les presses du réel
Wang Du -
Foreword
The Rodin Gallery has benn the site of an outstanding series of exhibitions featuring a wide spectrum of contemporary artists and including works such as The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calis by modern sculpture's seminal artist and master, Auguste Rodin. Thus it gives us great pleasure to develop for the first time a collaborative work with Le consortium, a leading contemporary art center in France on the occasion of the presentation of Wang Du's Disposable Reality.

Wang Du, who was trained as sculptor in China within an academic tradition, works with images taken as readymade from newspapers, magazines and advertisements and transforms these two dimensional media images into three dimensional painted sculptural works with his own masterly skill. Through the information conveyed by articles on politics, economics, society, sports, leisure and fashion the artist expresses his feeling, often in a pointed, satirical manner, about the ordinary and our social reality.

In this exhibition I believe there is special meaning in seeing the direct confrontation and dialogue between the works of Rodin, which deal with human emotions and those of Wang Du, which deal with contemporary issues in our daily life with sculptures as a common denominator. The vocabularies of contemporary art have expanded so much that somtimes we have a tendency to consider painting and sculpture to be outmoded media fot artistic expression. However, it is high time to demonstrate that it is not the medium which matters, but how it is used.

Ra Hee Hong Lee
Director, Samsung Museum of Modern Art
This catalogue is published in conjonction with the exhibition Wang Du: Disposable Reality.
Co-produiced with the Rodin Gallery, Seoul.
 
published in 2001
bilingual edition (English / Korean)
21 x 25 cm
72 pages
 
sold out


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