It’s your last chance to catch the Through the Looking Glass exhibition at Asia House. Quite by chance, and unfortunately making no reference to the show, the Times over the weekend featured one of the artists in a weekly column highlighting what’s hot on the web arts-wise.

Sweet Dreams

Crayon drawings by small children are not merely destined for classroom walls or fridge doors. Oh no. In the case of the Korean photo artist Jung Yeondoo, they are the inspiration for his project Wonderland. Jung presents primitive kids’ drawings, but click your mouse and they are transformed into real-life photographs, which try to ape every detail of the original. For example, the work Television was so Funny turns grinning girl figures into a photo featuring five female models with exaggerated facial expressions standing around in a sleek-looking apartment.

Other drawings-cum-photographs include a Wannabe — Singer in which a performer sings in a red auditorium while being showered with straws, and the wonderfully titled Three Brothers Riding the Rainbow Wave. The concept is beautifully executed and utterly charming.

Olav Bjortomt

Jung’s Wonderland project is displaying as part of the Asia House exhibition. The show closes any day now (16 or 17th I think). According to the show’s website it’s closed already. But the artworks are still there. But not for long. Go this week, and ring Asia House before you go to check the stuff is still there.

Explore Jung’s site at your leisure below. Picture above is Snow White from his Wonderland project.

Links:

• Wonderland project on Jung Yeon-doo’s own website
• Jung Yeondoo at Through the Looking Glass exhibition
• Jung Yeondoo at Seoul: Until Now! exhibition

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

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