Connections/Abstraction

My name is Soyoung Lee. I'm a curator here at the Metropolitan Museum, and I am responsible for the Korean art collection and gallery, and my topic is abstraction.

I have two children. Henry is 8, and Audrey is 6, and like all children they love to draw and you know a lot of abstract artists'

works are characterized as naive or childlike in a very positive sense and I think that's the strength of children.

Because they don't grasp the real world the way that we can, they're actually in many ways better to see the essential qualities.

And there are artists like Klee, who can so delicately and elegantly express a lot with just a few color strokes, with shapes, and yet at the same time retain some sort of realistic sense of the place.

Even though they can seem so stripped bare. For example, the Homage to [the]Square, it's just blue and green squares. Why should that be appealing?

And yet I think geometric patterns, things that are reduced to the essentials, the viewer brings just as much to the meaning of the art as the artist, so you're in many ways participating in the creation of what it means and what the emotional depth of the artwork is.

And of course it also reminds me something that I'm very familiar with, which is patchwork in Korean art. These were not art per se. They were made from discarded pieces of clothing

to make something that was both practical and beautiful. They very much look a lot like Mondrian. And lots of people comment on that, actually make that connection.

When you look at ancient pottery, in different cultures, perhaps the most striking thing is how

they're all very visually and emotionally powerful because they get down to the

very basic forms and lines. It has nothing to do with realistic depictions of anything we might find around us.

We tend to equate, in Western culture, realism with lifelike or naturalistic renderings of the subject matter. But in abstract

art, where there are no realistic depictions, the lines, the geometric forms, and the abstraction makes them incredibly dynamic.

There are many things actually in the Museum that are accidental abstractions. This head of a woman. The face has been eroded and so really all you see is the egg-shaped head, the beautiful tubular neck, and a hint of an eyebrow and a chipped nose. Though this is not the intended result of the creator, of the artist, in fact what we today see is in some ways perhaps more evocative and I think more emotionally resonant.

What I've come to develop or come to realize is that, in fact, abstraction is very much a part of Korean art and it's this classical restraint and minimalism in traditional Korean art

that resonates with modern and contemporary art and audiences. The moon Jar

it in many ways doesn't represent anything; at the same time it's incredibly evocative of the full moon.

But I think there's that sense of ambiguity which is what is so appealing about abstract art to some people and perhaps what's frustrating about abstract art

to others.