127 Yongmasan-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul. Go down to the first basement level of the National Center for Mental Health building and Gallery M appears. Since September 1, paintings by four artists who have been working on Jeju have hung here. It is 'A World That Reaches You,' an invitational exhibition arranged by the Ministry of Health and Welfare's National Center for Mental Health to mark Mental Health Day on October 10.
The exhibition continues through October 30. It is a two-month run.
The invited artists are four people: Kim Hyuk-jong, Kim Seok-hyun, Lee Rae-sook and Jang Hee-na. All of them have experienced or are experiencing mental illness, and all have continued their creative work with Jeju as their base. The center prepared this exhibition together with Nuguna, an incorporated association for disability arts.
The center planned the exhibition with the aim of stripping away prejudice toward mental illness and understanding one another by looking into the distinctive world inside a single person.
This is not the first time Gallery M has held such an exhibition. In April 2024, the same space hosted 'Splendid Awkwardness,' a special exhibition that invited artists belonging to Nuguna. It was an exhibition that took as its theme the individuality and sensibility of people set apart from society's prejudices. The fact that it has joined hands with the same organization twice in two years shows that these encounters have not been consumed as one-off events.
The four paint on Jeju, far from Seoul. In a reality where mental health services and the infrastructure that supports artistic creation are both concentrated in the capital region, work by people who have kept creating on the island now hangs in the exhibition hall of a national institution in the middle of Seoul.
What also remains is that the work of stripping away prejudice still has to begin from the form called an 'exhibition.' The very situation of having to substitute the direct showing of works for explanation tells us how our society has treated people with mental illness.
Even so, what hangs on the wall is work with no diagnosis on it. What visitors encounter is the colors and forms each of the four has held onto for a long time.
Gallery M is on the first basement level, which everyone who visits the National Center for Mental Health passes through. It sits beside a corridor where people waiting for treatment, guardians and staff come and go. The exhibition comes down on October 30.
