Last month a group of US museums shipped over 168 American artworks—from Native American art to Jackson Pollack—to the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, which will reciprocate by sending the museums some Korean art from the Chosun period next year. It’s a cultural exchange that will help both countries further understand each other’s artistic heritage, from the European influence on American art to how Korean art shifted from Confucianism ideals to more realistic representation.Skip forward 100 odd years from the end of the Chosun period and you have a new crop of Korean artists who are making their mark in the world and living and working in America. One of these is New York-based Jin-Yo Mok who uses technology to engage his audience in a more direct and immediate way, so they’re free of the need to know an art history degree’s worth of info about the artist to appreciate the work. “For me the most important moment is when someone walks into somewhere like a gallery and meets an art piece. There and then, at that very moment, the value of the piece is determined, and the message is delivered,” he says in the video above.Noble MonoHis works have included sound installations like Sonic Column, an LED column that lights up and plays music as you touch it, and E-MAN, an online entity that became an offline interactive sculpture. He’s also made large scale works—like Noble Mono (above) a layered 10,000 LED facade for a Seoul department store—that reflects his approach of engaging audiences through playful, simple ways, using technology as a facilitator. “The design aspects of artworks sometimes start from technology.” he explains. “And from new technologies new ideas blossom. From that, sometimes a new form appears also. The search for beauty within that then becomes art.”Last year he made headlines with Hyper-Matrix, created by his new media art group Jonpasang. This “kinetic landscape” was made for the Hyundai Motor Group Exhibition Pavilion and used a huge grid of computerized pistons to animate a wall of Styrofoam blocks. It was a feat of precise engineering and jaw-dropping spectacle as the cubes shift into various patterns in a fluid, hypnotizing motion (just listen to the gasps of the crowds in the vids below).“I want technology to become more simplified so we can understand better,” he says. “And I want to make more obvious art that doesn’t hold any secrets.”Hyper-Matrix@stewart23rd
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