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The first Korean solo exhibition by Rick Prol, "Cracked Window," features paintings that will take visitors back to New York of decades past. (Roh Hyung-suk/The Hankyoreh)

Just in time for spring, art exhibitions are blooming in the museums and galleries of Bukchon and Seochon, two neighborhoods at the center of Seoul's art scene.

What's distinctive about this spring's batch of exhibitions is their focus on lesser-known overseas masters of contemporary art.

The first exhibition to catch my eye is the first Korean solo exhibition by Rick Prol, a major figure in New York's art scene in the 1980s. Held at Leeahn Gallery, in Seochon (Changseong-dong), under the title "Cracked Window" through April 24, this exhibition features paintings that will take visitors back to New York of decades past.

Prol spent time in the East Village, in the New York slums, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, hugely influential artists who died at an early age. He took an expressionist approach to depict the urban landscape of the time, with its pervasive poverty and crime.

Prol depicts stumbling figures with heads chopped off and knives jutting out, buildings on fire, and desolate streets in sharp and sharp-tempered lines. The self-destructive humans on Prol's canvases are boxed in broken window frames that he collected on jaunts through the city streets, in an exquisite presentation of the decadent atmosphere in New York of the time.

The exhibition "Injury Time" features nine young artists' latest sculptures. The most notable piece here is "Inflatable," a sculpture of a silver balloon by Kang Jae-won. On the left is Oh Eun's "Last Minute Goal."

Some notable shows in the galleries in Bukchon (Anguk-dong, Samcheong-dong) are the first solo exhibition in Korea by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña at Lehmann Maupin Gallery through April 24, a two-person exhibition by British photographer master Michael Kenna and Korean installation artist Kim Seung-young at Gallery K.O.N.G. through May 23, and a solo exhibition by Michael Dean at Barakat Contemporary through May 30.

Vicuña, who is also featured in this year's Gwangju Biennale, presents her series "Lo Precario" (meaning "the precarious"), in which she suspends strips of cloth, knotted gauze, and small everyday items such as feathers, rocks, sticks, and seashells. Her work inspires ecological introspection about human rights and the environment and about the relationship between human life and nature.

Kenna, who is quite popular in Korea, is represented by recent works focusing on Buddhist statuary in Korea and Japan, which will be paired with an image of the pensive bodhisattva by Kim Seung-young.

Michael Dean is a major British sculptor whose work appeared in a public art project in the German city of Münster in 2017. His arrangements of sculptures that seem to stand upright illustrate the shifting destiny of materials such as concrete that are transformed alongside nature and human lives.

Also notable is the appearance of artistic venues that take a close look at new sculptures that encapsulate the unique worldview and the artistic vision of young artists and the oeuvre of talented artists outside the mainstream. Some good examples are "Injury Time" at Museumhead (Gahoe-dong) through Saturday and "Private Sketches of Their Creative Process" at Artbit (Anguk-dong) through Monday.

The exhibition "Injury Time," which features the latest sculptures of nine young artists, suggests that sculpture—which is underappreciated in contemporary art—is similar to the extra time added to football games to compensate for the stoppage of gameplay when players are injured. The pieces here convey the attitude of young artists who are pondering what the future of sculpture should hold.

The most notable piece here is "Inflatable," a sculpture of a silver balloon by Kang Jae-won. Kang uses a 3D printer to move a 3D figure from a computer program into an actual space, shedding light on how the sculptures will be envisioned and produced in the future.

Oh Eun's human sculptures made of polystyrene foam focus on the works of past masters of figurative sculpture but strip those works of their historicity and treat them as a way to express the artist's current emotions and subjectivity.

In "Private Sketches of Their Creative Process," seven established artists (Kim Ho-seok, Bae Jong-heon, Song Dong-uk, Ryu Bi-ho, Yuk Geun-byeong, Lee Su-jin, and Lee Won-ho) provide a confessional disclosure of the passion and anguish that go into their paintings, videos, and installation art through a number of studies and conceptual diagrams.

By Roh Hyung-suk, Culture Correspondent

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