Museum SAN in Wonju is hosting Burn to Shine, the largest Korean solo exhibition of Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone. Running from April 6 to December 1, 2024, the exhibition transforms the museum’s galleries, the Nam June Paik Gallery, and the outdoor Stone Garden into an immersive exploration of time, transformation, and the profound relationship between nature and humanity. Featuring over 40 works encompassing sculpture, painting, installation, and video, the exhibition reflects Rondinone’s decades-long artistic inquiry into the cycles of existence.

The title, Burn to Shine, draws inspiration from John Giorno’s poem You Got to Burn to Shine and Buddhist teachings about the coexistence of life and death. Rondinone connects these ideas to the myth of the phoenix, a symbol of cyclical rebirth and renewal, emphasizing transformation through destruction and renewal. The exhibition embodies this theme as it journeys through vivid contrasts: fire and water, light and shadow, stillness and movement. Each piece offers viewers a moment to reflect on their place in the natural cycles of life.

At the heart of the exhibition is Rondinone’s Mattituck series, inspired by the sunsets and moonrises of Long Island, where the artist resides. These watercolors, rendered in complementary hues of orange and blue, function as both personal diaries and universal meditations on time. Each painting is dated, grounding abstract, emotional expressions in specific moments of creation, offering a silent but poignant memento mori. They serve as records of fleeting beauty, bridging the artist’s intimate connection to nature with viewers’ contemplations.

Complementing these works are Rondinone’s blue glass horse sculptures, named after oceans around the world. Slightly smaller than life-size, each sculpture features a horizontal line cutting through the form, evoking a horizon that merges land, sea, and sky. These pieces, created through the fusion of glass with air, water, and fire, symbolize the four elements, distilled into forms that transcend their materiality. Their shimmering, translucent surfaces seem to hold time itself, encapsulating the artist’s reflections on space and the natural world.

The exhibition also features Your Age and My Age and the Age of the Sun and Your Age and My Age and the Age of the Moon, participatory projects that incorporate 2,000 drawings by children aged 3 to 13 from the local Wonju community. These evolving installations, with their accumulation of new drawings in each iteration, celebrate the spontaneity and creativity of youth while inviting viewers to consider the universal passage of time. The works remind audiences of the continuous cycle of life, from childhood to maturity, and the shared experiences that unite us across generations.

Rondinone’s film Burn to Shine, created in collaboration with Moroccan-French choreographer Fouad Boussouf, presents an intense, ritualistic performance combining African Maghreb traditions with contemporary dance. Featuring 12 percussionists and 18 dancers, the film is a hypnotic exploration of life’s cyclical nature, where flames symbolize both destruction and rebirth. The endless loop of the video mirrors the recurring themes of light and darkness, life and death, creating a visceral meditation on impermanence and renewal.

The exhibition extends outdoors to the Stone Garden, where Rondinone’s Nuns and Monks series transforms the space into a spiritual sanctuary. These towering bronze sculptures, modeled after limestone figures, interact with the natural environment as sunlight and shadows shift across their forms. The works evoke ancient stone monuments, linking the sacred with the temporal, and invite visitors to engage in quiet contemplation amidst nature’s rhythms.

In the Nam June Paik Gallery, Rondinone’s 4-meter-tall bronze sculpture Yellow Red Monk stands under a skylight, merging the solemnity of medieval saints with the timeless allure of pure form and color. Its monumental presence draws viewers into a meditative dialogue with light and materiality, reinforcing the artist’s commitment to blending contemporary aesthetics with age-old questions of existence.

The exhibition’s interplay of light, color, and material continues in the Cheong-jo Gallery, where works like Window, Clock, and Love Invents Us transform natural and artificial light into dynamic, ever-changing installations. These pieces harness the shifting qualities of light to immerse visitors in a sensory experience that evolves throughout the day, blurring the boundaries between art and the environment.

Rondinone’s Burn to Shine offers a profound exploration of life’s cyclical beauty, seamlessly weaving together the personal and universal, the natural and spiritual. Through his works, he challenges viewers to consider their connection to the rhythms of the world and the transformative power of renewal. Museum SAN’s serene setting amplifies the meditative quality of the exhibition, making it a cultural highlight of 2024 and an unmissable invitation to reflect on life’s eternal cycles.

Sayart / Maria Kim, sayart2022@gmail.com