The wall is coated with art at the fifth Hechyeomoyeo group exhibition, this one held in Bangkok, Thailand. Courtesy of Neil Wheelock Deforest Smith By Jon Dunbar The Hechyeomoyeo, a group exhibition series of artists — Korean and foreign, local and overseas — is returning for the sixth time, this time presenting the works of more than 250 individual artists at KOTE in downtown Seoul's Insa-dong. Visiting an exhibition of The Hechyeomoyeo is like walking into an explosion of art.
The room is coated with wildly diverse art, leaving barely any of the walls visible. It's overwhelming by design, but any visitor is likely to find many art pieces that jump out at them. Neil Wheelock Deforest Smith, the brainchild of this exhibition series, called The Hechyeomoyeo a "reactionary movement" to the current state of and trends in the art gallery market.
Neil Wheelock Deforest Smith, the man behind The Hechyeomoyeo, poses beside a street in Seoul, June 2. Korea Times photo by Jon Dunbar Although much has been said about Korea's rising art market, Smith isn't so optimistic. He likened it to the California gold rush of the mid-1800s, in which a few people struck gold early on, triggering more prospectors to come in search of their fortunes.
As the trend deepened, some people started selling maps to places to look for gold. Soon, there were so many people rushing to find gold, that the only people left making any more money were the map sellers. "There was a boom — now there's maps," .
