Review by Beccy Kennedy

Whilst munching on spicy chorizo stotties — a dish given the name Smoky Mountain — we browsed the inimitable menus, commented on the amorous musical medley and read the bright red words stuck to the windows, trying to decipher which phrases answered which questions. These questions, focusing on romantic memory, were devised by Korean artist Sora Kim, and posed to local Newcastle residents. The findings were then assimilated into a multi-sensory café installation incorporating: a range of correspondingly conceived recipes, a selection of new but mismatched furniture and a small TV screen demonstrating how to cook (the contents of the menu?). It looked vaguely atypical for a white-cube gallery’s café décor, but I hadn’t known what the BALTIC refectory looked like before the installation, and nothing, but the strategically high-positioned TV, appeared out of sync for a public eating-place. The exhibition interlaces itself mischievously and intangibly into the eatery. Perhaps, this is why Kim’s exhibit was the most populated in the gallery that day. Everyone likes to dine, with or without design.

Kim’s artwork works in terms of its kinaesthetic rather than its aesthetic impact. Admittedly, Melting Alaska’s concept doesn’t aim to provide fine arts appreciative value but the installation’s visual aspect generally fails to fuel the appetite. There is no delicious ocular stimulus to tease the taste buds and optimise the consumer’s interactive art experience, in this sense. The tabletops are plain, pine appearance, the walls are bare — except for the arial font styled stuck-on words, which overlap, making them difficult to read — and the table menus are monochromatic and text-dense. However, the fluorescent pink pick-up Collector’s Edition Recipe Booklet (suggested donation £1) explains Kim’s project in a user-friendly format and lists the questions that were asked to the local people. This helps the viewer to assemble the seemingly incongruent parts of the installation, and reinforces the artwork’s capability for widening participation.

Whilst Kim ‘engages with local communities,’ ^[1] including the chefs who ‘interpret’ the dishes, during the execution of the artwork, she also encourages the art’s realisation to take place in a non-threatening environment. It’s possible that members of the public may visit the café without any intention of going to the galleries, then incidentally experience a work of art, which ultimately challenges their expectations of contemporary art and the gallery space. Kim’s piece is involved and egoless in this way. She enables the chefs to transpose and compose recipes, from the thoughts and experiences of the interviewees, and even the dishes’ names consist of these quotations. Kim had a concept and the public participants actualised it. The difficulty lies in how widely the rest of the public residents will actually receive it. The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts sits in a touristy spot, by the millennium bridge at Gateshead Quays but it stands apart from the city’s shopping and business area, and is separated by the Tyne itself. Aside from the sea air, there’s a whiff of the Victorian Art Museum-opolis, in terms of the BALTIC’s uneasy location. However, this isn’t Kim’s doing, and in choosing Newcastle, she has avoided the capital-city-centrism of the international arts arena in Britain.

What I found engaging about the artwork was not the description of its conceptualisation, the assortment of questionnaire answers in the form of word transfers floating across the four walls, or the curiously combined flavour of chorizo and rocket in my stottie. It was the way the theme of the exhibition subtly manoeuvred itself into the conversation between my friends and myself as we sat in the cafe, like eggs sealing round mushrooms in a pan. By choosing a concept, which everyone has experienced in some shape or form, Kim has widened conceptual participation, at the very least for the engagement of the available audience at the BALTIC. I found myself asking a friend of ten years, “Where is the most romantic place you’ve ever been?” She replied, “Liverpool.” In Melting Alaska, Kim’s aptitude is, perhaps, in her capacity for creating an environment, which encourages the unfolding of the unexpected.

1. Sora Kim, Melting Alaska, Collector’s Edition Recipe Booklet, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art.

An important indicator of the rise in the Korean Art market is the increasing exposure of contemporary artists in the West. Taking the UK as an example, the current Asia House show is one of the first exhibitions to have invited Korean artists to participate, with works specially commissioned for the show. And 2007 will see no less than 3 invitation shows by Korean artists in the UK: Choi Jeong-wha in Wolverhampton from 21 June this year; Kim Sora (above right) at the Baltic space in Gateshead from Valentines Day for three months, and Kim Kira (above left) in Kings Lynn, Norfolk, from 27 Jaunary to 24 February.

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