By: Contemporary Art showcase at KCC | London Korean Links

Contemporary Art showcase at KCC | London Korean Links — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:53:19 +0000

[...] Read Grace Kim’s review of the show here. [...]

By: Philip Gowman

Philip Gowman — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:11:29 +0000

Thanks for the review Grace. You easily beat me to it, and there was no way I was going to get my own review polished up before the exhibition finished. For the record, here belatedly are the bullet points that were floating round my head and which I would have organised into something more articulate if I’d had time.

Despite having many more artists on display than the KCC’s inaugural exhibition, this second show seemed less cluttered and more coherent. There were certainly fewer logistical infelicities, and a good attempt had been made to organise the widely disparate nature of the different works into three sections.
The first section, branded “Embedded in Eastern Philosophy” I found most accessible. But even within this section there was a wide variety of approaches. If I had a bottomless bank account, Park Seo-bo’s Myobop would be the one for me, but I also appreciated Yoo Seung-ho’s homage to old Korean ink painting, Love, soft breeze – from afar looking like watery washes of ink, but up close made up of tiny Hangeul characters in pencil: the work chimes in with Jiyoon Lee’s comment about there being a category of contemporary Korean art which involves an immense amount of painstaking work. Kim Jin-ah’s pixellated kimchi cabbage and Park Hyung-jin’s table-top barbeque floating like a flying saucer didn’t mean much to me. I enjoyed Cha Kyu-sun’s landscape painted like buncheong pottery, and Han Ki-joo’s work moulding hanji paper onto sculpted wood.
Kim Sang-woo’s Generations, an innocent looking large oil of a Seoul street scene, had some poignancy, depicting an old man walking with a slight stoop, lost in his own thoughts, followed by a child wearing a T-shirt with Disney cartoon characters. Rather unremarkable and understated in terms of style, but I found myself standing in front of it longer than I expected.
I probably need to educate myself in respect of video art. Given that some of the sponsorship of the KCC comes from LG in the form of flat-screen video displays, my guess is that video art will be a recurring feature of the shows here. But given – as your review suggests – that many people will be paying the exhibition a visit for a quick half an hour at lunchtime, there’s no time to figure out the video works. Lee Hye-rim’s pink doe-eyed anime woman? Afraid she’s not my type, and the “whiplash” sounded more like a camera shutter than anything more exotic. Kim Hae-min’s TV Hammer engaged with the viewer more directly than one normally expects. And as you point out, An Jung-ju’s video work of the antics of the Kashmiri border guards is immediately accessible and fun to watch, with the obvious connection with Korea’s own internal border.

By: Grace Kim

Grace Kim — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:14:59 +0000

To the Dear Editor: The title of this review should have been TEN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW. [Now fixed - Ed] The LKL link to the Hye-Rim Lee article from New Zealand was fantastic. From your Comrade Author

Comments on: Ten contemporary Korean artists you should know

By: Contemporary Art showcase at KCC | London Korean Links

By: Philip Gowman

By: Grace Kim