In Dialog is Sorol Art Museum’s project exhibition planned to illuminate the art historical context of Korean art and global art.

The first project, In Dialog: Quac Insik, introduces the works of the renowned Korean artist Quac Insik (1919-1988). With this exhibition, an intriguing aesthetic dialog is anticipated to take place between Lucio Fontana and Quac Insik, who shared the era but had different regional, cultural, and historical backgrounds.

Born in Korea in 1919, Quac moved to Japan in the 1930s to study art, experiencing various trends in Western contemporary art. In the mid-1950s, he actively explored major movements in Western art, such as Surrealism, Art Informel, and Fontana’s Spatialism, while simultaneously conducting diverse experiments to find his unique artistic language. In the early 1960s, focusing on the Matterism, Quac distorted the surface of his works and created art using everyday materials such as stones, glass, and steel.

While there was no direct exchange between Fontana and Quac, some of Quac’s works reflect Spatialist influences and aesthetic parallels seen in Fontana’s Spatialism. If Fontana slashed the canvas to introduce a four-dimensional spacetime into his art, Quac Insik, who was engrossed in exploring materiality, opted to shatter glass plates with iron balls or tear and reassemble metal plates. The similarities in their performative and methodological approaches offer ample grounds for comparison. Nevertheless, the artistic paths of these two diverge, heading in different directions regarding the themes of tradition and materiality. Fontana surpassed the physically confined limits of art, expanding his art through space, light, and the experience itself. In contrast, Quac Insik, as expressed in his statement “listening to the words of objects,” engaged in performative acts on the materials themselves, delving deeply into the essence of materials with his distinct and personal sensibility.