Around the main exhibition space, affixed to the windows, were Francesca Cho’s ‘stained glass’ drawings Fruit of Words and Tree of Words, (coloured pencil on tracing paper). Aimed at children, they contained Ghandi’s adage: ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’ – a couple of words from the motto were inscribed on each of the panels, so that as you walked around the room the pictures told a story. Deceptively simple in style, yet nevertheless containing a powerful message. In a welcome attempt at education and multiculturalism, some of the panels contained Hangeul script as well as English (above left - click to enlarge), and one afternoon earlier in the week Cho had spent an hour in a workshop with local school children explaining her work and encouraging the children to explore their own responses, which were displayed in the library the following week.

Francesca Cho’s Little Dream Garden, tucked in to the porchway either side of the front door, looked somewhat dark and forlorn when I visited, a consequence of the time of day: with the candles unlit, the work was full of potential, but without the magic and spirituality that the work takes on as soon as the flames are brought to life. Presumably a combination of cost and the potential fire hazard meant that the work could not be seen at its best the whole time. The use of feathers hung on nylon threads suspended above the candles seemed to symbolise free-floating spirits waving in the breeze.

Fortunately Jo Seong-hee visited the exhibition at a more auspicious time (or took her own matches) and fully captured the impact of the installation, as it was intended to be experienced.

Peaceful and uplifting.

Free Words was at Mayfair Public Library 15 - 31 July 2008. Francesca Cho’s installation was sponsored by Rolawn, and mentioned on their blog here.

Photo credits: images with candles lit, plus top right “stained glass” picture are all by Jo Seong-hee.

Psycho Buildings

Suh’s work has in the past explored aspects of identity, from his Some / one sculpture of a warrior crafted out of US military dog-tags, to his floor made of tiny figures holding up a sheet of glass. In another group of installations, his trademark is the recreation of interiors and exteriors of domestic spaces by carefully hanging sheets of diaphanous silk or nylon. He has created both western and Korean domestic spaces, inviting the viewer to enter and explore their own reaction to the architecture.

When entering the Psycho Buildings exhibition the first room is filled with nylon gauze creating an architectural space. The shapes are organic – walking into the main womb-like room the viewer encounters giant distended scrotums filled with spices. This however is not Suh Do-ho exploring curves: it’s a psycho construction, enigmatically titled Life Fog Frog … Fog Frog created by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. One has to wait till the top floor of the exhibition to see Suh’s more familiar style, with the installation Staircase V.

On the way out of the Hayward, one passes through one of Rachael Whiteread’s more approachable works, Place: gone are the grey monoliths of concrete moulding domestic architecture like a three dimensional photographic negative, or archive boxes filled with plaster: instead, a darkened room containing a carefully laid out shanty-town of dolls houses filled with tiny lights.

If Whiteread’s work in the show is more human than her previous offerings, Suh’s work in this upstars feels more Whiteread-like than his previous work. The walls and floor of the room are perfectly empty. Suspended from a ceiling of red nylon is the outside of a staircase. Those who have lived in a Victorian house will be immediately familiar with the shapes involved. The details of the room itself are left to the imagination. Instead Suh concentrates on the negative space, the way the storey above impinges on the room we are in. But through the semi-transparent walls of the stairwell we can see details like a light switch or the banisters on the floor above.

It is worth quoting a passage from the documentation accompanying the exhibition, as it casts light on many aspects of Suh’s work:

What I found interesting in Western architecture was the distinct separation between nature and the artificial space: there’s a wall. You create a space totally separate from the outside. In the Korean house where I used to live, there are not many walls. It’s all windows and doors – and the material of the windows and doors is all semi-transparent rice paper, so there’s a sense that architecture is very porous. There’s a sense of permeability, versus opaqueness.

But the most striking installation in the exhibition is Suh’s more solid work. We are very used to talk of diaspora artists exploring the interaction of their native and adoptive cultures and identities. Suh’s Fallen Star 1/5 explores culture clash in a very literal way. The hanok he grew up in has been whisked from Korea to Providence, Rhode Island by a whirlwind and has collided with the brownstone building which was Suh’s first home in America. In exact 1:5 scale detail the effect of the impact is described: rubble on the floor, chaos in the individual rooms.

On the way out from the exhibition, there’s a dramatic installation created by the Cuban artists Los Carpinteros, showing a freeze-frame impact of a sudden disaster on a Show Room. Pieces of masonry are suspended in mid-air by nylon fishing line. The cause of the disaster is unknown, but the viewer is in the middle of it. In Suh’s installation, the calamity has already happened, and the rubble is on the floor. It’s puzzling that he sees the coming together of his Korean past and American present as so destructive. Paradoxically, however, he intends to pursue this idea further: subject to funding (and presumably, a suitable space), he aims to create a full-scale, 1:1 version of this work.

Psycho Buildings continues at the Hayward Gallery until 25 August. The above artwork images were kindly provided by the Hayward Gallery. The thumbnail of Suh Do-ho himself is from Designboom. Credits:

• Suh Do Ho: Fallen Star 1/5, 2008
  ABS, basswood, beech, ceramic, enamel paint, glass, honeycomb board, laquer paint, latex paint, LED lights, pinewood, plywood, resin, spruce, styrene, polycarbonate sheets, PVC sheets
  Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
  Photo: © Stephen White
• Suh Do Ho: Staircase – V, 2003/04/08
  Polyester and stainless steel tubes
  Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
  Photo: © Stephen White

Suh Do-ho resources:

• Interview at Designboom, which also has a load of good images of Suh’s earlier work
• Artnet - some more images
• Absolutearts - Suh Do-ho in Seattle, 2002

The Situation: Back to Basics
July 17, 2008 7:00 pm to July 18, 2008 1:00 am. The Situation presents the dialectical unification of art and life: art / music / performance / social / life at arch635, 15-16 Lendal Terrace, Clapham North tube, SW4.

If you can work out what it’s all about, please leave a comment below. But the reason why I’m mentioning it here is that one of my favourite Korean artists working in London is participating in it.

I first came across Kwon Dae-hun’s work at I-MYU in November last year (pictured left) – rather intriguing sculptures / installations involving metal or hanji paper, with the emphasis on light and shade.

I failed to make it to his installation at the Electric Blue event on the South Bank earlier this year, but someone sneaked a camcorder in:

Do go along tomorrow for what promises to be an interesting experience. If you happen to be in Seoul, pop along to the Seoul Museum of Art, where he’s participating in the group show Your Mind’s Eye: Digital Spectrum, from tomorrow (17 July) till 23 August. Details in the following flyer:

Links

• London Lit Plus website
• The Situation website and MySpace page

Left: Lim Taek: Transferred Landscape. Right: Lee Sea-hyun: Between Red

Stand in front of Lim Taek’s surreal landscapes and what appears on the surface is some entertaining Photoshop trickery.

Lim’s creative technique is to first create a three-dimensional model of a range of mountains, in a highly simplified style. The mountains are then decorated with models of temples and other items. At an exhibition, spectators can wander through these model landscapes (right) – a recent installation was in Insa Art Centre (2006).

Playing with two and three dimensions, Lim dots his landscapes with real bonsai trees and cut-out photos of trees. Having introduced one jarring element into his work, Lim has only just started. He plays with introducing elements from different geographies (giraffes and flamingos rather than tigers and cranes grace his landscapes - left); chronologies (an SUV is seen climbing the mountain) or cultures (a Japanese lady is seen enjoying the sun). Into this melee Lim brings the actual spectator. As spectators wander through the installation, they are photographed and the resulting miniature cut-outs are then introduced into the landscape.

The fun really begins when Lim photographs the three dimensional landscape installation and starts playing with his software.

Lim, like most Korean art students, is well-drilled in traditional Korean and Chinese landscape painting. The genre depicts mountains, waterfalls, auspicious items of flora and fauna, and maybe a scholar contemplating his latest compositions outside a pavilion.

Left: Lim Taek: Transferred Landscape Journey 0717 (2007) Digital Print

Once the conventions are understood, it’s easier to start playing with them. Perhaps Lim’s most obvious joke is to overturn the convention regarding the purity of white space. Instead of leaving the “canvas” white to depict the sky, and instead of lavishing attention to detail on the landscape itself, Lim reverses the convention – colourful skies (deep blue or a crazy swirling green - right) and plain white mountains. Photoshop enables all sorts of games to be played: valley floors seem to be shrouded in mist, while the rest of the landscape is clear. Colours, of course, are far from natural. And where some of the juxtapositions cannot be achieved in the physical world, they are possible in the digital world: Lim is able to play with the interplay of the possible (if unlikely) and impossible (in the latter category falls the depiction Lim himself riding a seagull or a giant butterfly - just visible above). Lim calls his series of work “transferred landscape” – a riotous parody of the classical landscape genre.

Unusual physical juxtapositions and a playfulness with two and three dimensions link Lim Taek’s playful parody landscapes with Lee Sea Hyun’s more sombre creations.

While Lim’s images start from a carefully constructed three-dimensional model and is then collapsed into two dimensions through the medium of photography, Lee takes great care to create the correct sense of perspective in his landscapes – the parallel lines in the ploughed fields converge correctly into a distant vanishing point in strict Western style. Yet as the endless number of rocky outcrops and peninsulas meet the sky and the ocean the eye is confused by a flat, two dimensional effect, like giant craggy fingers scratching the page (left)

While Lim’s landscapes are clearly a jumble of contrasts and contradictions, stand in front of Lee’s landscapes and you see, initially, harmonious and homogeneous compositions. The unusual feature of Lee’s work is the colour – apparently inspired by Lee’s experiences wearing infra-red night-vision goggles while on military service near the DMZ. We see the landscapes through this ghostly red filter, and the unreality is reinforced by the fact that the landscapes are empty of people.

To this particular viewer, the colour recalls more the bleeding red laments and angry protests of minjung artist Lim Ok Sang, where the land itself seems to grieve for the wounds inflicted in war and by the Yushin policies of Park Chung-hee. Yet minjung politics is not something that Lee espouses in his statements. Instead, his business is more with the quiet beauty of the countryside of the DMZ.

Lee Sea-hyun: Between Red 33, 2007. 400 x 250 cm, oil on canvas

Included in Lee’s fantasy landscapes are, we are told, mountain ranges from both north and south of the DMZ; an educated eye can maybe make out northern and southern styles of rural domestic architecture. And probably an even better educated eye can detect differences in the landscapes due to different farming practices. (Indeed, one or two of the fields almost look as if they could be located in Northern France).

Although they are intricately crafted Lee’s landscapes are no less impossible than Lim Taek’s. In piling peak upon peak, the composition recalls the type of mountainous picture a child might draw, or a type of Tolkeinesque world (above). One is drawn into the landscape, forced to trace the flow of a river from its origins in a mountain waterfall to the broader flow in the plains. But on close inspection there are things not right with the landscape. In the real world, one does not find carefully ploughed farmland in a valley in the heart of a vertical-sloped mountain range. Only in a fantasy landscape do you see a tiny band-stand-like pavilion perched on an outcrop just above some farm buildings. Nowhere will you find a grand Namdaemun-style gate (right) or a lighthouse perched atop an ugly mound of concrete tetrapods (left) located so close to a pastoral idyll.

And if you look more closely at the full collection – titled “Between Red”, you will see the evidence of what looks like Photoshop – or at least a collage-based approach. In different pictures you will see precisely the same line of trees, precisely the same farm buildings, the same mountain waterfall, the same breakwater or lighthouse, all in precisely the same dimensions and orientation, as if these elements are mix-and-match building blocks of Lee’s infra-red world.

What Lee is trying to say by this repetition is unclear, but individually the compositions are pleasing to the eye and reward more in-depth study by asking the viewer questions about historical conflict and the environmental impact of economic progress. Indeed, despite the title, the series seems to be more about red’s complementary colour: green.

Lim Taek: Transferred Landscapes. I-MYU Projects 7-24 March 2008
Lee Sea-hyun: Between Red. Union Gallery 7 May - 5 July 2008

Links:

• I-MYU Projects website
• Union Gallery website

Francesca Cho will be participating in the group exhibition ‘Free words’ at the Mayfair Public Library, 15 - 31 July.

This is the first exhibition to be held in the library space and complements nicely the National Year of Reading. ‘Free words’ explores the censored word, printed matter and use of language as means of expression, through the interpretations of five artists, with site specific installations, painting, photography and sound pieces:

• Marisol Cavia
• Francesca Cho
• Sumer Erek
• Marko Stepanov
• Katie Sollohub

Mayfair Public Library is at 25 South Audley Street, Mayfair, London W1K 2PB [Map]. Opening hours 11am-7pm weekdays, 10:30am-2:00pm Saturdays.

Cho’s installation is sponsored by Rolawn, who also sponsored her previous turf installation at Conran’s Bluebird shop

Links:

• Free Word Show channel on YouTube
• Notice of exhibition on City of Westminster website
• Rolawn website

The Union’s press release follows:

UNION is pleased to launch a new catalogue by Korean artist Sea Hyun Lee.

Sea Hyun Lee’s paintings are a constant and obsessive shuffling of recurring fragments. His unmistakable series of landscapes are rendered in delicate but pervasive washes of red - large swaths of unmarked white meandering between islands of crimson land. The blank spaces are harshly set against the carefully detailed fragments in red yet cohering into the flawless totality that is created by each painting.

This body of work endlessly revisits and reconstitutes the landscape of the DMZ - The Demilitarized Zone cutting across the Korean Peninsula that acts as a buffer zone between North and South Korea. Reworking fragments of terrain, blocks of land and water, Lee creates a world functioning according to the logic of its own terms. In this sense, it is a world that is entirely hermetic - appropriately so, considering that the territory Lee depicts is defined by the very impregnability of its borders:

When I was serving my mandatory military service, I would be in a tactical area at night, close to the border. I would wear night vision goggles, which coated everything in red. The forests and trees felt so fantastic and beautiful. It was unrealistic scenery filled with horror and fear, and with no possibility of entering.

Lee’s painting functions both on a political and on an aesthetic level. The symbols employed in his work - whether it is the filter of red or the way in which each of his imagined landscapes combine elements of both the North and South Korean mountain ranges into a seamless single landscape - set the visual terms of his paintings, while also delivering a concise political message.

These are also deeply personal works that reference Lee’s own sense of the past and its losses. Here, Lee tarries with two familiar ideas: nostalgia and utopia. But he avoids approaching either with mere simplicity or mere skepticism. Instead, his paintings are infused with a sophisticated sense of nostalgia, and a wry idea of utopia.

Sea Hyun Lee was born in Geoje Island, South Korea in 1967. Graduating from M.F.A Chelsea College, London in 2006, he currently lives and works in London. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Neuberger Museum of Art, New York; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Susak Expo, Island of Susak, Croatia; Museum of Hunabaci, Japan.

For more information please contact: +44 (0)20 7928 3388 or: info [at] union-gallery [dot] com

The Union is at 57 Ewer Street, London SE1 0NR, underneath the railway arches.

Links:

• Union Gallery website

One of the Korean artists featured was Choi So-young (b 1980), who has a show coming up at the Union Gallery later this year. Choi specialises in creating panoramic landscapes out of recycled denim. Her 3 meter wide cityscape (below) was sold for the equivalent of USD232,714.

The Union Gallery are still collecting your old jeans to be transformed into Choi’s next creation. See here for details.

Other artists whose work was sold last week were (images bottom, left to right):

• Hong Kyoung Tack (b 1968), whose colourful Library II (1995-2001) raised USD588,000 (just beating the top end estimate by 10%, and setting a new record for the artist)
• Kim Tschang Yeul (b 1929), whose peaceful large scale oil Water Drops (1981) raised USD542,000
• Kim Dong Yoo (b 1965), whose greyscale pixellated Rose & Explosion (2003) raised USD403,000
• Chun Kwang Young (b 1944), whose sculptural hanji creation Aggregation (2006) raised USD279,000 (more or less doubling the pre-sale estimate)

Click on the thumbnails below and the image above to be taken to the relevant page of the Christie’s website.

Links:

• Christie’s post-sale press release
• Christie’s pre-sale press release: “Largest and most-valuable sale of Asian Contemporary Art ever offered”

Image credits: Christie’s Images Ltd

Britain’s first Triennial of Asian Art launched earlier this month, when a gaggle of global art goers gathered in the grandiose foyer and atrium of Manchester Art Gallery to preview the outstanding art installations from Korea. Of the five Asian countries selected by galleries in Manchester: China, India, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, the largest gallery chose striking art works by Korean artists, Gwon Osang and Choe U-ram.

Upon entering the foyer of Manchester Art Gallery, Gwon Osang’s shiny photo montaged life sized figures greet the visitor wearing their casual clothes and animated poses, as they stand, on their plinths on either side of the staircase. Gwon visited Manchester last year and was inspired by a performance by Mancunian musician, Graham Massey, so decided to model a Styrofoam sculpture on him, YAMAHA (left), commissioned by Manchester Art Gallery. Gwon, who is interested in how body language and hand gestures alternate between cultures, worked one to one with Massey to produce a ‘glocal’ cultural creation, uniting Mancunian cultural chic with the typically careful craftsmanship of a contemporary Korean artist. YAMAHA stands opposite Control (bottom), a young Korean male, complimenting and contrasting Massey, clad in similarly casual gear but with a puzzlingly different pose. Gwon covers his figures with hundreds of snap shots of the model which include every separate part of the figure’s body, fused together on the surface of the sculpture to form a holistic yet slightly disjointed visual assimilation. Does this signify the complexity of our human biological mechanisms and the similarity of our genetic makeup across nations? Or, perhaps it represents the fractured and hyper-realistic nature of our identity formations in an increasingly media orientated globe.

Similarly surreal in outlook, are two mechanized metallic organisms from Choe U-ram’s extraordinary animal empire (right). Urbanus Male and Urbanus Female (below) co-habit the upper echelon of the gallery’s atrium. Suspended from the roof, like dinosaur skeletons, the two fictional creatures move interactively at regular intervals, catching the viewer unaware. Visitors have reportedly fallen in love with the robotic romance of these silver skinned structures, whose particular habitation requirements and personalities are described in the accompanying labeling. Not dissimilar in theme and style to Lee Hyungkoo’s faux-scientific sculptures, Choe creates creatures from naturalistic looking shapes, whose intangible familiarity is juxtaposed with the familiar intangibility of museum and mass media reduced science. Lee and Choe share this thoughtful mix of contemporary cultural commentation and stunning workmanship. Lee’s sculptures were the focus of the Venice Biennial 2007, and here, Choe’s works were the feature within the space for the opening speeches of Asia Triennial Manchester.

Choe U-ram: Urbanus Female (photo: Caroline Bradley)

The Tri/biennial phenomenon has been shaping and been shaped by the international contemporary art scene, increasingly, over the past twenty years. Art critics are sceptical of the ‘pick a country’ approach to representing global art, or curatorial themes which aim to characterize a particular continent or nation’s cultural attributes. Asia Triennial Manchester 08, organised by the Asian arts agency Shisha, aimed to keep the artistic themes open, around the issue of ‘protest’ reflecting how individual artists use dissent in their work. Perhaps, this protest is also manifested within Shisha’s own autonomic approach to the triennial, as they have decentralised the omnipotent chief curator’s voice and gaze, and offered the microphone and magnifying glass to a range of curators, artists and members of the public, through a number of educational events and symposia. Issues such as the global/local have been explored at Castlefield Gallery’s ATM08 symposia series, whilst questions of the commercialisation and labelling of ‘Asian Art’ were raised at the Shisha / Manchester Metropolitan University conference on 4th April, ‘Protest: Reflections and Revolutions,’ by academics such as S. Sayid and Hou Hanru.

Asia Triennial Manchester has traversed the difficulties raised by the prescriptive visual documentation of ‘Asian Art,’ partly through its own self categorisation as an ‘Asia Triennial’, rather than a Triennial of ‘the Asian.’ The latter term, could instigate crude and undignified issues of ‘compare and contrast’ between Asian countries and ultimately suggest an outdated notion of nation or continent. Gwon Osang’s and Choe U-ram’s installations suggest they work as global artists, using global materials and inter-cultural or supernatural subject matter. Their themes, styles and techniques descend the neat narratives of national difference and highlight the plethora of issues encountered and aroused by artists from Korea.

Gwon Osang will also present a solo exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery from 21 June – 21 September 2008.

Urbanus Male and Urbanus Female will exhibited in the gallery’s atrium space from 5 April to 21 September 2008.

Beccy Kennedy is a course leader for the Asia Triennial Manchester related course, ‘An Introduction to Contemporary Asian Art’ at Cornerhouse, Manchester. On 18 June, Beccy will lecture on issues of Colonial Modernity and post-modernity in 20thC art from Korea, and on 25 June, she will explore the contemporary implications of Socialist Realist poster art in DPRK (North Korea).

Lee Ufan
2 April — 10 May 2008
52-54 & 29 Bell Street

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present new works by Lee Ufan in his latest solo exhibition in London. One of the most significant Asian artists of his generation, Lee’s exploration of “the art of emptiness” results in works of beautiful and thought provoking simplicity.

This exhibition will use the three gallery spaces in their entirety incorporating new paintings and works on paper and a selection of sculptures from the last twenty years. Following his critically acclaimed solo exhibition at the 52nd Venice Biennale last year, Lee’s new paintings continue his “Correspondance” and “Dialogue” series: minimal white canvases that are defined by one or sometimes two broad grey brushstrokes. Lee’s methodology is reductive and based on an utter concentration on essential elements.

Gesture and the body play a key role in the making of his paintings, during which Lee crouches on a wooden plank placed over the surface of the canvas. Each brushstroke is applied slowly and is composed of several layers of crushed stone mixed with pigment.

Where the brush first makes contact with the canvas, the paint is thick, forming a “ridge” that gradually becomes lighter. Rarely does his brush touch the surface more than three times. Lee has said “When I make a brush mark on the canvas, I hold my breath, I concentrate and I pray that my hand, the brush and the canvas will be in harmony.”

Lee Ufan’s sculptural work explores emptiness and the void. Consisting of untreated materials like stone and iron, the sculptural compositions are silent yet suggestive. They manipulate the space that they inhabit and so condition the viewer’s perception of it. Like the paintings, Lee’s sculptures share a similar treatment of space and use of colour. These works express his preoccupation with the relationship between the painted and the unpainted, the made and the unmade, the interior and the exterior.

Born in Korea in 1936, Lee Ufan divides his time between Kamakura, Japan and Paris, France. Artist, theorist, poet and teacher, he is one of the founders of the avant garde Mono-ha (Object School) group. Lee Ufan received the UNESCO Prize at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000; the Ho-Am Prize of the Samsung Foundation in Korea in 2001; and the 13th Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2001. Major exhibitions of Lee Ufan’s recent painting and sculpture were held at the Yokohama Museum of Art in September 2005 and the Musée d’art Moderne Saint-Etienne in France in December 2005. The Kunst Situation, a museum associated with Bochum University in Germany, opened in November 2006 with a gallery devoted to a permanent installation of Lee Ufan’s paintings and a garden of his sculpture.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Lisson Gallery will publish the third edition of Lee Ufan’s collected writings The Art of Encounter (translated into English).

Visitor Information
Lisson Gallery 29 & 52-54 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
Hours: Mon-Fri 10am-6pm; Sat 11am-5pm
Admission: Free
Nearest Tube Station: Edgware Road

Links:

• Lisson Gallery website

First, those who missed Kwon Dae-hun’s intriguing paper-and-light sculptures (above: Lost in the Forest) at I-MYU last year have a second opportunity to view his work at a Coin Street gallery.

The exhibition Electric Blue at Bargehouse near the OXO tower runs from 13 - 30 March.

Electric Blue is a cleverly engineered sensory and interactive art exhibition from over 30 creative and inventive national and international artists. Artwork has been carefully selected from all over the UK and overseas. The exhibition features light, sound and interactive installations, photography and paintings, site specific artwork, live performances and sculpture.

The Bargehouse is at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, London SE1 9PH.

Second, another 30 artists from around the world are exhibiting in the group show Laughing in a Foreign Language at the Hayward Gallery, which continues until 13 April. The Korean artist is Gimhongsok.

Links:

• Electric Blue details at Submit2Gravity
• Laughing in a Foreign Language details at the South Bank Centre

I had assumed that the Nam June Paik talk by Jiyoon Lee would take the form of a tour around the gallery itself. The schedule of the evening was fuller than I had expected, and required the setting of the ‘Sejong Room’ on the basement level, newly fitted out with lecture-room tables and an LG flat screen TV of considerable proportions.

The talk material had evidently been prepared very carefully for a non-Korean audience, which was much appreciated by those non-Koreans who did make it (in spite of the late announcement).

Jiyoon Lee is an independent curator, and director of the London-based SUUM Project, which brought us Through the Looking Glass at Asia House last year. An intense and engaging speaker, she devoted the greater portion of the talk to the history of contemporary of Korean art, thus providing a context for the current exhibition.

The development of contemporary art in Korea was encumbered for most of the 20th century, first by the Japanese occupation, then the Korean War, and finally the extended period of military rule.

The key turning point was 1989, when restrictions on foreign travel were lifted for Korean citizens. This being accompanied by economic prosperity, many Korean artists were finally free to go and study abroad.

Since then Korean contemporary art, though still ‘young’ by European and US standards, has been gaining prominence both in auction houses and galleries around the world.

Ms. Lee of course showed many examples of Korean contemporary art in the course of this narrative. As well as drawing out the link between the messages contained in the art works and the socio-political trends of the day, she made the point that Korean artists tend to rank the labour that goes into creating a piece of work as highly as the concept itself.

This was evident from Gwon Osang’s painstaking human sculptures composed of hundreds of photographs of the person in question (example above), and seems to be a trait in Korean art throughout the ages.

After this detailed historical perspective, Jiyoon Lee turned to the exhibition itself. Devoting minimal time to the exhibition pieces (presumably on the basis that they should be seen and not heard), she spoke at some length about Nam June Paik, a pioneer and patron of the Korean contemporary art scene.

His approach was ‘collaborative’ above all else, she emphasised, and this was reflected in the cross-cultural nature of many of the works on display (see right, Miyeon Yoon’s Elizabeth 1). She went so far as to say that her hope for the Cultural Centre was for it to become a place not only for Korean art, but artists from all cultural backgrounds.

She ended with an explanation of the curious title of the exhibition. In 1984, Paik staged a media-themed exhibition entitled Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, through which he aimed to demonstrate the ability of a pervasive media to serve positive ends. Jiyoon Lee felt that the continuation of Nam June Paik’s spirit in the young contemporary artists of today merited a more positive title for a commemoration of his death, hence, Good Morning, Mr. Nam June Paik.

My thanks are due once again to the KCC for what was definitely another stimulating evening.

The Korea Tourist Office website advises us that Kim Hwan-gi (1913-1974) (known internationally as Kim Whanki — and he signs his paintings just plain “Whanki”) “was Korea’s top artist of modernism”. It is therefore frustrating that when you go into the Tourist Information Offices in Insadong no-one has heard of him, still less of the museum that was built specifically to house his work. On two occasions now (a year apart) I’ve struggled to get the helpful staff to believe that there really is such a place, and that I’d really like to know how to get there. I have to spell out the website address, www.whankimuseum.org, and make sure they type it into their browsers correctly, before they believe me. Once the website is loaded on their machines, the sailing becomes plainer.

How to get there? Well you could take the 1020 bus from outside Jogye-sa, tell the bus driver you want to go to Buam-dong and hope for the best. Or you could get the Museum Shuttle Bus which sets off from immediately behind the Tourist Information kiosk at the north end of Insadong (which makes it doubly puzzling why none of the staff have heard of the museum). The latter is the risk-free alternative, and Mr Kim Jeong-woong the enthusiastic driver deserves your custom. He can get by in German and English, and he will point you in the right direction when he drops you off. He’s also a classical music enthusiast, so if you go prepared to discuss Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony he will be doubly delighted.

The bus leaves at 11:30, 13:00 and 14:00, and takes 10 minutes to get to the museum. So if you’re feeling energetic it’s really close enough to walk back. (You wouldn’t want to walk there as you don’t know where it is, plus it’s uphill).

A lot of money has been spent on this museum. It’s an interesting building, designed by architect Woo Kyu-sung. The first phase was completed in 1992, and the remainder finished in 1997. There’s plenty of light and space inside, and on the day I visited there were more staff than visitors. So no-one’s going to get in your way if you want to contemplate your favourite painting for as long as you like.

When I visited, there was a maybe temporary display of two works by Felice Varini from 2006 (presumably from that year’s group exhibition at the museum, the Poetics of Space). At first, as you notice the strange yellow patches and dark blue curves painted on the walls, you think it’s a groovy design feature dreamed up by the architect. Then, as you climb the stairs, you see a notice on the wall staying “Yellow oval pierced by 7 holes”, 2006. You turn, and you see that the yellow splodges are designed to be viewed from one place, and one place only. If you close one eye, and get your positioning precisely right, the yellow splodges painted on the various pillars and walls coalesce perfectly, and you get an optical illusion of a yellow sheet of cellophane (oval, with seven holes), floating in front of your eye between you and your direction of sight. The other work, three large rectangles formed out of concentric blue oval lines, is an even greater exercise in three-dimensional perspectival trickery, with the patterns painted on pillars, walls both flat and curved, and even inside the staff office. The two works make clever use of the museum space, and complement the main show remarkably well.

The museum holds 1,000 pieces of Whanki’s work and personal relics. Many of the works are rough pencil sketches, but many of them are of course major pieces. There appears to be a sufficient quantity stored away to have an exhibition which changes regularly (every, say, two to three months). I went expecting to see loads of blue dot-paintings (example left), or less abstract works featuring Chosun dynasty moon jars (example right).

Something very different was on display:

The blue dot paintings are from Whanki’s final years in New York (1970-74), while the moon vases are from the mid to late 1950s. The works on display were from the late 60s, just before the final phase of his creative career in New York, and featured either a quadripartite design or other compositions featuring bold fields of colour.

Each painting was given due space to breathe, and given the crowd-free environment there was plenty of opportunity to enjoy the works and the building itself.

You can get a coffee in the museum shop, on the upper floor of which is more exhibition space. When I visited, they were showing some limited edition high quality reproductions of some of Whanki’s major works. Some of them were for sale in the shop — a bit steep at 2,000,000 Won each. There were more mass-produced posters available at 30,000 Won each, but without the authenticating seal of the museum.

A leisurely browse round the shop (some good quality Whanki memorabilia apart from the aforementioned posters, plus some books) plus a meditative perusal of the main museum and grounds will just about take the two hours between the time when the first bus drops you and the second bus comes by to take you back. If there was some nice cake to go with the coffee, or if you can find any evidence of the “Walking Trail”, the timing would be just about perfect.

Admission was 5,000 Won when I visited this week, with a 500 Won discount if you used Mr Kim’s shuttle bus (which itself was 1,000 Won). Well worth a trip.

Links:

• 환기 미술관 / Whanki Museum website. Beware, however: the English language portion of the website has not been updated for over a year, and you will only find up-to-date information in the Korean pages. Do NOT rely on the bus timetables provided in the English section.
• Tour2Korea Whanki Museum page
• Mr Kim Jeong-woong’s Cyworld minihompy
• More Kim Whanki info at Buddhapia
• Recommended reading: Kim Whanki, A Critical Biography, by Oh Kwang-su. A helpful and straightforward introduction.

It must be a very attractive prospect to be offered the job of curating a prestigious exhibition at the high-profile launch of a cultural centre. Having a blank canvas to work on certainly must be appealing. But the flip side of the deal is that, when you only know the exhibition space from the designer’s drawing board rather than in real life you are working with rather an unknown quantity. And when the inevitable nightmare comes, and you are trying to hang the show as builders struggle to finish the job, you must start to wonder if you were wise to take the job on.

The objectives of the exhibition are laudible. Anchored around three single-channel video works by Korea’s best-known modern artist internationally, Nam June Paik, is a kaleidoscopic view of work by other Korean artists, both established and emerging.

Unfortunately the space is not ideal for the works being displayed. Most importantly, with three or four video works playing simultaneously in close proximity, inevitably the sound from one work floats around the corner or over the top of the partition to distract you as you are trying to focus on another. Another shortcoming: one work is shown on multiple screens facing Northumberland Avenue, of course to attract the passing punter. In order to view the work from inside the Centre you are forced up against the window. Viewing the screens so close I was reminded why it was that I never once considered buying a plasma TV: the picture is just too fuzzy. This was partly the fault of the video work itself (which included some poor quality satellite broadcasting), but the reproduction on the LCD screens was noticeably better.

And just to get all my gripes about the physical aspects of the exhibition out of my system, one work is hung in so profoundly unsympathetic a position as to almost deny its point. The large format black and white photograph of a bamboo forest by Kim Daesoo (right) encourages you to stand in front of it and contemplate its peacefulness. The notes accompanying the exhibition highlight the work’s links to the traditional style of Eastern painting: black ink on paper. But as you look at the work, more than anything else you see, reflected in the glass, the noisy day-glo red of the wall behind you, the semi-naked cellist in one of the video works, and the free-standing screen with boldly-coloured cartoon characters.

Thus the exhibition, intentionally or not, reproduces the liveliness of a busy street in Seoul, where you are not permitted to stand and contemplate, but instead are jostled every which way by your fellow human beings and are assaulted by different noises and sensations from all sides.

As for the works themselves, there are certainly some high-profile and talented artists represented. The headline artist is of course Nam June Paik. One of the works on show appeared to be his 1984 project Good Morning Mr Orwell: a global simultaneous broadcast marking the beginning of the ominous year. Live from Seoul came a broadcast of a shaman blessing a satellite, perfectly encapsulating one of the strand of the Korean national branding: cutting edge but still retaining traditions. The obligatory not terribly illuminating interview follows.

The challenge I find with video work is that while you know fairly quickly whether a painting is going to interest you, with a video you’ve pretty much got to watch it all the way through to figure out whether it’s got anything to say. And when you’re constrained to a quick visit to a show at lunchtime, and the three video works interfere with each other aurally, it’s pretty difficult to work out whether it’s worth your while investing the time with them. However, there seemed to be a lot of cellos involved.

Of the remaining work my own particular favourite is by one of the more senior Koreans artists, Song Soonam, a pair of colourful flower paintings inspired by the folk-art genre. Song is a long-established artist, and earlier in his career was known for experimenting with more monochrome literati-style ink painting. But this was not the occasion for a retrospective of his work and development.

The exhibition spans a wide range of themes: aspects of Division are explored by Atta Kim’s 8-hour exposure photograph of the DMZ (a seemingly tranquil landscape, but with a barbed-wire fence in the foreground), by Kim Jiwon’s Mendrami (shown last year at Asia House) and a still from Lee Yongbaek’s prowling Angel Soldier (shown last year at the Circuit Diagram show). Aspects of the female form are explored by Debbie Han’s Three Graces (recently shown at I-MYU), Yoon Miyeon’s hybrid Korean / western Elizabethan queen; and the voyeuristic Costume of Painter Kiss by Bae Junsung, which, viewed from one angle is a classical western-style painting of an embrace (strangely situated in front of what seems to be an altar), while viewed from another the male of the couple disappears and the female is naked.

The accompanying notes are helpful and informative ^[1] and certainly make us want to explore some of the artists further.

Inevitably though, in setting a particular work in a horizontal context (setting it beside that of many other artists) the vertical context (placing the work in the development of the particular artist’s career) is lost, and we are faced with a pick-and-mix hors d’oeuvre rather than a satisfying meal. But it has certainly whetted the appetite for more in-depth explorations.

To have launched the KCC with a show that is an outstanding success would have left nowhere to go. As it is, what we have is a selection of interesting and varied work, and we can look forward to future exhibitions which have the luxury of working with a finished space.

Links:

•  Good Morning, Mr Nam June Paik official website

1. it is flattering to see some of LKL’s own language creeping in to the description of the work of one of the artists

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.

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

World Religion Day is practiced in all countries. Its mission is to foster the establishment of interfaith understanding and harmony by emphasizing the common denominators underlying all religions. The event was instituted by the Bahai community in 1950.

Sacred explores these common denominators and also the differences between religions and belief systems; the interweaving message throughout is of the world as one single global community. The reverberating pieces displayed also reveal the aspects of religion and spirituality that are personally sacred to each exhibiting artist.

The Deep Spring of Life, Francesca Cho (2005), Oil on Canvas 95×127cm

My work is abstract and tends to be meditative. I focus on themes and preoccupations held in common by all religions. From my perspective as a Roman Catholic it is perhaps to be expected that I regard universal themes as inspirational — the word catholic meaning ‘universal’. Whilst my work has been published in Oremus: the magazine of Westminster Cathedral, this is not to say that my paintings are ‘religious’ or tied to a belief system. But again and again people have told me that they identify and recognise the spiritual nature of my work. It pleases me to hear this because every artist hopes to elicit a deep response in the viewer. Since there is a profoundly spiritual dimension to the human person and to all faith systems worthy of the name, my hope is that the paintings are able to move and delight those who see them. My fundamental religious belief is that love and peace are fruits of all great religious traditions when practised with sincerity and lived with commitment and integrity.

And the connection with the anti-clerical Garibaldi (1807 - 1882)? ‘Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history’ claimed AJP Taylor.

Garibaldi was offered a ticker tape parade up the “canyon of heroes” in New York City. The Jesuits stirred up the Irish Catholics against him and in order to keep the peace he refused the offer. Of all the many world famous personalities to have been offered this singular honour, Garibaldi remains the only person to date to have refused it. ^[1]

Cho’s work grants him the honour posthumously.

The Only Person, Francesca Cho (2007), oil on canvas 77×57cm

Giuseppe Garibaldi: Uomo della libertà , uomo dell’umanità runs from 10-20 January at Museo Storico di Bergamo - Convento di S. Francesco (below right)

Sacred runs from 18 January to 16 February at Novas Contemporary Urban Centre, 73-81 Southwark Bridge Road, London SE1 ONQ, Mon - Sat 10-6.

Cho is currently preparing for a solo show in April.

Links:

• World Religion Day website
• Novas Contemporary Urban Centre website and exhibition page
• Garibaldi 200 website

1. Reformation.org

Review by Beccy Kennedy

Globalisation theory uses the term “time-space compression” ^[1] to elucidate the concept of a new world without distinct nations, where borders are malleable and hours are reconfigured into seconds through the single tap of a plastic key, where won transmogrify to dollars through the single swipe of a plastic card. Each single transaction is at once plural. Each plurality is a reoccurrence of regime but not of a moment. The art works at Arcadia exhibition both confirm and reject ‘time-space compression,’ creating new moments of cultural insight that transcend nations, empires and histories.

The curators at I-MYU, JeongAe Im and Eunbok Yu, address the historicism of the Greek term ‘Arcadia,’ as it has been used to refer to ‘landscapes,’ examining it through differing ages of perception and expectation. Here, they aim to translate the term via the works of three international artists from East ^[2] and West, positioned within the context of a contemporary East London arts space. The juxtaposition of two artists from Korea, Jin Kim and Dae Hun Kwon, with a British artist, Victoria Hall, is wise, as it realigns the theme of translation across nations whilst reasserting the boundlessness of globalisation. Kim and Hall reclassify classical scenes and echo each other’s ostensible fascination with traditional British décor or decorum; Hall (above right) posing as protagonist in her photographs of reformulated regal-esque oil paintings by masters such as Gainsborough and Orchardson, and Kim expressionistically painting urbane living rooms or old-fashioned garden sheds, taken from photographs of English country interiors. Via their transcriptions of the original images, from painting to photograph or photograph to painting, Hall and Kim attach their own ideological imprints, suggesting how the scenes could be both created and seen, through another author’s eyes, from another era, class or nation, in another’s moments. This ‘other’ is the artist and the viewer, as we collectively stand distanced from the Greek classicist, the Georgian painter, the Victorian interior designer, and draw new horizons unto our past and future historical landscapes.

The process of redefining ways of seeing is the main focus of Dae Hun Kwon’s paper and mixed media sculptures. In fact Kwon’s sculptural works appear at odds with Kim and Hall’s pictorial pieces until this is realised. Kwon’s illuminating landscape, ‘The Forest’ (above - click to enlarge), uses tiny pieces of paper, raised off the canvas, which cast shadows with the help of an automated, transitional light mechanisim, creating a 3D, fleeting, shimmering pattern. ‘The Forest’ of paper pieces resembles a backcloth of trees, where the trees are just a term, as the branches and the spaces between them realise new forms depending on when and how you look. There are no clear signifiers or signifieds ^[3], and Kwon appears to promote this aspect. Beside the image is a book of his own forest photographs, with identified shapes highlighted in different colours, where he has seen faces, which have later become crumpled masks in his other installations.

There is a figurative presence in all three artists’ works. In Hall’s reconstructions, the figures are clearly of herself and her child, in Kwon’s coppice, the viewer is left to identify their own versions of sentience and in Kim’s interiors there is either a noticeable absence of presence, or sometimes his portrait indicates a presence of absence. In his untitled scene of what appears to be a garden shed (above), you see his portrait but you have to look hard, as he melts into the coloured strokes of the setting, his body dismantled into the location, his aura becoming the decor. Whilst Hall makes a conscious statement about the changing role of portraiture and women’s place within it as it transcends to 21C time, place and medium, Kim and Kwon, perhaps, articulate more latently, the role of the migrant as this transcends through inter-nations to supposed trans-nations, Empires to ‘globe’.

Time-space compression may be the easing of actual global movement but almost expects the easiness of its ideological upshot. Yet, through recent conversation with Kwon and Kim, it seems that living in the UK can sometimes feel alienating, Korea distanced in both time and space. It can get dark as early as four o’clock in London in winter and still people leave their soiled shoes on when they enter the comfort of their own home. The keyboards on their laptops use English letters, for this is the global digital language, yet at home in Korea, hangul letters are present too. The histories of nations, of roles from the ‘ancients’ of civilisation to the currents of digitalisation, are omnipresent, like inside the trunk of a tree, compressed but extending far beyond the freshest bark. We shouldn’t just scratch on the layer of what is immediately visible, but try to unpeel the other layers, not just of one tree, but of the whole budding forest.

Links:

• Arcadia press release, LKL 19 November
• More Victoria Hall images at I-MYU site
• More Dae Hun Kwon images at I-MYU site
• More Jin Kim images at I-MYU site

1. Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
2. Whilst it can now be considered outdated to use the terms ‘East’ and ‘West, ‘ because of their rich Orientalist, Colonialist connotations, I have used them here within the context of the exhibition’s focus on changing historicisms and against the backdrop of I-MYU’s location in what is still known as ‘East’ London. In other writings, I would favour the fresher terms of ‘North’ and ‘South’.
3. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (2006) Writings in General Linguistics, Translated by Carol Sanders, Matthew Pires, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

I-MYU Projects is pleased to present the second exhibition of emerging Korean artists at its permanent gallery space in London. Artists Jin Kim and Dae Hun Kwon will be joined by UK artist Victoria Hall in an exhibition that looks to the margins of the classical and the contemporary landscape.

Titled Arcadia the works inform a continued historical reinvention of the term Arcadia by artists, writers, and musicians drawn towards the past. Specifically relating to the landscape the term Arcadia has remained, through history, one step removed from civilization, originating in Greek mythology as the birthplace of the God Pan, also known as the Shepherd God. The Roman poet Virgil established the geography of Arcadia, identifying it as an area of the Peloponnesian coast, a pastoral and remote landscape. Virgil adopted Arcadia in his famed ‘Eclogues’ as a means to counterbalance ideas of beauty and idyll against those of social and moral corruption and from here Arcadia came to represent utopian aspirations. It later informed the classical landscape painters of the 17th century, as artists such as Poussin and Lorrain began to invest in the landscape with regard that had previously only been reserved for the vestige of epic history paintings.

The artists in Arcadia draw on the divergent nature of modern lifestyle, informed by discrepancies between the past and the present they offer considerations of the landscape exploring ideas of classicism, mythology, fracture and perception.