In order to facilitate the meeting of art and society, and to re-affirm the social role of art in December 2006 Art Sonje Center presents, Somewhere in Time. This is where art participates in reality, and where the social models and the consciousness of our time that art exposes are communicated or shared with the audience. Through this exhibition without halting discussion of history and society we wish to re-activate the role of art while from various artists’ vantage points we try to propose possible future scenarios. Further, we hope that the people who came to see this exhibition will help those who have seen it to look at the work of modern art in a more active manner.

From times of old, the social purpose of art is an issue that is subject to dispute. This exhibition focuses on the sense of relationship that society and art have begun to knit, it is actually as though we are trying to travel through time by time machine and look at the periods of the past while mixing in the voices of artists who pre-view the future. Beginning with the Minjoong artists that arose under authoritarian rule in Korea in the 1980s, labour, modernization, urban over-population, social memory and experience became significant topics, after the 1990s and 2000s artworks sought harmony with space.

This exhibition is like a guidebook for a journey that compresses visual space and along with the memory of the past and somewhere of the present that explores social circumstance. Somewhere in Time makes the communal memory and historical experience of visual space a stage that probes reality with questioning, suspicion and conviction.

The title, Somewhere in Time is taken from the 1980 Jeannot Szwarc film that was released under the title, Love’s Heaven’s River in Korea. In this film as though forgetting reality, the protagonist travels through time to visit the love of his past. In the Somewhere in Time exhibition, by acknowledging art’s past and present we might be able to look upon the future that is incubated in the past and thereby search for the social possibility of art. That is to say, by turning back time and sharing the exhibition becomes a journey where we find new points.

With the works of 1980s minjoong artists at its nucleus this exhibition features the work of young artists from at home and abroad. There are 19 artists in total. The work of Min Joung-Ki and Joo Jae-hwan reflect the consciousness of the 1980s, and through a unique visual language of social exchange the work of Sora Kim, Kim Beom, Gimhongsok, Bae Young-whan the problems that emerged from globalisation and supranationalisation that became the social environment are metaphorically expressed along with the works of Kim Young Eun and Nam Hwayeon.

Declaration of North-South Unity (Ko Sankeum), Gwangju Uprising (Hein-kuhn Oh), Google Earth (Lee Eunu) the artists of Somewhere in Time ‘relate’ with the uneven distribution of various contemporary social issues across visual space. In this way the exhibition is a space where the historical experience of the individual and social problems intersect exposing numerous points simultaneously while starting to cry for an arrival at a new state of understanding of your and my or perhaps, our ‘somewhere.’