Korean artists contemporize with mixed media

By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

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Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawai'i Three exhibits "A Mirror Woman" Honolulu Hale 530 S. King St. 7:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays Through Oct. 31 Free "Relative Reality: Korean Media Art Today" Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College 4303 Diamond Head Road, Honolulu 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays Through Oct. 23 Free. Parking passes available. "Contemporary Korean-American Artists of Hawai'i" Recent work by Sean K.L. Browne Hawai'i — Its Land and Culture: Photographs by Elaine Mayes The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center 999 Bishop St. 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays Through Jan. 6 Free

It features the work of more than 50 contemporary Korean artists — many recognized as important international contemporary art figures — at numerous venues in Honolulu and on Maui.

In past columns, we've visited some of those venues.

This week, we'll visit three more.

'Mirror Woman'

Kimsooja is an internationally exhibited conceptual and performance artist whose work combines performance, video and installation.

She deals with the immigrant's experience, both a central and universal theme of this commemoration. Born in 1957 in South Korea, she lives and works in New York.

She is especially known for her performances and videos. In "A Needle Woman," she stands silently, her back turned to the viewer, while crowds in various cities of the world pass by her.

For "Crossing 2003," she has created an installation for the courtyard of Honolulu Hale.

The work, initially titled "The Ground of Nowhere," consists of a curving, 21-foot cylindrical curtain of translucent gauze that hangs from the building's skylight, 60 feet above.

In the middle of the cylinder is a platform mirror that reflects the sky below the viewer's feet.

She later renamed the work "A Mirror Woman."

The installation inventively expresses the underlying and universal experience of migration: the viewer is invited to step into a kind of floating space, the way we all have — either directly or through our family history — entered a new world as immigrants, whether domestic or international.

'Relative Reality'

Co-curated by Sul Won-gi, a professor at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, and Lee Byung Hee, "Relative Reality: Korean Media Art Today" features the work of a group of cutting-edge contemporary video artists.

The Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College was selected to host the video installation because of the rapidly expanding New Media Art Program at KCC.

As members of the many tribes of this global village, we collectively huddle around the fire of television's many blue screens.

The artist's hunger — which had its first utterance in bone and pigment, feathers and wood — now finds some of its most interesting expression through the medium of writing with light.

Chang Jia's black-and-white performative video presents a tongue-in-cheek laboratory experiment, with rabbits frolicking while the artist as a human subject undergoes techno music, blood-pressure checks, and milk-drinking, distilled from several hours of documentary footage.

An exquisite miniature film in the form of a screen saver on an Apple PowerBook executed by Chang Yun Seong creates a magical universe of a place where snow falling on a cityscape invokes a remembrance of Simon and Garfunkel's freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.

Ham Yang Ah's hypnotic, upside down, slow-motion crisp color images of a hang-glider — in saturated yellows, reds, blues and magenta — are truly "More Real Than This World."

"Prayer for Those That Remain," Kim Changkyum's current-events time capsule — consisting of images from South Korean television, the Internet and popular film — is an intensely religious vision, accompanied by "The Psalm," sung by a choir in an almost Buddhist chant style.

Underlying the images derived from media and everyday street footage in South Korea is a sexual tension, clothed buttocks and pretty faces, mixed with images of Iraqi War violence and 9-11 destruction and of mainstream Hollywood films.

For Kim Joon, the human body morphed in 3-D animation summons forth not only the surface reality of body hair, tattoos, and bullet holes like fireworks, but also an individual's social context that is buried within.

Kim Sejin's voyeuristic video — the least successful from an installation point of view — alternates with the tension of minimal movement and explosions of spontaneous adolescent energy.

The "Ingres and His Friends" color video is Park Hyesung's homage to Western art masters.

With live, mostly nude models in three-dimensional movement, combined with skillful editing and use of music, she evokes an individual illusion of herself.

Finally, Choi Jungbum's sound piece, created for this exhibition, builds in intensity to crescendo that releases as naturally as the rain.

A one-hour meditative visit to this exhibition can pay handsome dividends.

'Korean-American Artists of Hawai'i'

"Contemporary Korean-American Artists of Hawai'i," an exhibit of works by 12 Hawai'i artists of Korean ancestry deftly organized by curator Allison Wong, includes photography, painting, fiber art, printmaking, mixed media and sculpture.

The works are all beautifully showcased in the magnificent First Hawaiian Center space and in an impressive catalog containing a photograph of a representative work of each artist.

Dana Forsberg's exquisitely rendered grid photographs, especially "Denise," suggestively convey a delicate sensibility and erotic arousal with more than a touch of wistful longing, a blissful marriage of subtle form and enticing subject matter.

Forsberg's materials — photographic gel transfers, plastic and rice paper — display a technical command at the service of the heart and of the ineffable.

Ezekiel Chihye Hwang's mixed-media assemblages of ready-made objects that incorporate photographs effectively recreate archetypal memories of the child buried within our adult social personas.

Kloe Kang skillfully uses oil on canvas to reveal the familiar with new eyes. Her collection of rice bowls dancing in a weightless, suspended animation does just that.

Mixed media, including materials such as pins, stickers, paper and oil on canvas, combine in the hands of Diane Chongmin Kim to evoke a troubled interior landscape of subconscious terror.

Although photographs usually invite a viewer to see only the literal, Hyeyoung Kim's gelatin silver prints resonate with the intimations of the supernatural.

The salt brick boats of Jeeun Kim in "Dream of Returning Home" movingly evoke the lost dreams and insistent hopes of the immigrant experience.

Jinja Kim's mixed-media works such as "Spring Wind" clearly convey her persistent playfulness, modulated by an unmistakable undercurrent of the sadness of time passing, time wished for, time lost.

For many years, Wendy Kim Messier has been an important figure in our local arts community, delighting us with her inventiveness and expressive, solid craft. She began her career as a graphic designer before branching out into clothing and other fabric arts.

With her current mixed-media pieces — especially her "Folding Screen," which presents a rich visual experience from afar and close-up — she continues to evidence a continual reinvention of herself through her interest in the transformative powers of light.

In the "For the Cornerstone" pieces, acrylic on Korean rice paper gave the late Byoung Yong Lee a rich palette and ground, combining traditional and contemporary materials to create a very personal and darkly rich vision, a unique expression that challenges the viewer to change.

Chang Jin Lee's color photographs convey a similar sensibility, utilizing bold primary colors and deep shadows to invoke an unmistakably beautiful but somehow eerily dangerous twilight zone.

"Resonance" exploits blown glass in juxtaposition with wood, rice, paper, enamel, bent steel and wood to give Geoff Lee effective means to achieve the expression of his stated goal: power, coupled with a heartbreaking and painful fragility.

Finally, Jooyi Maya Lee's intaglio "Gum Prints" truly demonstrate the transformative potential of art: gum marks on the streets of New York City are elevated into something oddly beautiful, if we give them the requisite attention, suspended disbelief, and romantic complicity.

The exhibition, which is nicely complemented by Sean K.L. Browne's recent work and the intriguing photographs of Hawai'i by Elaine Mayes, is certainly worth repeated visits between now and January, when it closes.

David C. Farmer wrote the Sunday art column from 1975 to 1976. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history. Arts writer Victoria Gail-White is taking the week off.