Is there much significant art being produced in Korea?
The Political and the Aesthetic: South Korea in Review
By Thalia Vrachopoulos
Is there much significant art being produced in Korea? In past years Korean artists were groping with issues of national versus global identity in their work, but my recent view of their production proved that they have overcome their national boundaries and are for the most part dealing with international issues.
Four years ago, a conceptual video artist, Yook Teijoon, produced an a work entitles Lotte World, where he created an environment of projections about the consumerist culture in which he was living by using images of beautiful women in clothing and accessories from the Lotte department store. Although this was a meaningful piece for his context, it would have been incomprehensible to a global milieu that would have found his references obscure and unfamiliar.
Presently, Korean artists are engaging with the international community to produce pieces that can easily be compared to projects shown in New York, Berlin, Basel or Venice. Some of the best can be seen in the studios of Ssamzie Space in Seoul, where every year young artists are chosen from around the world to become its residents. One example is Youngin Hong who uses fabrics and hand labor to subvert both the dualism of public and private space in an effort to harmonize the two. Her drawn curtains, whether pleated, flounced, or just simply draped, serve to suggest and redefine private and public space. Hong’s wrapped and transformed spaces could easily be compared to Christo’s endeavors in that he covers public spaces to play with scale and its spatial dichotomies. Hong began with performance but now creates installations that, while referencing theater, and keeping the body absent, still allude to the relationship between viewer and audience.
Seulgi Lee from Paris is another resident who creates installations concerning the social conditions of the disenfranchised by protesting the conditions that engendered them. Her Strike Banner, 5/26/04 is a large fabric piece embroidered by the elderly women of an adjacent village and was carried by young people during a Korean labor protest rally. She brings art to life through this interactive project by bridging generations, as well as hand labor and technology. Debbie Han, after graduating from the University of California, received her MFA from Pratt Institute and is now a Ssamzie space artist. In her work Han is concerned with the contradictions, paradoxes and complexities of contemporary life. Han’s installation, The Almighty Faces of Reality, consists of 18 glazed, terra-cotta Venus de Milo heads wearing various grimaces. In altering their classical expressions Han not only destroys the classical canon but she also maintains a sense of punning irony and fun. Her Sweet World, which depicts a box of chocolates as a universal sign of seduction, shocks the viewer out of his complacency towards consumerism upon the realization that these objects are made of dog feces. She uses witticism again in her Sweet World III, which features a series of multi-colored lollipops made of hair that, while appealing to the palette due to their attractive colors, thwart desire because of their hairy texture.
These are only three artists of the many examples at Ssamzie space under the directorship of Honghee Kim, curator of last year’s Venice Bienial exhibition, who recently opened the Ssamzie Collection Museum in Heyri. This venue, which opened on June 12th, 2004, was previously the collection’s warehouse and has now become an alternative space with unique exhibition features. Artworks are shown in various stages of preparation, from the packing crate to the gallery wall, crossing the boundaries of storage space and gallery.
Working in independent studios around the art hub of Ilsan near the DMZ are the artists Intae Kim, Bumsu Kim and Insoon Choi. Having received his MFA at Pratt Institute in 1996, Intae Kim creates site-specific installations and is now engaged with several public projects. His last series, The Excess of Life, consists of organic elements involving bodily functions such as blood, organs, veins, and intestines, combined with TV monitors, motor pumps, rubber hoses and Ringer’s bottles. While manufactured to imitate real live organs and systems, these grotesque features combined with grasses and electrical circuits produce shocking effects. By showing the combined workings of the human, vegetal and cultural Intae Kim expresses his concerns with life itself and its various hybrids. His latest series involves giant produce such as garlic or cabbage that seem more appealing in their finishes but that are outside the normal order of nature due to their size. These are genetically manipulated and altered super fruits and vegetables that allude to the existence of the excesses of desire in contemporary culture.
Bumsu Kim received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been working in Seoul since 1999. His site specific work is composed of strips of discarded film deconstructed and reconstituted to create a bridge between the media of analogue, digital and fine art that results in a distinctive idiom departing from traditional forms of art. His Hidden Emotions at the Seoul Museum of Art, employs used film documentary or feature, color or black and white, combined with the flow of light to reconfirm the dynamism of the moving image and to transform the film into a plastic language that is akin to fine art. Bumsu Kim deals with condensed memories contained in 35 mm, 16 mm, and 8 mm films re-edited in communication with the artist to inhabit a realm in which he discovers his own hidden emotions.
Insun Choi’s engagement with language and text has been continuous at least since his graduation with an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 1997. His mixed media installation, Glass Ceiling, evinces both his tendency to use language or sign and his interest in facture. This installation work is composed primarily of thick white layers of paint and mixed media with many smaller pieces abutting the main work that incorporates tiny human figures alluding to letters within small grids. Recently at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York Michael Rovner also made an installation about communication using text in the form of tiny human figures projected digitally on rocks. While both artists are working with language and communication, and may hold some similarities within the details of their work, their concepts differ morphologically. Choi’s recent Linguistic Sculpture has been compared by critics to Kosuth’s work and his philosophy to that of Beuys due to Choi’s exploration into the sign and the way in which it can act as or approach essence. Choi has stated that although sign may get close to fulfilling its function it will nevertheless retain some obstacle to 100% communication. Like Beuys, who attempts to heal this communication impediment by the spiritual act of incantation in his performance "What Can You Communicat to the Dead Rabbit?", Choi through his signs, "has devised the substantiality of language to manifest bodily motion through language and the incarnation of the mind."
Some of the most significant artists in Korea are not only familiar with the developments at large due to their travels but are also committed to living among the global art community. For example, Hyesook Kim maintains studios both in New York and Seoul. Kim’s work reflects her lifelong personal concerns with the after-life and its resultant effects of transformation, conversion or metamorphosis. While her colossal flowers maintain an appealing quality from afar, a detailed look reveals the pores of the pigskin from which they were constructed. The ensuing numbing response is akin to that felt when viewing Nicola Constrantino’s human-skinned shoes or soccer-balls shown at the Deitch Projects and the Tatintsian Gallery last year in New York. Something so beautiful yet simultaneously so horrifying fulfills its role as an artwork capable of maintaining viewer interest while arousing a strong, visceral response.
Kyungho Lee, represented by the Gallery Sejul in Seoul, is preparing a project for the Gwangju Biennial. This site-specific installation consists of a smoke-puffing machine that manufactures tacos by the millions, spewing them onto the gallery floor. While dealing with temporal and spatial chaos and referring to consumerism and mechanization, this video artist combines the work itself with a wall projection that enlarges its size turning the relatively small contraption into a huge, scary monster.
Another Biennial participant is Soojung Hyun a feminist artist who is creating a satellite show wherein a whole room will be filled with lit optical fibers on the floor covered by thick glass for walking, while on the facing wall she will place a huge heart also made of these fibers. This appealing installation, however, is not concerned with the notion of beauty; rather, through her materials and symbolism, Hyun explores the male/female relationship and its place vis-à-vis the modern scientific context. The wall piece is a heart with its accompanying references to romance while the pieces that flow from its body appear to have phallic connotations in their aggressive projection into viewer’s space. This environment made of lit fiber optic strands references the latest technologies within a context that examines the world of romance.
As we have seen by the examples offered here, as well as the numerous exhibitions in New York and around the world, Korean artists have entered the global arena and are producing work that is not only critically viable but whose production methods are qualitatively unsurpassed.
