“The muses for most big-name Western artists are women, but for it’s more about the pieces that have inspired him—traditional furniture and folk objects.” —Kim Young-jin(CEO of Artinside)
Stone sculptures that resemble two chickens facing each other, a traditional ladder in the shape of a miniature totem pole and agricultural tools set upon a pedestal on its vertical axis are three of the many unusual objects you might find among Kim Chong-hak’s collection, which blends surprisingly well with the domestic interiors of the former Belgium Consulate. So why did Kim avidly collect folk objects? (I mean, seriously, a mysterious monster of a “sculpture” that is in fact, a wooden noodle press machine?) Because he believed that the act of collecting sharpened his eye to “tell the good apart from the bad” in his own compositions and drawings.