127 Yongmasan-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul. Go down to the first basement level of the National Center for Mental Health building and you reach Gallery M. 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 organized by the Ministry of Health and Welfare's National Center for Mental Health to mark Mental Health Day on October 10.
The exhibition runs through October 30. It is a two-month schedule.
The invited artists are Kim Hyuk-jong, Kim Seok-hyun, Lee Rae-sook and Jang Hee-na. All four have experienced or are living with mental illness, and all continue to create with Jeju as their base. The center prepared the exhibition together with Nuguna, an incorporated association of artists with disabilities.
The center planned the exhibition with the aim of clearing away prejudice toward mental illness and understanding one another by looking into the distinctive world inside a person.
This is not the first time Gallery M has held such an exhibition. In April 2024, the same space hosted "Wonderful Awkwardness," a curated show that invited artists belonging to Nuguna. That exhibition took as its theme the individuality and sensibility of people set apart from society's prejudices. The fact that the center has joined hands with the same organization twice within 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 an island has been hung in the exhibition hall of a national institution in the middle of Seoul.
What also remains is that clearing away prejudice still has to begin in the form of an "exhibition." The very situation of having to substitute showing the works directly for explanation tells us how our society has treated people living with mental illness.
Even so, what hangs on the wall are works without diagnoses. What visitors encounter are the colors and forms that each of the four has held onto for a long time.
Gallery M sits on the first basement level, which anyone visiting the National Center for Mental Health passes through. It is beside a corridor where people waiting for treatment, guardians and staff come and go. The exhibition comes down on October 30.
