September 22, 2011, SEOUL: The Seoul Art Center is pleased to announce the retrospective of the acclaimed American artist and photographer David LaChapelle opening Tuesday, November 22nd at the Hangaram Design Museum in Seoul, Korea.

Hugely anticipated, this is LaChapelle’s second Asian museum retrospective after a widely successful reception in Taipei, Taiwan in 2010. With nearly two hundred works, it will present the most comprehensive selection of LaChapelle’s photographic works ever seen in Asia, spanning over twenty years of his artistic career from the 1980s to 2011.

LaChapelle is known internationally for his exceptional talent in combining a unique hyper-realistic aesthetic with profound social messages. Alongside his earlier works commissioned for fashion and celebrity editorials, the exhibition will showcase LaChapelle's recent artworks such as The Raft of Illusion, the site-specific installation Chain of Life and his most recent work Gaia.

LaChapelle’s photography career began in the 1980s showing his artwork in New York City galleries. His works caught the eye of Andy Warhol who offered him his first job as a photographer at Interview Magazine.

Since then, LaChapelle has worked for the most prestigious international publications such as Italian Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and Rolling Stone, photographing personalities as diverse as Madonna, Lance Armstrong, Uma Thurman, Elizabeth Taylor, David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, and Muhammed Ali, to name a few.

In 2006, LaChapelle decided to leave the world of publishing and magazines to return to where he started, creating work for exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.

LaChapelle has been the subject of exhibitions in both commercial galleries and leading public institutions around the world. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Barbican Museum, London (2002), Palazzo Reale, Milan (2007), MALBA Museum, Buenos Aires (2007), Museo del Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City (2009), and the Musee de La Monnaie, Paris (2009), among many others. In 2010, he mounted two record-breaking solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel. In 2011, he has had a major exhibition of new work at The Lever House, New York, and a retrospective at the Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (open through March 2012).

The Hangaram Design Museum at The Seoul Arts Center, is located off the Nambu Loop Line 2406, at 700 Seocho-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Korea, 137-718.

The exhibition is open to the public Monday-Sunday, 11:00 – 7:00pm except for the last Monday of every month.

For more information visit: http://dlcseoul.com