The Shape of Time: Korean Art since 1989 is fairly small, but interesting, exhibition on display at Minneapolis Institute of Art through July 2024. On the evidence of the show -- and I have no idea how representative it is -- Korean art has largely eschewed works on canvas and painting. Almost everything in the show was either sculpture (glazed, highly finished ceramic objects), photography, or other media. The show's name is a misnomer of sorts -- the art on display is either from South Korea or the Korean diaspora in the United States.
The first gallery and its anteroom are representative. A large colorful ceramic tower, something like a totem pole, greets museum-goers. The brightly glazed ceramic spire is a mass of interlocked animals and human figures surmounted by a ghostly-looking figure representing an ancestor -- the object is about 15 feet high and has a shamanistic aura, although I don't whether it imitates Korean precursors or is based on Haida (or other Pacific Northwest) totem poles. The bright surface of sculpture is very different from the current weathered surfaces of Pacific Northwest totem poles (although I think these objects may also once have been brightly painted) -- it's an interesting invitation to the show (which will cost you $20 to enter). In the first gallery, there are a number of eight-foot high canes, also surmounted with ceramic finials and representing certain natural forces, make a sparse forest in one corner of the room: lights cast shadows of these stalk-like objects against a nearby wall, an interesting effect. The gallery's main focus is a huge back-lit photograph stretched like a mural across one of the walls -- it's probably about 40 feet long showing tourists gathered in an observatory station overlooking the DMZ. In this part of Korea, the DMZ runs through a dramatic mountainous landscape. The figures in the observatory (it's the Euiji overlook) are reproduced life-size, a frieze of casually dressed men and women in seats facing a long, floor-to-ceiling picture window that simulates the shape of the vast photograph. We are seeing people seeing -- apparently, the tourists are listening to a kind of lecture on the topography in front of them, with a voice pointing out landmarks in the enormous, sprawling range of green mountains. (A model of the landscape is also in front of the audience labeled with the names of the various peaks and military fortifications.) A man with a sort of zither stands in the middle of the long, mural-sized photograph. Facing this huge picture is a large TV screen on which there is projected a spooky virtual reality tour of the DMZ with captions explaining different routes across the heavily militarized frontier (paradoxically called a demilitarized zone.) This array of art works is, more or less, representative of the rest of the show.
There are some startling objects in the show: a room full of meditating monks, painted Pompeii red, have lost their heads. Dangling over each plaster-cast decapitated torso, are the heads of dolls, things like Waldo from the Where's Waldo books. A corridor contains five photographs, larger than life-size, of urinating women -- they are standing up like men and disgorging great gushes of fluid in streams that could be emerging from a garden hose. (The work is supposed to have something to do with feminism, although the clinical images, also cropped to be as headless/faceless as the monks, are really more fetishistic in effect). "Comfort Hair" is similarly feminist -- a sinister bale of braided black hair, the size of compact car, lies in a corner; on the wall, there's an image of three generations of women lying prostrate next to the vast excremental spool of hair. (This is about Korean women impressed into service as sex slaves, "comfort women", during World War Two). One room features images of urban renewal, three huge photographs showing a hillside slum in Seoul after dark -- it's punctum is a red neon cross on a little adobe-brick church. With each successive image, the neighborhood loses more and more of its lights as buildings are demolished; in the end, it's, more or less, just the neon cross that remains in the darkness Across from these pictures, an elaborate landscape full of bone-white ceramic ruins depicts what is either the aftermath of aerial bombardment or urban renewal. The sole canvas painting in the exhibition are a series of five pictures of Michael Jackson. In three of the pictures, the pop star sits on a throne on which a leopard skin is draped. The last two pictures depict the King of Pop regal on a red enamel throne. A note explains that the pictures of Jackson, each showing a phase of his career (and plastic surgery), reference the iconography of nobility and kingship in a fourteenth century Korean dynasty. There are elaborately detailed and specific clay simulacra of commercial items -- a ketchup bottle, pop cans, a Wilson basketball. These objects are unimpressive, following in the wake of Jasper Johns' sculpture of a Ballentine Ale can from the late fifties -- nothing's really new in art after Duchamp and the Abstract Expressionists; that's true here and, also, in Korea. A huge laser-sharp video provides documentary-style information about an idiosyncratic form of theater, also feminist -- plays and lip-synch performances in which women cross-dress and imitate men as "drag kings" (as the interlocutors on screen explain.) This is a phenomenon that bears more study and the performances briefly shown on the video seem charismatic. But the artifact, itself, is just a documentary video that could be broadcast on PBS. (Theater works of this kind are called yeosung gukgeuk) In a darkened gallery a triptych of screens shows iron being poured, ships unloaded, whales and huge fish, women weeping at some kind of mediumistic ritual -- it's beautiful but banal.) A final gallery is full of huge photographs of anxious-looking young people.
In broad terms, much of the show is incomprehensible without a detailed knowledge of Korean culture and history. I was able to ascertain that two divisions are significant. First, there is the divide between the repressive authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea prior to 1989 -- the thaw in the country was largely attributable to the 1988 Seoul Olympics which attracted international scrutiny. (In the very first room, there is a nod to the pre-democratic era in a wall covered with defaced and partially erased portrait panels, pictures of people killed by the police or otherwise "disappeared" prior to 1989. It looks a bit like a somber Gerhart Richter array of images.) The second divide, of course, is marked by the DMZ between North and South Korea, also the subject of several large and imposing works. Nothing in this show made much of an impression on me -- but this is my ignorance speaking through this review.
(Upstairs there's a show of about 25 prints made in the Low Countries around the time of Rembrandt. The Dutch, like Constable, like to show buildings and barns in semi-ruinous state, as if the victims of vast and destructive floods The wood on display is always sodden and half-rotted away. The structures are gimcrack, huddled in collapsing heaps, or standing on weird stilts with frail-looking ladders stacked against walls that are sprouting tufts of grass and moss. There are bridges that I wouldn't try to cross, goats and sheep and cows, and drunken peasants stumbling around in front of half-demolished taverns. Very interesting, if you like this kind of stuff.)
No comments:
Post a Comment