On the occasion of the Korean Modern Art: Daegu Scenery exhibition, the Korean Cultural Centre and the Daegu Art Museum are pleased to invite you to join the virtual Korea-Canada Modern Art Symposium on Monday, November 29, at 7:30 pm (Eastern Time).

The Symposium introduces the characteristics of modern art in Korea and Canada (including Indigenous Canada). It also investigates similarities and differences in the historical development and the practices of modern art between our countries in the turbulent time of the 20th century. 

The purpose of the Symposium is to connect experts who are working on research and presentation of modern art while furthering cultural understandings between Korea and Canada to a more sophisticated level.   

Details of the Symposium are as follows.

The Korea-Canada Modern Art Symposium

Monday, November 29, at 7:30pm (Eastern Time) / KCC ZOOM 

Registration:  https://forms.gle/pWSgyuULKHPPmXKR6

Presentation: 

1. Korean modern art: Eunju Choi (Director/ Daegu Art Museum)  

2. Canadian modern art: Catherine Sinclair (Deputy Director and Chief Curator/ Ottawa Art Gallery)

3. Canadian Indigenous modern art: Greg Hill (Audain Senior Curator, Indigenous Art/ National  Gallery of Canada) 

Discussions/ Questions:   

1. Hong Kal (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Art and Art History/ York University) )

2. Jinny Yu (Professor, Department of Visual Art/ University of Ottawa) 

Moderation: 

Kimberly Chung (Assistant Professor, Korea Foundation Professorship in Korean Studies/ McGill University)

About the Participants: 

Eunju Choi 

CHOI Eunju is Director of Daegu Art Museum. She received her BA in Painting from Seoul National University, Korea, MA in Art Theory and Ph. D. in Fine Arts Education at the same university. From 1994 CHOI has worked as Art Research Officer at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA). From 2002 to 2015, she served as a Chief Curator at MMCA and a Director of MMCA Deoksugung. And from 2015 to 2019, she was the Director of Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea. She has curated numerous exhibitions of Korean Modern and Contemporary art and International Exchanges with countries worldwide. After assuming office as the Director of Daegu Art Museum in 2019, she focused on research and illumination of Korean Modern Art.

Catherine Sinclair 

Catherine Sinclair is Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Ottawa Art Gallery and oversees three departments: Learning and Engagement, Collections and Curatorial. At the OAG since 2006, she has curated over forty exhibitions, including many from the 20th century Firestone Collection of Canadian Art, and most recently Russell Yuristy: The Inside of Elephants and All Kinds of Things (2020) and Àdisòkàmàgan/Nous connaître un peu nous-mêmes/We’ll all become stories (co-curated, 2018), as well as Alma: The Life and Art of Alma Duncan (1917-2004) (2014-16). She has presented at the University Art Association Conference and the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Conference, and published in The Journal of Curatorial Studies (2018, co-author) and esse arts + opinions (2019). She was a recipient of the AAMC Foundation Engagement Program for International Curators (2017-2019).

Greg Hill 

Greg Hill is the National Gallery of Canada’s inaugural Audain Chair and Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, an artist himself, and a Kanyen’kehaka member of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Hill has been dedicated to expanding the collection, display and recognition of Indigenous art, and has curated several important retrospective exhibitions on senior Indigenous artists in Canada, including Norval Morrisseau: Shaman Artist (2006) — the first-ever solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada for a First Nations artist — along with Carl Beam: The Poetics of Being (2010), and a retrospective on Alex Janvier (2016). He is also co-curator of an upcoming retrospective on Shelley Niro (2023).

In addition, Hill was co-curator for the Gallery’s ongoing series of international Indigenous art exhibitions, Sakahàn (2013), Àbadakone / Continuous Fire / Feu continuel (2019–20), and for the upcoming Àbadakone (2025). Through these activities, he has greatly expanded the representation of Indigenous artists within the Gallery’s collection and has led the establishment of a world-leading collection of contemporary art, made by some of the most significant Indigenous artists of our time.

Hong KAL  

Hong Kal is Associate Professor in the department of Visual Art and Art History at York University. She has written about expositions and museums in relation to the formation of Korean nationalism. Her current research focuses on visual representations of historical and social injustice, trauma art, and socially engaged art in Korea. She is the author of Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Routledge, 2011), and published articles in journals of Comparative Studies in Society and History, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Studies Review, Korean Studies, and The Asia Pacific Journal.

Jinny Yu

Jinny Yu is Professor of Fine Art Department at the University of Ottawa. Jinny Yu's practice is an inquiry into the medium of painting as a means of trying to understand the world around us. Her work presented at the 56th Venice Biennale addresses themes about migration, which resonate with larger political concerns globally. Yu works simultaneously to scrutinize conventions and to explore new possibilities within the medium of painting, oscillating between the fields of the abstract painting and the object. Her work has been shown widely, including exhibitions in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, UK and USA.

Kimberly Chung

Kimberly Chung is a specialist in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Proletarian Sensibilities: Mass Culture of 1920s and 1930s Colonial Korea that explores mass culturecolonial subjectivity, representations of the laboring body, the supernatural and the folkthrough the visual and narrative representations of the lower classes.  She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture and art in scholarly journals like Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana, and has been a special guest editor for an issue on Korean literature and film for Acta Koreana (Vol. 17 no.1). She is also a coeditor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation and Interaction.