“Wonder City” held at Taekwang Group’s Sehwa Museum of Art(SMA) in 2018 features the theme of “city.” This is an attempt to establish the locality of the museum as its part of identity, while portraying the city in the language of contemporary art for viewers visiting the museum in the city center. It is perhaps inevitable to discuss the city in the Sehwa Museum which overlooks Gwanghwamun Street through its glass wall. During my exploration of discourses in modern urban aesthetics that unfold in complexity, I realized that my gaze at the busy city from the relatively slow-paced museum had something in common with the perspective of the “flâneur” who observed the metropolitan city of the 19th century Paris.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), a French poet, revealed in his poetry, Le Spleen de Paris, the process in which the “flâneur” who first appeared in the modern city transformed the city into a space of adventure and fantasy. Although Baudelaire’s view of the flâneur as idle and loose, ironically such characteristics laid the foundation on which modern art could blossom. The flâneur’s observation at a step back from the center of the busy metropolis serves as a mechanism for looking into the intimate details of the city that were meant to be hidden.

This exhibition adopts the flâneur’s perspective. The perspective from the inside of the museum overlooking the city, perspectives of artists who live the city, and perspectives of the viewers of this exhibition are represented in the flâneur’s observation activity in an attempt to present the point where contemporary urban aesthetics is replaced with visual artifacts that contain the modern city. Contemporary urban aesthetics portrayed in the theme of Wonder City reveals the beautiful, wondrous, bizarre, and distorted duality. Eight artists—Park Hyundoo, Shon Kyunghwa, Ahn Sungseok, Oliver Griem, Yi Hwankwon, Im Sangbin, Jung Haejung, and Cho Junyong—who live the metropolis of increasing complexity proposes urban aesthetics of their respective interpretation as the contemporary urban flâneur.

For the artists who were born and have continued their lives in the city, observing and interpreting the city is nothing more than exploring their own identities. As Baudelaire suggested the existence of the flâneur and tried to explore the hidden depth of Paris through their unyielding observations, the artists’ gaze on the city reflects the desire to intimately connect with the city to survive in it. The Wonder City is expected to provide viewers the opportunity to share the artists’ observations and to become flâneurs to reflect on different sides of the modern city and their own lives as city dwellers.