Seoul youth art show asks what to remember in AI era

SEOUL, October 23 (AJP) - As artificial intelligence can produce a finished painting in seconds, a youth art exhibition in Seoul has asked young artists what they want the future to remember, and why they still make art by hand.

The question reaches students who already use AI widely. In a Korea Press Foundation survey of 2,674 students from fourth grade through high school, released in January, 67.6 percent said they use conversational or generative AI. Most of them, 74.2 percent, said they use it mainly to get a range of information quickly, and ChatGPT was by far the most used service at 89.6 percent.
 
The exhibition, titled "Memory for Tomorrow," ran from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5 and took over the whole of The Star Gallery in Insadong, the central Seoul neighborhood known for its galleries and traditional craft shops. It was the fourth youth environmental art exhibition organized by Sally Mom Art, a children's art academy in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, just south of Seoul.

Alongside a group show, individual students held solo and special exhibitions. The first three editions centered on nature and the environment, but this year the theme widened to take in history, culture, tradition and the values students hope to pass on.

Shim Ye-ji, an 18-year-old 11th grader at Monarch Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto, answered with four paintings, one for each season.

Living abroad changed the way she felt the year turn, she said in a recent interview with AJP. Spring in an unfamiliar place felt like a new beginning, while winter became a quiet time to look back on herself.
 
"It was fascinating that the same season could feel different depending on where I was and what frame of mind I was in when I looked at it," Shim said.

The adjustment did not come easily. "Leaving my family and friends and adjusting to a new environment was not always easy, and at times I was lonely and missed Korea," she said. "But even then, as I met new people and tried things for the first time, I felt myself growing little by little."

What she wanted to capture was that feeling, not just the scenery, and she said that turned out to be the hardest part of the work.
 
"It was especially hard to show feelings you cannot see, like the loneliness and longing I felt while studying abroad, through color and painting," she said. "In the process, I learned that a painting does not have to be perfect, and that expressing my feelings honestly matters more."

Shim said those personal feelings are what a machine cannot supply. "Even if we paint the same winter scene, winter might be a joyful season for someone else, but for me it can be the season when I miss my family far away," she said. "AI can help make a painting, but I don't think it can replace the feelings I have and the growth I go through while I paint."

She described the series as a record for her future self. "When I look at these paintings again someday, I want to remember how I found the courage to make a new start in an unfamiliar place, and the precious feelings I had at the time," she said.
 
That kind of long, personal struggle with a single work sits at the center of how Sally Mom Art teaches. Its director, Kim Sung-hae, has taught art to children and teenagers for more than 20 years and holds a master's degree in exhibition design from Kookmin University's Graduate School of Design.

"What we see today, what we value and what we remember will ultimately shape the future," Kim said of the exhibition's theme.
 
Her students choose their own subjects, research them, decide on composition and color, and revise their work again and again. Kim said she guides them with questions and teaches the skills they need, but does not hand them the answers.

"I always tell my students the same thing," she said. "A painting must be completed with your own strength."

She holds to that even when the work drags on. "No matter how long it takes, I believe adults should not do for students the part of the process they need to go through themselves," Kim said.

The rise of AI, she said, has made that principle matter more. "AI can produce a result quickly, but it cannot replace the trial and error and the sense of achievement a student experiences while facing a single work for dozens of hours, sometimes for months," she said.

Kim has since founded NEXT CANVAS Art & Exhibition, an exhibition planning company, to take students' work beyond the classroom. She said it is arranging shows with hotels and cultural venues in South Korea and preparing an exhibition in Bali, Indonesia.
 
One adult also hung his work beside the students. Nam Joo-cheol, a co-host of the English-learning program Easy English on the Korea Educational Broadcasting System, showed nine travel photographs at Kim's invitation. His link to the academy began through his niece, who studied art under Kim for years.

It was his first exhibition. The photographs show landmarks in France and Italy, from Mont-Saint-Michel and the Eiffel Tower to the Colosseum in Rome and Milan's Duomo, and every one was taken on a smartphone.
 
"I wanted to show that meaningful photography does not necessarily require expensive cameras or professional equipment," Nam said.

He shot each scene in color and then converted it to black and white, "selectively preserving certain colors to draw attention to details that held particular meaning for me."

Millions of people have visited the places in his photographs, and Nam said that pushed him to ask what he had seen there that others had not.

"Two people can stand in exactly the same place and walk away with entirely different memories, emotions, and perspectives," he said. "AI can generate extraordinary images, but it cannot actually live my life, experience my memories, or stand in my place at that particular moment."
 
Of the young artists he exhibited with, Nam said, "They reminded me that art has no age limit, no single definition, and no one correct way of seeing the world."

For Shim, painting is a way to look slowly into her own heart and put into color and line the feelings that are hard to say in words.

"That is why, for me, painting is not just a piece of work," she said. "It is another language for discovering and expressing myself in an unfamiliar world."

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