[HanCinema's Digest] Photography and Art

'Snarkitecture' plays on the borderlands between art and architecture with a complex 400 meter marble track in Seoul, Lonely Planet catches up with a French photographer who fell in love with Jeju's 'mermaids', Tomás Saraceno's first exhibition in Korea is inspired by the beautiful complexity of spiderwebs, and Crystal Tai explores South Korea's street style revolution.

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"Seoul on a roll: art installation takes marble run to the next level"

'Snarkitecture' is a collaborative project between co-founders Alex Mustonen and Daniel Arsham that explores the borderlands between art and architecture. The two recently constructed "Loop", a complex 400-meter track with 100,000 white marbles running along it at different intervals. "On the one hand here you have that that looseness and chaos and unpredictability of marbles", said Mustonen in this interview on The Guardian, "but on the other, there's the architectural precision of the armature which puts the marbles on a set path".

...READ ON THE GUARDIAN

"The extraordinary lives of South Korea's Mermaids of Jeju captured in evocative photo essay"

The Haenyeo (the 'mermaids of Jeju') have been caught by a number of photographers in recent years. In this post on Lonely Planet, you'll hear how one French photographer, José Jeuland, who was immediately drawn to the Haeinyeo after he first heard of their existence, framed these incredible women for himself. "The more information I gathered about the Haenyeo, the more I fell in love with the heritage of Jeju", said José. "The story of these women is very interesting - their culture, their life, their character, their age, their skills ... I was fascinated by [the] resilience of the Haenyeo in the face of adversity".

...READ ON LONELY PLANET

"A spider-obsessed artist is collaborating with MIT to spin the architecture for climate change"

Tomás Saraceno's web-inspired works will be on display at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju until March 25: his first solo exhibition in Korea. "These complex spider webs help us understand that we are part of this cosmic web", said Tomás, who has spent over a decade studying spider architecture in his studio near Berlin. His work has even been admired by 'arachnologists' for "expanding the horizons of scientific research". Catch it if you can!

...READ ON QUARTZ

"Exploring South Korea's street style revolution: 90s K-pop nostalgia and the new K-punk aesthetic"

Reflecting on Seoul Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2018, Crystal Tai notes that the styles and direction of this year's artists indicate "the emergence of a new era of style - and perhaps even social attitudes", specifically as a reaction to the recent social and political unrest. According to Crystal, the young designers "seem to have developed a devil-may-care attitude towards sartorial and self expression", leading to what she calls "K-punk". Apparently, the nineties have made somewhat of a comeback: "[...] from brightly coloured plaid button-ups to oversized sunglasses with tinted lenses in hues of faded blue and burnt sienna".

...READ ON SCMP