Art Marathon

I went to meet the very accommodating and thoughtful Soo-Jung Kang, who is a senior curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum is located in Seoul Grand Park, along with a zoo and a little theme park, and there were throngs of adorable children doing really adorable things such as hurtling toward a giant tiger sculpture outside of the zoo,



and romping around this Calder stabile,



and shopping for plastic snakes and dinosaurs along the way.







Inside the museum is a giant Nam June Paik sculpture.



After a tour around the museum, Soo-Jung and I drove to Goyang, a suburb just outside of Seoul (although we were driving for over an hour) to visit a gallery with a feminist exhibition, and see the open studios of the museum's residency program, which featured a jazz trio and included a flurry of bows and a hemorrhage of business cards. Next we drove back into Seoul to meet her amiable and manicured friend Jieun Lee at a hilariously surreal cello & piano performance/video art piece/exquisite corpse power point presentation. Or something like that. Throughout it I was wavering between sleep and delirious laughter, but fortunately gave in to neither.



Jieun is a lawyer, and kindly invited me to a presentation she was giving the next morning to inform immigrant workers protesting at the G20 summit of their rights. (I really wanted to go, but gave in to jet-lagged sleep festival instead.) Here are Soo-Jung and Jieun.



To top off the evening, the three of us went with the curator from the feminist exhibit and some Aussie gallerists to get some dinner nearby. It was the only meal I've had so far in Korea that wasn't thrilled with, but I have to give myself credit for mustering the courage to try sea worms. Finally, back to Alps Seoul Guest House---I was so tired the helpful Aussies had to point me in the right direction.