8th Dure

DURE is a group of Korean art and design students at Nottingham Trent University. Dure is the Korean farming tradition of communal labour and the experience of working and living with one another. In 8th DURE, the group’s latest exhibition, nine artists express their ideas about Korean culture.

The body of work conjures a modern Korea that portrays both ancient traditions shared by the once united states of Korea, and the development of an individual South Korean culture that diverges from the North’s state controlled culture industry. Yong Jin Kim’s textile piece ‘Trace of Ladies’ is a traditional Korean outfit known as a hanbok. Its long skirt (chima) and wide sleeved, collared jacket (jeogori) have design characteristics that can be traced back to the 3rd century BCE, but the cropped length of the jacket embodies a more modern cut adopted with Western influence in the 17th to 19th centuries. The garment is not just an example of, but represents in general how Korean culture has developed with influences from the West.

Kang Nak Lee’s piece ‘Samul Nori’ provides an insight into dure and its associated traditions. A short film depicts much of the communal aspect of pungmul, a Korean folk music performance based in shamanistic ritual. The music, involving drumming, gongs and dancing, has its roots in dure and was performed on rural holidays and as part of farm work. The piece also features paintings of pungmul performers as friends and teammates, referring to the experience of enjoying work together from the dance’s origin in dure. Korean dance dates back to the Josean dynasty (1392 – 1897), and the paintings are a reminder of the endurance of Korean culture.

The collection provides an insight into many other aspects of Korean culture, from the language to cuisine and architecture. The pieces guide the viewer through different features of Korean life and the exhibition is a learning experience as well as a creative one.

Also featured in the gallery is ‘Gomushin’, a group project and competition in which students and staff were invited to decorate pairs of traditional Korean rubber shoes to later be exhibited. I particularly liked the idea of involving participants in the artworks and exploring how they chose to express their ideas about Korean culture visually.

A real pleasure of the exhibition was that there remained a sense of mystery, created particularly by the more abstract work such as Jung Yoon Lee’s untitled piece, a cube lit from within and decorated with geometric shapes. Although the earthy colours and raw materials tied in with the rustic tone of the exhibition as a whole, this piece presented a much crisper contemporary departure from the culture I was just getting a feel for. It certainly gave me more curiosity about the design and technology based aspects of Korea’s modern culture.

The only disappointment of the exhibition was with the 1851 gallery space itself. It was a shame that a room with the potential to be an intimate gallery was also being used as a student workspace, which did somewhat interrupt my viewing of the pieces both physically (tables and chairs having been placed in front of the work), and in the sense that I felt like an intruder in a library at times.

Although some of the work is a little rough and ready in style, such as the sloping calligraphy inks that teach us the Korean alphabet, for me this added to the charm and modesty of the work and emphasised the sheer visual beauty of some of the more elaborate and decorative pieces: the hanbok and the colourful wall hanging by Jung Hoon Kim.

I felt the artists’ genuine desire to give an impression of the culture they knew, the Korea that has become somewhat submerged in politically based stereotypes. Last year I read Barbara Demick’s award winning ‘Nothing To Envy’, which deals with the crisis that Korea has faced over the last century. I would highly recommend the 8th DURE exhibition to anyone seeking to discover the beauty that lies beneath the turmoil. The exhibition provides a great starting point for an introduction into Korean culture, and as the group have put on many exhibitions, I am hopeful there will be more to come.