Your Bright Future presents the first major museum exhibition in the United States in about two decades to focus on contemporary art from South Korea. Organized by LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition features a generation of artists who have emerged from South Korea during the 1980’s, all of whose works address contemporary art trends within a uniquely Korean context. As co-curator Lynn Zelevansky notes in her essay, “Contemporary Art from Korea: The Presence of Absence,” “Coming of age amid political turmoil and increased freedoms, they [Korean artists] are keenly aware of their positions as citizens of a relatively small, increasingly prosperous but divided country in a rapidly globalizing world.”[1]
Viewing the show now several times since it’s closing, Your Bright Future has continually amazed and overwhelmed me with the enormous variety of mediums presented (drawing, installation, sculpture, video and performance art), as well as the multitude of themes addressed throughout the twelve artists’ conceptual works. Ranging from Choi Jeong-Hwa’s pop art installations to Haegue Yang’s installation and performance piece in which she expresses her frustrations with the Art Institution, Your Bright Future successfully attempts to showcase the history of nearly twenty years of contemporary Korean art in one exhibition. While the show includes a large number of works worthy of attention, the focus of this review centers on three artists whose works I feel are representative of larger concepts explored in Your Bright Future. Choi Jeong Hwa, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja works address what Zelevansky describes as the focus of the exhibition: “The ephemeral nature of life, time, identity, as well as on the limitations of communication across languages, cultures, and generations …”[2]
Before one even reaches the exhibition, a plethora of brightly colored plastic bowls, cups, plates, and other gadgets strung up to form a massive cube disrupt the usually quiet walk over to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum housing Your Bright Future. Initially unaware that this neon installation was the work of the Korean artist, Choi Jeong-Hwa, I took a brief departure from my intended destination to walk between the plastic garlands. Known for his appropriation of ready-made objects into monumental sculptures and installations, Choi is the only artist presented in Your Bright Future who has not had formal training or lived outside of his home country. Proudly stating at the show’s opening that he is “made in Korea,” I could not help interpret this comment as a slight pun on his unusual choice of artists’ materials that are so often “made in China.” For this installation entitled Happy Happy, Choi went to a local Los Angeles 99 cents store and bought out what appears to be the entire stock of bright, plastic kitchen utensils, toys, etc. in order to drill holes, string, and hang them together in parallel lines on LACMA’s outdoor plaza. In the second revision of this work, Choi invited the people of Los Angeles to bring their own plastic objects and hang them on a large fence near the plaza that LACMA erected for this purpose. In both cases, the viewer is welcome to touch and walk in between the rows of objects, which accounts for the large amount of screaming children attempting to swing from the installation as if on monkey bars.
Choi’s use of cheap and common objects to create Happy Happy is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s appropriation of brand names and commodity culture in his paintings and silkscreens. Noted in Your Bright Future’s catalog, Choi is known as the father of pop art in Korea, much as Warhol is heralded as the same in the United States. The availability and commodity status of the plastic objects Choi assembles deliberately interferes with notion of the traditional artist as genius who executes his work through the careful mastery of a set skill. Choi’s work is something that anyone, including the people of Los Angeles, can produce, thus calling into question the contemporary definition of the artist and art. Further confusing one’s idea of the artist genius is how accessible Choi’s work is to the viewer. Instead of looming behind a velvet rope with museum guards standing closely by, the viewer may interact with the artwork, and even change it in some ways (Happy Happy exhibited some wear throughout the course of the exhibition due to the visitor’s touch).
Furthermore, Choi’s artworks at LACMA, as his previous works at other locations, will eventually be deconstructed and recycled. The careful preservation of the monumental creation of the artist does not apply to Choi, rather his works are impermanent and eventually preserved only through memory and photographs. As Starkman and Zelevansky write, “Choi is concerned with the ephemeral and variable nature of material life and consumer culture, as is reflected in the unstable nature of the materials he employs, like plastic.”[3] Happy Happy is a work that is transient in nature, existing only for a brief amount of time. Other artists featured in Your Bright Future similarly employ ready-made, commodity items into their conceptual works, such Gimhongsok’s use of animal mascot costumes, as well as question the ephemeral nature of art objects, such as Haegue Yang’s Storage Piece.
Entering the exhibition, one cannot ignore the presence of two large works by Do Ho Suh, each of which uniquely interpret the artist’s sense of identity through discourse between Eastern and Western architecture although sharing the same subject matter. Fallen Star 1/5 presents the viewer with a replica of Suh’s first home in the United States while attending the Rhode Island School of Design in 1981. Suh recreates the brownstone faithfully in miniature, as the viewer becomes voyeur and is allowed to peer into every apartment and marvel at the details of each place of residence: a turkey cooks in one oven, and a bicycle sits precariously in an empty hallway of another. One would assume that the apartment which displays a drafting table, paintbrushes, and a half-eaten slice of pizza was inhabited by Suh. However, far from being an homage to the building at the center of his new American life, Suh complicates the artwork by crashing a replica of his parent’s’ traditional Korean house in Seoul into the side of the brownstone. Shards of glass and fallen bricks surround the Korean home, which sticks out at an angle from the wall of his Long Island residence. Peering inside the Korean home offers a different lifestyle than the apartments of the brownstone cluttered with furniture, decoration, and objects. The Korean home is nearly bear inside; few objects are distinguishable, aside from the old sewing machine and bedroll in plain view through a window. Attached to the ends of the Korean home is a sheer fabric sewn to replicate the home and act as a parachute, guiding the East to collide with the West in a somewhat violent fashion.
Home Within a Home similarly features Suh’s Long Island and Seoul homes, however in a different material and configuration that drastically changes the reception and interpretation of the piece. Constructed with a light blue, transparent resin, the Long Island home encases his Korean house, which floats carefully between the foundation and roof of the brownstone. Unlike Fallen Star 1/5, both homes are empty and stand together as a ghost-like giant, two buildings tangled into one.
While Fallen Star 1/5 and Home Within a Home navigate Suh’s identity as both a Korean and American inhabitant, each suggest different interpretations on his experience. In the exhibition catalog, Suh describes a narrative for Fallen Star 1/5 in which he explains that the heavy winds of a tornado surrounded his childhood home in Seoul, “taking the house [he] was living in up into the sky.”[4] In this way, the viewer can interpret Fallen Star 1/5 as an embodiment of Suh’s nomadic lifestyle, slowly drifting from Korea across the Pacific Ocean to the United States. The harsh realities of living in a new country, however, are recognized in the violence and aggression of the crashing homes. Korean culture and customs must meld with Americanized versions of the same, and one can imagine the kinds of discrepancies that would take place. The stark comparison of the clean and nearly empty Korean home as compared to the cluttered, item-filled apartments of the Long Island brownstone exemplify, if only aesthetically, the differences between Suh’s two worlds.
In contrast, Home Within a Home displays his two places of residence now joined as one. There are no longer any signs of the tremendous collision witnessed in Fallen Star 1/5, and the two locations now live together as a seamless unit. Far from being harmonious, however, one senses a degree of melancholy and longing, particularly in the artist’s choice of the translucent, ethereal resin that creates the work. While now conjoined, the feeling of displacement and loss pervades Home Within a Home, perhaps because his original Korean identity is now swallowed and possibly compromised by his newer Americanized self. As Zelevansky notes in her essay, “ghostly and fragile, [Suh’s work] evoke home, homesickness, and the sense of loss that is intrinsic to memory.”[5]
Both works, however, present the artist as a craftsman and laborer, working with textiles, fabric, and power tools to create his artworks. This places the traditional version of the masculinized artist working within the bourgeois cultural sphere into the realm of the feminized and lowbrow. This is especially noted in Suh’s creation of the parachute of his Korean home. Using a traditional Korean stitching technique, the artist takes up the feminized craft of sewing to fabricate the object, which appears as a ghostly shell lying dead on the floor next to its corporeal body. Issues of identity, the self, and the other are similarly explored in several other works in Your Bright Future, as Korean artists attempt to negotiate distinctiveness and sameness in an increasingly connected world.
The last work I will explore is a female artist who works primarily focus on video, performance, and spectacle. Entering the dimly lit room to view Kimsooja’s piece, A Needle Woman, the viewer is confronted with six large screens facing each other as if in dialogue. Each screen presents the artist with her back turned to the camera, her long hair tied into a simple ponytail that falls down the length of her torso. Kim stands straight, her arms at either side of her body, and her head looking forward with little deviation. Standing completely still, Kim appears as a rock in a heavy current as crowds of people walk by her motionless body, either ignoring her completely or pausing from their routine to observe this strange, silent woman. On every screen Kim wears the same grey tunic and stands in the same meditative position against the flow of pedestrian traffic. The only thing that changes is the location in which Kim performs, each screen representing Patan, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, N’djamena (Chad), San’a (Yemen), or Jerusalem.
In an interview conducted in the exhibition catalog, Kim explains that the title of the piece, A Needle Woman, is representative not only of the stiff posture she takes while filming, but also of the purpose of her work: “I established the immobility of my body as a symbolic needle, and further questioned my relationship to others through the act of a social, cultural sewing.”[6] A Needle Woman focuses on the complex and often subtle interplay of social relationships between a person and the Other. Every city presents the viewer with a different culture and people from whom Kim elicits a reaction, or lack there of. Standing silently while allowing crowds of people to wash by her body, Kim is interested in exploring the relationship between her body and of those around her. Will anyone ask what she is doing? Will people purposely move out of her way to avoid running into her? Will people deliberately attempt to break her hypnotic stance? Her video also brings up questions related to gender. As a woman, do people react differently towards her behavior? Does she feel vulnerable or frightened? One scene that is particularly revealing was filmed while Kim was shooting in Yemen. Surrounding Kim are large numbers of mostly males, who cast strange and somewhat disapproving glances at her stiff body. The few number of females that walk past are wearing head coverings and do not pay attention to her. Kim’s video displays the sexual hierarchies found in Yemen society as exhibited in the males’ aggressive, critical responses and the females’ passivity.
While thinking of Kim’s work, I was reminded of a question that Martha Rosler poses in the introduction of her essay, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment.” Lamenting on a society that is now drenched in technological consumerism, Rosler asks if video art can remain critical and avant-garde, or whether it will be absorbed into popular culture: “movement towards liberation or accommodation?”[7] Kim’s work, and several other video pieces shown in Your Bright Future do well to diminish such fear of the video as a mere apparatus of, what Theodore Adorno refers to as, the culture industry. Kim’s work questions identity, relationships, and the human condition, as thoroughly and successfully as avant-garde video works of the 1970’s did. While Lady Gaga may have appropriated some aspects of feminist performance art and video practices into her highly popularized, expensive music videos, avant-garde work in the more traditional sense is still alive and well through the work of Kim and her fellow Your Bright Future contemporaries.
[1] Lynn Zelevansky. “Contemporary Art from Korea: The Presence of Absence,” in Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, by Christina Starkman and Lynn Zelevansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 31.
[2] Ibid. 31.
[3] Christina Starkman and Lynn Zelevansky. Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 82.
[4] Ibid. 167.
[5] Zelevansky, “The Presence of Absence,” 34.
[6] Starkman and Zelevansky, 126.
[7] Martha Rosler, “”Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001, by Martha Rosler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 55.
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