A total of 18 artists from Mongolia and South Korea are showing their work together this month in an exhibition that asks what it means to remember, and to be seen. The Memory of Seeing opened at Mongol Art Gallery and ran through August 5, bringing together 14 members of Mongolia’s “New Morning” Collective with four artists from Daejeon. The show is the product of a cross-cultural exchange between the two groups, and it reads less like a themed group show than a conversation carried out in paint, ink, wood and pencil.
The range on display is wide. In one room, a heavy oil painting of a docked fishing vessel dominates a wall, its hull rendered in deep indigo and rust red against a hazy, sunset-orange sky. Beside it hangs a smaller, softer landscape of teal mountains rolling behind a lone farmhouse, the kind of quiet countryside scene that would not look out of place on the Mongolian steppe. The two paintings, hung close together, set the tone for the exhibition’s recurring interest in place and departure.
Sculpture plays an equally prominent role. A pale wooden horse, carved with sharp, almost architectural cuts into its mane and flank, stands mid-stride on a marble plinth, its head lowered and one hoof raised as though caught in a single frozen breath of movement. Nearby, a more surreal piece pairs the smooth white curve of an animal skull with pastel pink limbs and a saddle of small mirrored spheres, an unsettling and playful hybrid of bone, toy and ornament that draws viewers in for a closer look before they quite know what they are looking at.
Works on paper offer some of the show’s most intimate moments. One large ink drawing is filled edge to edge with hundreds of small figures in motion, dancing, reaching, tumbling over one another in loose, energetic linework, a crowd rendered with such density that no single figure holds the eye for long before another pulls it away. Elsewhere, a long horizontal scroll painted in the splattered, gestural style of traditional Chinese ink work depicts a riverside village half swallowed by dark foliage, its rooftops picked out in small dashes of red, yellow and blue against a wash of black spray and grey stone.
A large cubist-inflected cityscape, its hillside rooftops and chimneys fractured into planes of ochre, teal and rust, anchors the space where organizers and artists gathered for the opening. The painting’s fragmented geometry, familiar rooftops broken into shards of color and light, quietly echoes the exhibition’s larger idea: that memory itself arrives not as a single clear image but as pieces, reassembled differently by each person who sees them.
Organizers say the exhibition is meant to explore memory, time and inner emotion as shared human territory, one that Mongolian and Korean artists can approach from different traditions and still meet in the middle. Judging by opening night, in which artists and visitors lingered long in front of individual works, deep in quiet conversation, that meeting point is exactly what The Memory of Seeing has found.
