The introduction of the exhibition begins with Nam June Paik‘s “Candle TV,” which consists of candles and iron TV cases. Candlelight means the beginning of human civilization and old media, TV means today’s digital civilization and new media, and Candle TV comprehensively presents the spectrum of “light” and various artistic achievements that have developed with human history.

In the next 16 sections, you can experience world-class works that have explored light using various media from the 18th century to the same time, including William Blake, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, Yayoi Kusama, Olafur Eliasson, Philippe Parreno, and James Turrell.

All 43 artists have marked a milestone in the history of art, but among them, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) is the most beloved national painter of the British people, becoming the new protagonist of the 20 pound bill. He spent an unfortunate childhood with a barber father and a distraught mother, but devoted to his son, who entered the Royal Academy at the age of 14, became a regular member of the Academy at the age of 27, and became a professor of perspective at the Royal Academy at the age of 32. In this exhibition, you can enjoy as many as 14 Turner’s works as a professor, including lecture designs that studied light and landscape paintings that show the highlights of romantic paintings.

Works that show Turner’s characteristics well are “Shade and Darkness- the Evening of the Deluge” and “Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory)- the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis.” “Deluge” is a traditionally drawn theme, but it is innovative in terms of expression in that it emphasizes color rather than form and expresses subtle color expressions in detail. Turner was influenced by Goethe’s theory of color, and Goethe said that yellow colors contained light, brightness, strength, warmth, and blue colors contained darkness, weakness, and coldness. According to Goethe’s theory of color, Turner described the confusion and darkness of the Deluge in blue in The Evening of the Deluge, and the hopeful scene of Moses writing Genesis in yellow in The Morning After the Great Flood. Turner’s style of painting, which focused more on the color effect of light than form, emphasizes only the atmosphere and color of the landscape, predicting Monet’s impressionist style and the abstract expressionist style of the 20th century after Monet.

In fact, Claude Monet (1840–1926), who went to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, learned the expression of light and color under the influence of landscape painters John Constable and William Turner in England.

Monet said, “To me, the landscape does not exist in itself. This is because light changes the landscape every moment. The landscape is revived by the changing surrounding atmosphere, air, and light.” Afterwards, Monet produced various series to capture the ever-changing effects of light on the canvas. Among the series of haystacks, water lilies, poplar, and the Seine, Monet painted a series of poplar trees along the Ept River near Giverny in the 1890s.

When the light outside the window illuminates the room, we measure the time by the length of the shadow. French artist Philippe Parreno (1964-) and Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) are artists who well embody the effects of light shining indoors with installations and paintings, respectively.

Parreno’s 6 p.m. is an eye trick work that elaborately embodies the light reflected on the indoor floor. He designed a shadow image of a window hanging on the floor around 6 p.m., and cut and fitted the windows and the flesh of the window with carpets of different colors. The elaborately produced window shadow-shaped carpet actually looks like a shadow hanging indoors, so visitors often look around windows that do not actually exist. Through a work that seems to have frozen a particular time in space, which is bound to be instantaneous, the artist reminds us that time as well as space also affects our visibility.

Hammershøi’s “Indoor, Sunlight on the Floor” is a work that makes you feel like you have moved Parreno’s work to a canvas. He drew a scene where sunlight came through the window and poured on the floor in a room with little furniture. Like impressionist painters, Hammershøi recorded subtle changes in light and weather by drawing the same room several times in different time zones.