Jeon Soo-cheon retrospective traces artist's influential career

The Jeonbuk Provincial Museum of Art is hosting a retrospective exhibition titled "Jeon Soo-cheon: Someday the Giant Will Come," honoring the legacy of the late artist Jeon Soo-cheon, eight years after his passing. Jeon Soo-cheon, who died in 2018, was a prominent figure in Korean contemporary art, achieving international acclaim.

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The exhibition title’s ‘Someday the Giant Will Come’ is borrowed from a painting work that Jeon Soo-cheon showed at a solo exhibition in the United States in 1987.

His career highlights include a special award at the 1995 Venice Biennale, where he exhibited an installation of Silla-era pottery fragments amidst industrial waste, marking a significant moment for Korean artists on the global stage. He also gained international attention in 2005 for the "Amtrak Project," an art performance that spanned across the United States on a 15-car train.

The exhibition, part of the Jeonbuk Art History Research Series, traces Jeon's artistic development over three decades. It is organized into four thematic sections: nature, civilization, society (capital), and humanity. Visitors can view key works such as "Toh-u in Wandering Planets - The Spirit of Koreans" (1995), which was shown at the Venice Biennale, video documentation and archives from his "Moving Drawing" project on the American continent (2005), and his "Barcode" series that critiques consumer society.

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The exhibition captures the artist’s attitude toward art that is close to a question and his contemplation of time and existence.

The exhibition title, "Someday the Giant Will Come," is borrowed from one of Jeon's paintings from 1987. The museum explains that the "giant" in the title represents a future human who achieves existential awareness within the systems of capital and civilization, rather than an external savior. The exhibition aims to capture the artist's questioning attitude towards life and his contemplation of time and existence.

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The ‘giant’ in the exhibition title means a future human who achieves existential self-awareness within the system of capital and civilization, not an external savior.