SEOUL, August 21 (AJP) - Engineering students at a Seoul university have spent a decade learning to draw the machines they study, and the results are on public view this month and next in two exhibitions outside their own campus.
The show is called The Drawing, and it runs at the BODA Gallery at Incheon Academy of Science and Arts through Aug. 27 before moving to the Kyung Hee University Museum of Art, where it stays through Sept. 11. Kookmin University is presenting it as part of its 80th anniversary. The university was founded in September 1946.
The exercise behind it began in 2017 as an attempt to put drawing into engineering education. Students in Kookmin's automotive and mobility program observe cars and mechanical systems directly and draw what they see, on the theory that the act of rendering something forces a closer look at it than reading a specification does. The stated aim is to sharpen observation and spatial reasoning rather than to produce artists.
Ten editions later it has grown past the classroom. This year's exhibition brings in fine arts students from Kyung Hee University and a group of invited artists, so the drawings hang alongside work made from an entirely different training.
The Incheon leg is tied to that school's own 10th anniversary. Incheon Academy of Science and Arts, a state-run school for gifted students that opened in 2016, teaches science and the arts together, which makes it an unusually apt room for the material.
The exhibition is organized by Kookmin's program office for future mobility, part of a government-funded scheme that has universities share courses across institutions in priority fields. Shin Sung-hwan heads the office.
Lee Dong-heon, the Kookmin professor who has taught the course and prepared the exhibitions, said the drawings are not judged as drawings. "The Drawing is not aimed at drawing well," Lee said. "The meaning is in the process of observing a subject closely and visually expressing the structure and the relationships you have understood."
He said the tenth year had widened the show into an exchange among several educational institutions, students from different majors, and working artists.
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