GWACHEON.- The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is presenting the MMCA Commissioned Project FOR YOU: Jenny Holzer from November 23, 2019, to July 5, 2020, at MMCA Seoul and Gwacheon.

Jenny Holzer employs written language as her primary medium to address collective concerns and private anxieties. Since 2017, the museum has been collaborating with the artist to present three works at MMCA Seoul (Seoul Box/lobby) and MMCA Gwacheon (outdoor space) for the project, which opened on November 23.

In the late 1970s, Holzer began anonymously putting up posters around the streets of New York City. This series, Truisms, consists of brief alphabetized statements on diverse subjects that distill contradictory perspectives and contentious ideas into seemingly straightforward statements of fact. For the past 40 years, her work has continued to draw attention to societal problems and political injustices, with text emblazoning everything from T-shirts, hats, and plaques, to stonework, electronic signs, architecture, and landscapes.

In 1990, Holzer was the first woman to represent the United States with a solo show at the 44th Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Leone d’Oro for best pavilion. Since then, her works have continued to be shown in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

FOR YOU: Jenny Holzer presents works in the artist’s best-known mediums – posters, LED signs, and stoneworks – installed in various indoor and outdoor spaces at MMCA. The Truisms (1977–79) and Inflammatory Essays (1977–82) posters, among Holzer’s earliest works, explore language as a medium. Comprising more than a thousand posters, this installation includes twelve statements selected from the series of twenty-five Inflammatory Essays, each poster a distinct color, and 240 single-sentence declarations from Truisms. With the guidance of professional translators and typography designers including Han Yujoo (novelist and translator) and Ahn Sang-soo (director, Paju Typography Institute), Holzer’s Truisms posters have been translated into the Korean language for the first time.

In addition to the posters, eleven Truisms selected by the artist have been permanently engraved on the stone bridge at MMCA Gwacheon, inviting visitors to pause and contemplate their meaning while taking in the natural landscape.

A new monumental LED artwork, titled FOR YOU, is on view at Seoul Box in MMCA Seoul. Programmed with animated text in both Korean and English on all four sides of the 6m-long rectangular beam, this work foregrounds the voices of women, featuring the writings of five contemporary authors: Kim Hyesoon, Han Kang, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Svetlana Alexievich, and Hawzhin Azeez. The LED is hung from the gallery’s 16m-high ceiling, and a custom robotic system moves it up and down at varying speeds. Taken together, the narratives presented in FOR YOU trace the thoughts of those who have experienced or witnessed calamitous events, transforming the museum into a space of empathy, confrontation, communication, and recovery.

For this exhibition, the Patrons of MMCA is donating two works – FOR YOU and the carving Selections from Truisms – to the museum. the Patrons of MMCA, a group of executives who first gathered in 2011 to sponsor the museum’s acquisition of new-media art, has previously donated News from Nowhere by Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho (2012), Liquidity Inc. by Hito Steyerl (2014), and Horizontal-Vaakasuora by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2018).

As part of the exhibition programming, two documentaries by filmmaker Claudia Müller will be screened at MMCA Seoul’s theater, MMCA Film and Video. The films, About Jenny Holzer (2011) and Women Artists: Jenny Holzer (2017), trace the artist’s career and illuminate her views on the other female artists whose work has been formative to her own. In addition to the film screenings, several talks with curators, art critics, and literary critics will be held throughout the exhibition period. (More information is available at the MMCA website: www.mmca.go.kr.)

MMCA Director Youn Bummo notes that FOR YOU: Jenny Holzer represents the artist’s first engagement with the Korean language presented in an institutional setting. He hopes that Holzer’s newly commissioned works for the museum will give visitors, both Korean and foreign, a new insight into contemporary art and draw attention to the international art world.