2023 Title Match Dongi Lee vs. Sangwoo Kang

The 2023 Title Match presents Dongi Lee and Sangwoo Kang, artists who reconstruct the spectacle that surrounds us by appropriating  mass media images in ways that “appropriate what is appropriated” or reveal the “trivial and fragile backside.” As the museum is currently focusing on examining the medium of painting, following last year’s examination of sculpture, there is a need to redefine Korean Pop Art. Korean pop artists have been exploring form, the unconscious, and social phenomena in the mass media with serious experimentation and a witty attitude, freely incorporating references to art history between the dominant currents of Realism and Abstraction in the Korean art scene. The exhibition also looks back at the works of Dongi Lee, who has been experimenting with mass media images as one of the topical issues in contemporary art since his early career, and Sangwoo Kang, who represents the opposite side of that experimentation. As such, it attempts to expand and break through the boundaries with the artists’ new works.