Art shows this week

Before walking into the Kukje Gallery, look up: on the roof of the building is "Walking Woman on the Roof," a self-described installation piece by American artist Jonathan Borofsky. The gallery opened in 1982 and has a total of three exhibition halls, which in turn are each divided into smaller exhibition spaces with separators. Kukje Gallery came onto the arts radar in 2003, when video artist Bill Viola and Anish Kapoor each held solo shows here. The museum's core exhibitions highlight internationally acclaimed artists with contemporary art backgrounds.

In commemoration of 130 years of diplomatic relations between France and Korea, the MMCA is hosting a solo exhibition of French contemporary artist Gilles Barbier, originally from the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.  Recently having shown at La Friche in Marseille, the exhibition, “Echo system: Gilles Barbier,” brings a variety of drawings, sculptures and  paintings never before seen in Seoul—introducing the prolific artist’s unique insights, processes and sense of humor. Colorful, witty and  perverse, Barbier’s works often challenge social conventions. The day before the exhibition’s opening, Time Out Seoul sat down with Gilles Barbier and his curator, Gaël Charbau, to talk about the exhibition and try to get inside Barbier’s mind (before we let him into ours).

After seeing the works in person, my perspective on your works have changed. The figures are a lot smaller in person—how on earth did you get clothes this small? On the “Still Life (Pieta)” (2007) is an altered jack we found, but everything on the sculpture is made. You can’t just get a dress off the rack, and it would take years to look around for clothes this tiny, with the right kind of color and fabric.    And who is this “we” that you speak of? My mother. She’s a dress maker, and the only person that I have ever met that is as fastidious and as particular as I am. So for “Woman and Child” (2010), I gave her my design, the fabric, and a foam body that she could put the pins into. Usually, a version is made to be tested on the mock-up, because these are all hard bodies that we can’t manipulate to fit clothing onto, as the sculptures are oddly positioned. But my mother is an expert. She’s the best.   Before you “became” an artist, you were a commercial sculptor in the film industry. How and when did the transition come about?   I started out as an illustrator when I was quite young, but went into advertising and making models for TV ads. The transition into film came naturally. The film industry was great fun, but there was always someone else who molded and painted the form that I made. It wasn’t artistically satisfying, so I kept making my own artwork, and showed them when given the opportunity.   I saw a clip where you were inserting the hair strands into the silicon,...