It was impossible in the crowds to enjoy the art work (artist Kang Seunghee was understandably concerned about her vulnerably-placed screen, shown last year at Gallery Yujiro), but downstairs it was quieter. Also taking refuge down there was the designer of the Centre’s interior space, Choi Jeong Hwa.

Also downstairs was the newly-appointed librarian, Eunjeong Shin (신은정), who agreed to pose in front of the bookshelves, in the process of being stocked.

Ms Shin lost no time in trying to recruit me for weekly Korean language classes starting in the Autumn.

I browsed the initial collection of books, somehow missing the rather large fluffy toy on the shelves (can anyone identify what it is?), and it looks promising. Some volumes which are on my Amazon wishlist I can now read without forking out hard cash. J Scott Burgeson will be happy to know that there are no fewer than five copies of his entertaining Korea Bug available for people to borrow. Korea Bug contains an interview with Choi Jeong Hwa, so I immediately spotted an opportunity for a celebrity photo endorsement:

As I suspected, the builders had struggled to get everything done on time and there seemed to be some finishing touches which remain outstanding, but on the way out I bumped in to someone from the Japanese cultural centre who was - rightly - rather envious of Mr Choi’s new space.

The Korean Cultural Centre UK is open Monday to Friday, 9:30am to 5:30pm. Its address is Ground Floor, Grand Buildings, 1 Northumberland Avenue, London WC2N 5EJ.

More news soon.

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The Centre officially opens at the end of the month, at a ceremony to be attended by Vice Minister Park Yang-woo from the Ministry of Culture & Tourism, and Ambassador Dr Cho Yoon-je, in one of his last official duties before returning to Seoul in February. From the official press materials:

With generous support from the Korean Ministry of Culture & Tourism and the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, the Korean Cultural Centre will showcase world-class examples of work from every cultural discipline from visual art to theatre, dance, performance and food.

Fusing the contemporary vibrancy and rich traditions of Korean culture, the programme will build on well established cultural links between Korea and the UK, offering a cutting-edge insight into trends in contemporary Korean culture - such as the dynamic emerging film scene, the recent influence of Korean music and television on the rest of Asia and the country’s innovations in new technology — as well as connections to Korea’s unique cultural heritage.

Located in Grand Buildings on the south-east (Charing Cross) side of Trafalgar Square, the Korean Cultural Centre has been designed in collaboration with artist Jeong Hwa Choi, internationally known for his project in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2005.

In addition to its art gallery, lecture room, theatre and cultural lounge, the Centre will host a library and high-tech information centre (with support from major Korean companies including LG and Samsung), offering Korean language courses and specialist lectures by academics and experts.

Mr Choi Kyu-hak, Director of the Korean Cultural Centre says: “We hope that the Korean Cultural Centre will become a vital resource for those interested in engaging with Korea’s diverse and vibrant cultural scene, by offering outstanding events at our major new central London venue. We will continue our good relationships with organisations such as London International Mime Festival, the Liverpool Biennial and the Thames Festival to create dynamic and engaging events off-site throughout 2008.”

Good news indeed.

Choi Jeong-hwa, one of Korea’s hippest artists, is also know for his interior design projects. He had a temporary design installed in Asia House’s Cafe T during the Through the Looking Glass exhibition last year (right), while way back in 1993, when Apkujong-dong had yet to become quite the destination venue it is now, Choi was in the vanguard in designing the Botticelli fashion boutique. The design for the lounge of the Cultural Centre is shown above. Note the circular coffee tables - familiar from the Asia House installation.

In a deal concluded on 12 November 2007, the Cultural Centre has taken out a 15 year lease on the ground floor and basement (units E and F) of Grand Buildings at the corner of Trafalgar Square. Map below.

More soon, on the high-profile art exhibition that will be the Centre’s first public event.

Acknowledgements:

• J Scott Burgeson’s Korea Bug for background on Choi’s early design projects
• Louise for her detective work on the lease.

Links:

• Korean Cultural Centre website.
• Other articles about the Cultural Centre, including the launch events

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A recent article in the JoongAng daily about a foreigner in Seoul who hasn’t made himself popular with hypersensitive and volatile Korean netizens introduced me to a gem. Burgeson, a foreigner who has been in Seoul since 1996 is one of the more unusual expats out there in that he takes an interest in the local culture, to the extent of having set up his own ‘zine — a home-produced, street-vended amateur magazine covering, well, just about anything the author feels like. It’s a sort of heavyweight, hard-copy blog. And in Burgeson’s case it made a point of trying to engage with and explore Korean culture, particularly those elements which seem unusual to a foreigner.

The zine was called Bug, and the current book is a personal selection of some of his meatier articles.

It’s the sort of stuff you can’t find in some of the more serious cultural books out there. You’ve heard of that famous tailor in Itaewon — U.S. Kim, the one who’s made suits for President Reagan? The Bug interviewed him before he retired, and a fascinating story he has. Ever been interested in what a shaman does? The Bug has interviewed one, and we get the low-down of the bitchiness in top shamanistic circles. A kisaeng? A fortune-teller? Been there, done that.

Read this collection, and you’ll find yourself becoming interested in things you never knew existed. How about Yi Paksa, King of Disco Ppongtchak? After reading the Bug’s interview, I’ve just got to track down the classic album Shinparam Yi Paksa! (신바람 이박사!), which sold between 1 and 10 million copies, depending on who you believe.

Some of the time, Burgeson’s enthusiasm gets the better of him. A fifty-page introduction on the history of expat zining in its various manifestations could easily have been half the length. And in the concluding chapter, an internet email discussion between current and former expats about the existential imperative of transcultural engagement, some of the participants are so far up their own fundaments that they sound as if they are auditioning for the part of that hippy dude in Northern Exposure who talks rather too much on the local radio station. But overall there’s a huge amount to enjoy. There’s an interview with Hong Sang Soo before he became famous, plus (female) directors Im Soon-rye (임순례 - Three Friends) and Byun Young-joo (변영주 - The Murmuring, Ardor). An interview with artist Choi Jeong-hwa when he was young and cool, and taekkyon master Lee Yong-bok, who comes clean about the fact that taekwondo is really just a recent derivative of karate ^[1].

Each chapter has a rambling introduction, never less than readable and sometimes with some fascinating snippets. Like how he would have liked to have re-published his interview with artist Lee Bul — but she and her legal advisers are now far too important to have anything to do with a lowly zinester. This little story is totally believable given her unwillingness to co-operate with the recent BAKS article on contemporary Korean artists.

Other gems? A feature on the collection of paintings unearthed in North Korea depicting Jesus performing miracles in Chosun dysnasty Korea; and a chapter on totally weird books written by foreigners about Korea — such as the one claiming that Koreans are really a lost tribe of Israel. Or that Koreans are in fact descendents of colonists from ancient Greece.

While there are a few dull moments, the best bits are so good that this book deserves a straight five stars. It’s a collection which is well worth searching out, for those interested in the zany, the bizarre, the Korean.

Links:

• Buy Korea Bug at Seoul Selection
• Another review at Koreabridge
• White hands, zucchini and a mean girlfriend, a feature on J Scott Burgeson in the JoongAng Daily, 22 June 2007
• Burgeson’s own site (turn down the volume if you’re viewing from work)
• Taekkyon: A Martial Arts Comeback, Colin Moore in OhMyNews, 19 October 2007

1. Or is it just that he has to say such things as master of a more ancient art? I await the hate mail from TKD fans. But before you hit “send” check out this article in the Chosun
   

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Choi has celebrated by wrapping the gallery in bright-coloured ribbons (below left) - a project reminiscent of his installation as part of the Seoul Until Now! group exhibition in Copenhagen (2005), when he wrapped the Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall with discarded commercial banners.

Choi (born in 1961), sometimes known as Korea’s “pop artist”, is also an architect and designer. He designed the set for Park Chul-soo’s 1995 food-obsession film 301, 302, and created the interior for the Botticelli fashion boutique in Seoul’s trendy Apkujong-dong ^[1]. He is one of Korea’s more prominent artists, having participated in Korea’s pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Wolverhampton is at least his third appearance in the UK, since he adorned Liverpool’s Lime Street station in 2004 as part of their biennial festival of contemporary art, and participated in the group show Through the Looking Glass in Asia House, London.

From the press release:

Choi Jeong Hwa’s work draws its inspiration from influences as wide ranging as the Black Country’s industrial heritage, Asian weddings, Caribbean carnivals and charity shops, engaging with the local area. Dominating the gallery’s new atrium space will be an imposing ‘chimney’ built from cheap, mass-produced, black plastic baskets. Alongside this striking centrepiece, Choi Jeong Hwa will also show Caribbean carnival costumes and traditional Korean dress to celebrate the cultural diversity of the city and region.

Choi Jeong Hwa is an artist concerned with the fundamental functions and roles of art. He explores the theme in this exhibition by bringing together a unique mixture of objects and works from twenty-five other contemporary Korean artists, from the collections of Wayne Hemmingway and Stella Mitchell, New Art Gallery Walsall, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, the Frank Cohen Collection, The University of Wolverhampton and Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s own collection. These objects, including work by Korean avant-garde artist Lee Seung Taek, Andy Warhol, Joe Tilson, Gavin Turk, Vladimir Tretchikoff and Margaret Keane, will be juxtaposed against work from emerging art students, Egyptian sculpture, Victorian genre painting, African hair combs, and contemporary furniture by designers Pottinger and Cole. The unusual combinations of old and new, unknown and established, manufactured and bespoke create an alternative context in which the original value of the objects is questioned

This exhibition asks why objects are worthy of collection and explores the value of popular, mass-produced and commercial objects. This ‘fake museum’ concept continues throughout the gallery with whimsical interventions by the artist appearing within Wolverhampton Art Gallery’s permanent collections.

Cabinets will display a ‘People’s Silverware Collection’, a mixture of objects from the Gallery’s Elkington plate collection, silverware borrowed from local people’s homes and plastic items wrapped in silver foil. This demonstrates the importance Choi Jeong Hwa places on community involvement, in his work, making connections with Wolverhampton and the locale.

Welcome combines these installations and commissions with some of Choi Jeong Hwa’s better known and loved pieces such as Lotus (2005), shown at the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale and his giant pile of plastic magnets in 2005 which will invite the public to create their own art. His work will be visible not only to gallery visitors, as he puts his unique stamp on the building’s exterior, wrapping the Victorian structure with huge lengths of fluorescent material, tied in diagonal strands, spanning the full height of the gallery.

Welcome has been co-curated by Kate Pryor of Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Jiyoon Lee, who also curated the Asia House exhibition and co-curated Seoul Until Now!.

Welcome runs from 23 June to 1 September 2007.

Links:

• Seoul Until Now: report on Copenhagen’s city website (the Seoul Until Now official exhibition website seems to have died)
• 2005 Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale
• Welcome at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery

1. Source: J Scott Burgeson, Korea Bug

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Review of the Asia House exhibition by Beccy Kennedy

The multi-storey, multi-story exhibition of contemporary Korean art at Asia House, Through the Looking Glass, provides a multi-faceted Korean art experience, in terms of the media used and the themes approached by the artists. Independent curator, Jiyoon Lee, uses the looking glass as an audience-friendly metaphor to describe the need for investigation between the worlds of Britain and Korea, as they collide within a globalising world. On one side of the glass are Korean art works, from an art world of which the British mind is perhaps unfamiliar; on the other side of the glass is this uninformed British consciousness, carrying with it assumptions and expectations of Korean culture. The two worlds can see each other but are still partitioned by an invisible barrier, which is in need of some breaking, in order for a complete fusion of understanding and meaning to be embraced. This exhibition challenges the currently underdeveloped dialogue between the British and Korean art worlds. As part of Britain’s Think Korea season, “Through the Looking Glass” has uncovered a vital and vitalising channel into the contemporary Korean art scene.

A range of art works from South Korea are presented by artists using a mixture of media, from figurative cold war themed oil painting (Jiwoon Kim’s Mendrami, 2004) to real time, motional, water based video projection (Youngjin Kim’s Fluid, 2006) (below right). The depth and variety of art forms and styles is striking, as they interlace their way through the Georgian rooms and corridors of the Asia House space, not forgetting the ladies’ toilets, where Meekyoung Shin’s metallicised soap Translation-Buddha (2006) (left) offers to literally and spiritually cleanse the viewer of their cultural preconceptions.

This is also explored in Shin’s other soap sculptures, such as Translation-Crouching Aphrodite, a Greek styled soap statue of herself (Korean), which raises questions of art historical authenticity and the historicity of the East - West dichotomy or Orientalism. Other artists to approach these issues are Duck-Hyun Cho, in his commissioned Sir Peter Wakefield Collection (2006) and Jeong-Hwa Choi in his plastic suspended sculptures, such as Green, (2006) (left) which is comprised of fluorescent green baskets, with a look of production line aesthetics, joined together to form an elegant, stupa like chandelier. This juxtaposition of contemporary materials with traditionally “oriental” subject matter is also present in Choi’s motor generated Lotus (2006); two waterproof lotus flowers whose “pond” is actually a pre-fabricated concrete rooftop, which can be unexpectedly spotted from a window of one of the first floor exhibition rooms.

Yong-Baek Lee’s In-between (2006) provides a similarly astonishing visual impact. A mirrored box stands at knee level and at first seems to offer nothing but the viewer’s own distorted reflection, until a religiously iconic head transmogrifying from Buddha to Jesus, flies forwards from within the far side of the box then disappears, before reappearing again, in a continual flux of celestial confusion. In-between raises possible questions of religious indigeneity and mutability caused by international movements and globalisation. It challenges Western preconceptions of Eastern countries’ religions and thus traditionalisms, as Christianity has been recorded to be South Korea’s predominant religion ^[1]. Lee’s work is housed at basement level, alongside the impressive and challenging multi-media installations of Youngjin Kim and Beom Kim. Beom Kim’s montage of hundreds of Korean newsreader clips, assimilates a seemingly coherent monologue of the newsreader on the surface, but quickly it becomes clear that the content of what they are saying is banal. This questions the repetitiveness and absurdity of news based dialogue and how the mass media plays an authoritative role in constructing the audience’s knowledge of the “world”. Next to Kim’s work is Kyuchul Ahn’s Abandoned Doors (2006), a small house, into which you can enter, made from unused wooden doors, discarded during the 60s and 70s in Korea, an era which is sometimes viewed as lost within its transitory quest for industrialisation. Like Sora Kim’s Runaway (2006) poem/music installation, consisting (post-performance) of books, taken from the Asia House collection, stacked face-up on shelves; the scale and interactive aspect of the works welcome the viewer to engage empathetically with the histories in question. It also raises an awareness of the well needed current concerns of integrating environmentalism into art works.

Yeongdoo Jung’s photographs and paintings, Wonderland (2004), which occupy the main room on the first floor, offer a charming passage into the childhood psyche. Each colourful drawing of a favourite story or daily experience of the child artists (example left) is elaborately reproduced in the form of a staged photograph by Jung (below right). The attention to detail in the transliterated photographs emphasises the imaginations of the children and provokes a nostalgic glimpse into the viewer’s own forgotten interpretations of life. Jung’s work nicely compliments and assimilates the general “wonderland” theme of the exhibition ^[2].

At Through the Looking Glass, Korean art is not reduced, as it sometimes is, to an overview of its own “Korean identity” or “Korean-ness”; an approach which simplifies and generalises Korean art, confining it to a periphery. The British viewer’s vision of Korea as a country as seen through the “Looking Glass” is as diverse and inconclusive a statement on Korean culture as a British art show, such as The Turner Prize, is to British culture. It is an enlightening, educational and eclectic opening for contemporary Korean art works in Britain, not a crude guide to Korea’s history and traditionalism as traced through their modern art scene. Jiyoon Lee has allowed for open interpretations of the art works by using a wide range of artists and little accompanying written analysis. The visitor is invited to experience and explore the art works comfortably, without needing prior knowledge of art or of Korea. Upon magnification there will be elements visible of Korea’s traditional “wonders” within the exhibition but it is also edifying of contemporary Korean lifestyles. The degree of multi-dimensionality experienced during the journey of Through the Looking Glass, depends on who’s holding the looking glass, how carefully they gaze and at what angle they choose to hold it.

Links:

• Official exhibition website with images and artist biographies.

1. ”According to a 1995 social statistics survey, 50.7 percent of Koreans follow a specific religious faith. Buddhists number 10,321,0123 or 45.6 percent of the religious population; Protestants 8,760,336 or 38.7 percent; Catholics 2,950,730 or 13.1 percent; and Confucianists 210,927 or 0.9 percent,” The Korean Embassy, http://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/korea/pro-religion.htm
2. The full set of Jung’s Wonderland images are on his website here

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Yesterday morning’s panel session gave a priveleged ^[1] insight into the work of some of the artists represented at the stimulating show at Asia House. Chaired by Beth McKillop of the V&A, the discussant panel included Alessio Antoniolli from Gasworks, Hans Ulrich Obrist from The Serpentine, curator Jiyoon Lee and artists Duck-hyun Cho, Yeondoo Jung, Jeong-hwa Choi and Meekyoung Shin.

The artists presented some of their work outside of the pieces on display at Asia House.

Choi Jeong-hwa talked about his colourful Flower Tree installations (most recently in Singapore - left) and his Happy Happy project in Christchurch, New Zealand (right), which fences off a children’s play area with brightly-coloured plastic objects. Other works (such as the chandelier on display at Asia House) used plastic baskets in bright primary colours.

Cho Duck-hyun introduced some of his games with history. His project in San Francisco in 2003:

Cho creates performance-like excavations in which life-size, fiberglass dogs are first buried in the ground and then dug up by professional archaeologists and presented for public display. The artist also invents a narrative “history” of the excavated dogs; this is usually based on a combination of Korean legends and local folklore and myths. In manufacturing physical evidence for fictional cultures, he blurs the boundaries between science and art.

Encrusted with Korean soil, the twenty dogs on view in the museum’s North Court - along with a video documenting their “discovery” - were made and used by Cho for an excavation conducted in his homeland. For his work Eureka, another twenty dogs are being unearthed in a multi-tiered archaeological pit created just outside the Asian Art Museum building, near the northwest corner of Hyde and McAllister streets. The dogs were buried in June 2003; the excavation, which began in August, is being conducted by Archeo-Tec, a preeminent Bay Area archaeological firm. Museum visitors will be able to view the excavation site as part of the exhibit. The history Cho created for the dogs “discovered” outside the museum combines the themes of immigration, late-nineteenth-century San Francisco political history, and the Korean legend of a lost civilization called Yiseoguk.

The spoof documentary video of the dogs being excavated reminded one of the Chinese terracotta army. A similar archaeological project was devised with “relics” from Hendrik Hamel’s seventeenth-century journey through Korea - this time dropped into and then dredged up from a Dutch canal.

Yeondoo Jung’s project “Bewitched” focuses on the dreams of ordinary people. All the images from the project are on his site. Seriously worth a look (be patient: the page takes a long time to load). He also talked about his Evergreen project: a set of family portraits taken in the identical living rooms of flats in an apartment block. He mentioned the first showing of this project, to which all the families were invited. It’s comforting to know that people are the same the world over: the families were interested more in seeing what the inside of their neighbours’ flats looked like, than in looking at their own pictures.

Finally, Meekyoung Shin introduced some of her classical-style self-portraits in soap, one of which has been on show in the British Museum Great Court (see p 50 of the attached document).

I’ve studiously avoided commenting on any of the works in the Asia House show itself, because I’m hoping that a new contributor will be writing a review for this site and I don’t want to steal her thunder. But for the chaps among you, go along: it’s probably the only time in your life you will be positively encouraged to go and wash your hands in the ladies’ loo. Oh, and you get to use one of those brand new little iPods which only went on sale this week.

Links:

• Further images of the panel discussion and some of the works in the exhibition. Most of the photos are by Young-Ae KIM, journalist at Wolganmisool - The Korean Monthly Art Magazine, as is the one at the top left of this article. The above images of works by Choi Jeong-hwa are from the websites linked to in the text.
• More posts about Through the Looking Glass

1. And good value, at only £4

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