Artist Shi Guowei (b. 1977, Henan) is one to watch. Keen to draw a parallel between events described in Western Old Master paitning and the current concerns of contemporary China , he works with photography and colours black and white photographs by hand. One of his striking images is this one, “The Wedding Invitation” which takes references from Van Eyck’s “The Arnolfini Marriage” where he has changed articles to suit a very different time and society. For example, stiletto shoes have replaced the fifteenth century clogs and the demure wife has become a hardheaded red guard. Shi’s works were recently on display at the Albemarle Gallery, January, 2012.

Abc took place in a former postal railway station where it started four years ago. Featuring 130 artists from 125 international galleries, this year’s fair focused on painting. The fair has grown and does attract some international artists, but it retains a very Berlin flavour.

Berliner Liste Fair showed more photography as well as contemporary art and predominantly local artists. Situated in a former power station it’s an atmospheric location. New galleries were showing works from central and eastern European countries.

Over the past decade, Korea has reinvented itself and it’s become an Asian miracle again. Korea has become an innovator, an economy that designs and develops products, brands and markets them worldwide. Samsung and LG, not the Japanese electronics giants, are dominating the hot new LCD TV business today.

These Western values of consumerism have been fast appropriated by successive generations in Korea with great enthusiasm and they have fundamentally changed the nature of contemporary Korean life and society. Artist Kim Hyuenjun (born 1978) draws on random objects which he reconstructs in heavy-duty cardboard, using consumer packaging to convey the idea of waste in the world. Packaging is the key to the enduring success of consumerism. In one of his most ambitious pieces, the artist constructed an armchair out of the material. He named the piece “Fragile”, (2009) in a playful reference to the oft used instruction.

Je Baak (born 1969) whose most famous video piece of the football match without the football, “Gong 1” (2009), in which a football match is filmed, but the object of the chase, the ball itself, is absent, referring to the Korean word, Gong, for football, which at once means ball and also emptiness. In his latest work the artist shows us a fairground, referring to the Buddhist wheel of life, with the carousel of life going round and round as if to demonstrate the pointlessness of life. The artist draws our attention to the void at the centre of the twilight capitalist society. What is the point of consumerism? Is it really fulfilling? These seem to be the questions these artists are posing.

Gwon Osang (born 1974) draws extensively on our material culture and suggests that the pristine, short-lived life of consumerism has literally invaded our physical self in the form of cosmetic surgery. His huge sculptures made out of styrophone make reference to the plastic surgery favoured by some Koreans in their attempts to westernize themselves.

The fragility of the Korean psyche today is best expressed in the “perceptual mirrors “ of Hong Sungchul (born 1969), the layered, taut, synthetic strings onto which the artist transfers photographs. The clasped hands that he depicts are impermanent. They suffer a fragile existence. Hong’s works are three dimensional and appear, superficially, as fleeting and rapidly changed 3D electronic images, but the truth lies in the significance of the cords of communication.

And finally artist Bae joonsung draws alike on the subtle masterpieces of Jan Vermeer and the derivative, uninspiring works of nineteenth century Academicians like Waterhouse and Alma-Tadema. This artist demonstrates to his audience that in Asia the qualitative distinction between great Western art and technically proficient pictures is much less pronounced. The central motive is consumption; the indiscriminate consumption of famous imagery.

The consumer society is deceptive. It shows us a world in its own image and creates needs where once there were none. The artists in this exhibition look at the imposition of global consumerism on Korea. Today’s Korea has woken up to a critical acknowledgment of the benefits of modernisation, so while artists like Bae Joonsun, Kim Hyuenjun and Gwon Osang point to the uniformity of Korean consumer judgement, Hong Sungchul and Je Baak draw our attention to the void at the very centre of consumerism. In this void, in this silence, we are left to contemplate the empty space. Within this emptiness lies our salvation and perhaps it is this very essence which is at the heart of the real Korean miracle.

Claire