Reflecting South Korea's changing art world

By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

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"Crossings 2003" features South Korea's finest contemporary artists at several locations in Honolulu. The Honolulu Academy of Arts hosts an exhibition of contemporary expressions of traditional Korean crafts through Nov. 9, and works by Komelia Hongja Okim through Nov. 16. The University of Hawai`i Art Gallery presents installations by contemporary South Korean artists though Nov. 7. The work of Kim Sooja will be on display at Honolulu Hale until Oct. 31. The East-West Center Gallery at Burns Hall displays paintings inspired by traditional Korean art through Nov. 14. Gallery 'Iolani at Windward Community College is showing drawings by contemporary artists who use traditional materials through Oct. 18. The Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College presents new media through Oct. 22. Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui will display selections from Dec. 27 through Feb. 1.

There is great range and depth in this excellents show, organized by TCM curators James Jensen and Allison Wong.

It's part of an international collaborative arts event commemorating the centennial of Korean immigration to the United States. TCM is one of several galleries participating statewide.

Cho Duck-Hyun's works, in graphite and charcoal on canvas, first greet the visitor with impressive photorealism and technical skills; they also speak of the profound changes the nation has experienced during the past 100 years.

In the sculptural installation "A Memory of the 20th Century," Cho eloquently explores the ambiguities between fiction and reality through the realms of folklore, fiction and archaeology.

A photographic marriage portrait, rendered life size and contained in an opened black box, sings a bittersweet melody of a traditional way of life gone forever.

Equally subtle are the sensual monochromatic gelatin silver prints of Min Byung-Hun.

In his "Deep Fog" and "Body" series, Min evokes the mystery of things unseen in prints of luminous beauty that recall the classic works of Buddhist and Taoist ink landscape painting.

Photo emulsion on handmade mulberry paper provides the medium for Jungjin Lee's masterful "Ocean" and "Pagoda" series.

By a combination of modern photographic and traditional materials, the artist creates images that combine an almost traditional sumi-e ink sensibility with a uniquely contemporary and painterly feel.

Hong Sung-Do's large-scaled photographs of parts of the human body and face, clearly recognizable from a distance, close up become abstract textures of light, dark and minimalist color: at once photographic and painterly.

Evocative and darkly brooding, Hong's works conjure up a world both familiar yet somehow enchanted.

Bae Joonsung offers a playful note to the exhibition with layered, figurative imagery that invites the voyeuristic viewer to literally touch the works, albeit with a glove provided by the installation.

A "Costumes of Painters" series — with a kind of tongue-in-cheek homage to the 19th century artists Corot, David and Sargent — features a painted vinyl or Plexiglas cover that lifted reveals back-and-white photographs of nude male and female models.

Park Hwa Young's inventive "Daily Kleenex Documentation" presents a kind of printmaking in a performative mode.

Rows of tissues pinned to the gallery wall are imprinted with images of the artists' face from transferred make-up, taken on a daily basis over an extended period.

In this medium, the make-up is the ink, the tissue the picture ground, the assemblage a record of a kind of performance. Pinned to the wall, the tissues flutter, emitting the fragrance of the make-up in a multisensory experience.

The sculptural pieces in the exhibition are similarly provocative and stimulating.

The work of Chun Kwang-Young combines richly articulated minimalism and a love of deeply rooted Korean traditional sensibilities.

The impressive mixed-media installation "Aggregation 001-MY056" is made of triangular pieces wrapped in antique Korean hanji or mulberry paper obtained from old books.

Weighing in at some 600 pounds, the spherical sculpture is suspended from the ceiling in a powerful show of bulk and seeming weightlessness that provides wonderfully rich textures and detail on close inspection.

The almost flat "Aggregation 001-MA051" creates spatial and graphic contrasts in rich color and light; it resonates with inexpressible yearning of memory and time.

Nam Zie's motorized kinetic metal sculptures — designed to fit unlikely parts of the human body — express an almost Rube Goldberg fantasy world, undercut by intimations of violence and torture.

Here we have a machine sensibility crafted to an eerily human scale, combining aluminum, stainless steel, metal and plastic tubing and motors.

One of D.H. Law-rence's last poems comes to mind with these oddly disturbing pieces: "Death is not Evil; Evil is Mechanical."

Equally expressive of a sensibility of repressed violence is Lee Hyung-Woo's untitled wall piece, which, from a distance, appears to be a huge, wall-sized, multicylindrical woven fabric piece in subtle shades of grey and muted red oxide.

Close up, the piece reveals itself as long tubes of barbed wire, carrying with it all the subtext and overtones that this material evokes.

Painter Whang Inkie now works in what he calls "digital landscapes," using rivets on dry pigment-colored plywood and Lego blocks instead of traditional painterly media to create pointillist visions suggestive of a traditional village and the sun shimmering on a spring ocean surface.

Mother of pearl, certainly a beautiful natural material, presents a contemporary artist with some special challenges if chosen as a medium of expression.

In the hands of Kim You-Sun, unfortunately, the challenge is not met with any particular success.

"Picture Bride Rainbow," with its over-written and extremely literary literalness, simply does not stand on its own as a piece in the same league with the rest of the exhibition.

Together with Kim's second piece in the same veneer material, both works appear oddly disconnected and abandoned in the far corner of the gallery space.

The fact that they are also visually overpowered by the far more dynamic works of Lee and Chun, which hover in close proximity, suggests that the exhibition design — although faultless in every other respect — missteps with Kim's work.

The two video pieces in the exhibition are worth special note.

Kim Young-Jin's "Globe" represents a kind of marriage of high tech (although with extremely simple means) and a hyper-awareness of what Thoreau termed the preservation of the world in wildness.

In a riveting display of the artist simply walking through a rural landscape as seen from a mirrored globe suspended above, one senses the deep love of nature that has traditionally imbued Korean art, craft and culture. This resonates clearly to the present day, through all the travails and dislocations of this proud and brave people.

Finally, in Park Hwa Young's "Everything Okay? 1 & 2," many of the exhibition's major themes and sensibilities are recapitulated.

Shamanistic rhythms accompany images both playful and disturbing: a phone call from a woman's mother, metal violence, electro-shocked severed fish heads, images of severed human heads, fingers, feet and hands, danger lurking beneath pristine images, color and black and white, sound and image fragments of an urban landscape of isolation, fear and loneliness.

Guest arts writer David C. Farmer wrote the Sunday art column in 1975 and 1976. He holds a bachelor's of fine arts degree in painting and drawing, and a master's degree in Asian and Pacific art history.