, called “hanji,” charcoal, computer graphics, and augmented reality. Some of the motifs expressed include life and death, presence and absence, and displacement and diaspora. 

Lee Bae’s 21-foot sculpture, called “Issu du feu,” was installed at the Rockefeller Center’s Channel Gardens and is made of massive, stacked charcoals in the shape of tree trucks. The sculpture represents the “memory of disasters, while also creating a contrast to the surrounding skyscrapers.” The natural properties of the charcoal is meant to convey a “desire to purify what humans cannot solve.”

Johyun Gallery, a leading gallery in Busan, the second-largest city in Korea,…