happy happy
by Douglas Messerli
Lynn
Zelevansky, Christine Starkman, and Sun Jung Kim (curators) Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists
from Korea / Los Angeles County Museum of Art
As a admirer of
contemporary Korean literature (publisher of major Korean poet Ko Un) and given
the large Korean population of my city, I wanted very much to love the new show
of Korean artists at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, located across the
street from my home and my nearby office. This show does indeed give some
glimmers of excellent art.
While the show was located primarily in the Eli Broad wing of the
museum, the entire Ahmanson Building across the plaza was festooned in ribbons
of fabric in yellow, red, and blue, by Choi Jeong-Hwa, an artwork that, whipped
up by the wind, snapped and seemingly waved out its title "Welcome," to
the neighborhood even before the opening of the show. And as museum goers entered
the plaza they were greeted by an equally festive and joyful piece also by Choi
titled "Happy Happy," a work made up of hanging plastic tubs, bins,
strainers, bowels, funnels, and pitchers, all purchased from the nearby 99-cent
Only Store. The latter work, a celebration of consumerism, was particularly beautiful,
lit up so that the colors glowed in the night.
The first piece
of the show, Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star 1/5" was a definite knock out,
picturing a replica of his home in Seoul where the artist grew up that has
crashed into the a Providence, Rhode Island apartment house where Suh lived in
the early 1990s while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. The
apartment, split literary in half—apparently by the crash of the Korean home—is
filled with miniature furniture, reading materials, clothing, kitchen utensils,
etc. with which Suh surrounded himself, and as the viewer goes from window to
window to peer into the home and its contents, he witnesses what Suh describes
as an "exposure of his life." The collision of the two buildings, Shu
argues, signifies less of a outright statement of cultural differences than it
does a kind of Wizard of Oz-like tale
about cultural change:
I was in the house, making my
first fabric architectural piece. All of a
of a sudden, there was a
tornado that took the building into the sky. I
didn't know where I was
going, but then I saw the ocean and a bridge from
Seoul to New York, so I knew
that the house was heading to the U.S.
I realized the house was
going down soon, so I finished my fabric
piece to use it as a
parachute. I got scared when I realized that the house
was slowing down and I
couldn't see land. I decided to throw things away,
but there were so many things
I was personally attached to. I made a list
of things I possessed and
prioritized them. It gave me time to reflect on
entire life in that house.
Then I crossed off things on the list. In the end, I
decided to throw out pretty
much everything except what was essential to
survival.
When the building
started to descend, I went up on the roof with the
parachute. The house started
to come down and crash, but it had a semi-
soft landing. And that's how
I feel. Culture shock didn't come as a shock
to me. It took a long time.
(quoted from an interview with the artist and
Suzanne Muchnic of the Los Angeles Times)
Accordingly,
Shu's work is personalized, and given its great attention to detail, we
recognize these houses as being objects of great personal love and beauty. Yet
one cannot ignore the fact that not only has Shu had to deal with a kind of
"cultural shock," but his home country is itself a house broken in two.
A companion piece, made of translucent resin, presents a more idealized version
of the specific, a kind of glowing white quartered house, which could
presumably be reunited in various forms by rearranging the four carts on which
it stands.
Were that all the artists in this show were capable of this
multi-complexity. At first, artist KIMsooja's video, "A Needle
Woman," projecting images of streets in Patan (Nepal), Havana, Rio de Janeiro,
N'Djanema (Chad), San'a (Yemen), and Jerusalem—in front of each of which the
artist herself stands with her back to the viewer—is fascinating to watch as the
various walkers in each of these locations move together and apart evidencing
the differences of the way people interrelate and simply communicate in these
very different cultures. But, in the end, since one cannot truly enter these
landscapes, we realize that the various differences we have observed are, in
fact, superficial. For the videos keep us at bay, and we can never know or
understand what truly being in those
locations means through the art.
Similarly, throughout the rest of the show the various objects, tapes,
videos, and packing materials seem more to stand in for experience than actually create new meaning or participate
in the world. Bahc Yiso's "Your Bright Future," for example, consists
of 10 floodlights, tilting to the sky, surrounded by the electrical wiring
necessary to keep the lights bright. The curators suggest that the work mimics
a crowd standing before a charismatic leader, demanding a kind of obedience to
the "great" or
"dear" leader. But the bright future, given that Bahc lived in
New York from 1982 to 1994, could be any false promise, including that of the
American dream or desire for celebrity.
Gimhongsok's videos and large stuffed animals, including a Harvey-sized
rabbit laid out on a pink sofa, "Bunny's Sofa," suggests yet another
take on the crass commercialism of all things "cute," but in the end
seems to lack the political bite it wants to suggest.
Haegue Yang, indeed, queries the whole question of even attempting to
make art by presenting a room full of small and large wooden storage containers
filled, we are told, by art he was unable to sell in various venues. Here the
all-important question of the artist's ability to pay for the storage of what
he creates comes painfully into play. But like so much else in this show, it is
a conceptual piece that leaves one with little to hold onto. An essay on the
subject might have been as elucidating as the vision of so many wrapped
bundles. How I wanted to open those carefully packed cartons and encounter what
lay within.
It is not the "conceptual" quality of this show's art,
however, of which I am complaining, but the vagueness and, often, emptiness, of
the concepts themselves. The bright future of happiness which the various
artists seem both to desire and satirize is just that, a unresolved
contradiction that transforms any possible enjoyment of the art into an empty
promise.
Los
Angeles, July 12, 2009
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (July 2009).
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