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Atta Kim, The Museum Project #149 (detail), 2001
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Korean Contemporary Art
October 1-14, 2008
More and more, Korean artists are making a splash in international art shows, fairs, and magazines. Now, with the Gwangju Biennale midway through its run, Artkrush devotes this issue to the country's brightly buzzing contemporary-art scene. After exploring
the Biennale's three sections, we highlight the work of the photographically inclined sculptor Osang Gwon, who layers three-dimensional forms with corresponding images, in a real-life application of texture mapping. Then, Artkrush
editor Paul Laster sits down with serial sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh to discuss his artistic heritage, as well as his recent work. Our media pick, Lee Ufan: Encounter with the Other, dissects the painting, sculpture, and theory of the iconic Korean artist. And in our gallery roundup, we look at Portland's
Quality Pictures — where Michael Scoggins channels his inner child onto wide-ruled letters and drawings — and stamp-sized illustrations by the Royal Art Lodge at London's Houldsworth Gallery.
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Guggenheim Names Armstrong Director
(Los Angeles Times, September 25)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong to be Thomas Krens' successor as director and overseer of its global network of museums. Armstrong has been director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh since 1996 and was previously a curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Armstrong, whose foremost expertise is American art after 1940, says that he is interested in "empowering curators" and wants to add "gravitas of purpose" to the museums, adding that his vision
for the Guggenheim was for it to "reassert itself as a place of high intellectual ambition."
Gagosian Takes Moscow
(Artinfo.com, September 19)
Superdealer Larry Gagosian has brought his business back to Russia for a second time with a star-studded show of American art in the landmark chocolate
factory Red October. Screen, fashion, and art luminaries such as Leelee Sobieski, Yvonne Force Villareal, and Takashi Murakami attended the opening
reception and dinner. Gagosian himself managed to find the time to hit another art soiree, this one celebrating the opening of entrepreneur Dasha Zukhova's art space, which seems to be the primo venue for Russia's contemporary artists and its newly moneyed collectors.
Francis Bacon Sizzles at Tate
(New York Times, September 24)
Though he died 16 years ago, painter Francis Bacon is still the toast of the contemporary-art world. The New York Times calls the artist's current retrospective at the Tate Britain "a landmark, a knockout," and modern viewers are enthralled by his skill and technique, his exploration of gay sexuality,
and his bad-boy reputation. Today's collectors are no less enthused: last May, Roman Abramovich bought Bacon's 1976 Triptych for $86 million, and a portrait of the artist's drinking pal Henrietta Moraes is expected to fetch nearly $14 million when it goes up for auction, while Lucian Freud's portrait of the artist is expected to bring nearly as much.
Museum of Arts and Design Reopens
(Archrecord.com, September 24)
Following a pitched preservation battle, architect Brad Cloepfil's Museum of Arts and Design is welcoming the public — but perhaps not the critics. The Columbus Circle building is a ten-story, 54,000-square-foot renovation of Edward Durell Stone's 1964 original. Cloepfil has substantially changed
the building's look, replacing the original marble with 20,000 handmade terra cotta tiles. In addition, Cloepfil has adorned
two of the museum's facades with bands of windows that seem to spell out the word "hi." One writer remarked that the building "may only remind many New Yorkers that idiosyncratic, romantic architecture like Stone's is increasingly
rare and valuable these days in Manhattan."
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Lehman Brothers' meltdown may result in liquidation of corporate art collection more »
Speedy Schnabel paints Plácido Domingo in one day more »
In China, fake-art district feeling the economic sting more »
Is Bilbao's new health department building a Guggenheim rival or a gimmick? more »
Peter MacDonald's slashed painting wins Moores Prize more »
Looking at four new LA buildings as they go up more »
Poet and critic John Ashbery exhibits collages more »
OMA unveils Madison Square Park tower more »
Was Damien Hirst's mega-auction good for the market? more »
Controversy over PBS art doc being shown in Texas schools more »
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's installations to light up NYC's Madison Square Park more »
Plans released for Ground Zero pavilion more »
Superstar art couple Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood separate more »
Photographer Catherine Opie brings home and community to mid-career survey more »
High marks for RISD's new classroom and museum center more »
Dallas opens up contemporary art lab more »
National Gallery to recreate a brothel in new installation more »
Art Fag City takes on the five principles of new media more »
Stuart Semple teams with denim brands for pricey Pop Art jeans more »
Ai Weiwei's giant LED spider a leading light of Liverpool Biennial more »
A look back at Martin Kersels' "performance sculpture" more »
Note: Some online publications require registration to access the articles. If you encounter a registration screen, try a
shared username and password from BugMeNot.
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[ The Gwangju Biennale ] |
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Bruce Yonemoto / Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla / Donghee Koo
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Artistic director Okwui Enwezor dispensed with a thematic framework for the Gwangju Biennale 2008. Instead, Enwezor — past director of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale and 2002's documenta 11 — chose to showcase a series of selected traveling exhibitions, consisting of 127 artists from 36 countries, under the title
Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions. The show consists of three sections: On the Road gathers and engages 36 exhibitions from the past year; Position Papers allows five emerging curators to realize innovative exhibition proposals and curatorial strategies; and Insertions presents new works created especially for the Biennale.
For On the Road, German artist Hans Haacke's Wide White Flow is transported from New York's Paula Cooper Gallery to the Biennale Hall, its white silk sheet billowing above the currents
of four large fans. Another New York transplant, the Whitney Museum's retrospective Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure contributes Matta-Clark's seminal works of segmented architecture, such as 1974's Splitting. Isaac Julien offers a somber film on illegal immigration off the Sicilian coast, while Bruce Yonemoto photographs Asian-American male models in theatrical Civil War costumes to explore heroism. Other notable contributions to On the Road come from two young Korean artists: Donghee Koo presents the impressive video work Static Electricity of Cat's Cradle, a film within a film based on a couple's shared memories of bygone heroes and ancestors, and Jina Park's new series of Moontan paintings draws inspiration from LOMO toy cameras, depicting banal, unremarkable moments of everyday existence.
In the Insertions portion of the Biennale, a collaborative work between Donghwan Jo and his son Haejun Jo contains more than 500 documentary
drawings based on their family history vis-à-vis Korean social history. A special archival cabinet has been constructed for the work, with viewers invited to examine each drawing closely. Meanwhile, American photographer
Daniel Faust channels Stephen Shore's drive-by aesthetic for a tourist-cum-ethnographer's take on Alaska, and Indian artist Praneet Soi shows deftly rendered miniatures of Abu Ghraib tortures. Claire Tancons' opening-day procession at Position Papers meanwhile, paid tribute to Gwangju's democratic uprising in May of 1980, while Sung-Hyen Park's Bokdukbang Project placed experimental installations by Korean artists Munho Ma, Munjong Park, Kiyoung Peik, and others in Daein Traditional Market — set up in stalls alongside fish, fruit, and vegetable vendors.
Founded in the fall of 1995, the Gwangju Biennale was intended to be the foremost contemporary art event in Asia, but it faces
increasing competition from other festivals in Korea and those in nearby countries. However, Enwezor has praised such proliferation,
saying: "It is not a competition among biennales... This is an immense privilege for this region to have so many exhibits
open." Enwezor believes it is only proof that "the 21st century will be the Asian century."
- Josephina E. Lee
The Gwangju Biennale continues through November 9 at the Biennale Hall, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Uijae Museum of Korean
Art, the Daein Traditional Market, and the Cinema Gwangju.
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Shinro Ohtake: Shell & Occupy 3
Tokyo
Take Ninagawa
Now through October 25
In his third consecutive solo exhibition at Take Ninagawa, Shinro Ohtake, a major artist in Japan but little-known abroad, presents 17 works that continue to explore his taste for "stickering."
The first installation, in May, featured an assortment of lurid, mostly '90s-era collages made with all kinds of printed matter, including cards, wallpaper and tape; in July, part two saw Ohtake's imagery mixed
in with dense smears of white oil paint and a variety of found objects, such as cigarette packages, newspaper clippings, and photographs. In this
third show, Ohtake's work is a more intricately layered synthesis of imagery and matter. In heavily lacquered collages, the artist suspends salvaged cultural flotsam and circles of colorful acrylic, drawing on the entire global canon of pop culture. In the exhibition's large centerpiece, Poppy / Sound Shadow 1, Ohtake compresses contemporary icons and forms into a riff on 20th-century nostalgia.
- Ashley Rawlings
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Michael Scoggins: So American It Hurts
Portland, Oregon
Quality Pictures
Now through November 1
Like pages torn from a giant child's notebook, Michael Scoggins' oversize drawings are monumental and infantile in equal parts. In works measuring more than five feet in height and cleverly
crafted to resemble spiral-bound sheets, the Brooklyn-based artist adopts the visual idiom of the elementary-school doodle
to tackle themes of race, patriotism, and war. Works such as Clash Bang, Crash, Bong! effectively filter the impulses of an adult id through the bright colors and crude violence of children's entertainment.
Though Scoggins' insistent anti-Bush sentiment — most strident in The White House IV — occasionally feels as jejune as his style, other works include date, text, image, and signature, as in I Will Not Commit Acts of Treason, dated July 4.
- Adam Eaker
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Jane Hammond: Photographs
New York
Galerie Lelong
Now through October 11
At first glance, the black-and-white photographs on display in Jane Hammond's solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong resemble an eerie hybrid of Lee Friedlander, Richard Avedon, and Man Ray. This exhibition marks a departure from Hammond's quirky, illustrative paintings, with the artist adapting new technologies to continue her explorations into the nature of memory. In this new process, Hammond
converts dreamlike, digital collages to negatives and prints them as "documentary" photographs, triggering, as ever, a disorienting
set of references. When You Wish depicts a newlywed couple — Hammond and Elvis — walking in a corridor lined with cloth-draped skeletons, a surrealist nod
to Día de los Muertos. Complementing the silver-gelatin prints is the colossal Album (Rita Braverman), an archive of constructed self-portraits placing Hammond in vintage photographs that range from the erotic to the banal.
- Julia Fryett
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Royal Art Lodge: Learned Helplessness
London
Houldsworth Gallery
Now through October 25
In the current show at London's Houldsworth Gallery, Winnipeg-based collective Royal Art Lodge — comprised of Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, and Neil Farber — presents a darkly comic outlook in 160 miniature paintings. Each tiny two-inch-square panel assumes a self-contained narrative
that spills over into the next through shared themes of isolation and incongruity. The style of the mixed-media pieces is
akin to doodling, an aesthetic strengthened by captions penned in a childlike hand, adding to the sense of visual play. A Girl Named Triniti is a panel depicting a three-eyed child; a study of a brown-paper parcel bears the legend "Infanticipating." Such ambiguity
tends toward a darker, more melancholy tone in a show that amounts to an impressive shaggy-dog story.
- Helen Holtom
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Ann-Sofi Sidén: In Passing
Stockholm
Bonniers Konsthall
Now through October 12
At Bonniers Konsthall, Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Sidén presents her latest project exploring contemporary European society. In Passing is a video installation that addresses the controversial phenomenon of the babyklappe. Recently introduced in Germany to deter infanticide, the babyklappe is a hatch on the exterior of a hospital where mothers can anonymously leave their infants if they are unable or unwilling
to care for them. Sidén's multichannel installation includes two parallel narratives, one in color and one in black-and-white.
The color section follows a young woman who leaves her daughter in a babyklappe, while the black-and-white complement shows the detached, formal treatment of the infant once inside the hospital. Avoiding explanations and judgments, Sidén allows
for an emotional take on the contentious topic, focusing on the difficulties of separation.
- Elna Svenle
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[ Osang Gwon ] |
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Osang Gwon
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Osang Gwon may be best known for his photographic modes, but don't call him a photographer. In 1998, he began his Deodorant Type series of life-size figures created from hundreds of cut-and-pasted photographic fragments, including inanimate objects,
such as Unbearable heaviness, that mapped the texture of stone over rounded forms. But his human figures — eerie, three-dimensional paper dolls — eventually
became Gwon's trademark entrance into the art world, and continue to hold sway on the contemporary market. Several works from
the series, along with new commissions, were recently on view in a solo show at the Manchester Art Gallery in the UK.
Born in 1974 in Seoul, where he lives and works today, Gwon received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in sculpture from
the prestigious Hong-Ik University. Gwon's attempts to break away from traditional sculpture led him to abandon conventional
materials, such as bronze and stone, and begin working photography into his work. In doing so, Gwon secured his first solo
exhibition in 2001 at Insa Art Space in Seoul; he has since shown internationally in Beijing, London, and Zurich.
For his next project, appropriately titled The Flat, Gwon assembled magazine cutouts of luxury goods, propping them up in a tight swarm across desks and floors to create the
illusion of depth; he then photographed the glossy, yet empty cascades, collapsing them back into two dimensions. Again toying
with the demands of three-dimensional representation, Gwon re-examines sculptural conventions with full-scale, painted bronze
models of sports cars and motorbikes in The Sculpture. Here, the sculptor's quest for anomalous artistic forms leads him back to an old-fashioned material in an act of ironic
homecoming. Gwon's name continues to circulate — he recently photographed British megarockers Keane for the cover of their upcoming album — as his continuing ability to subvert his media challenges audiences to look beyond
preconceived notions.
- Carol Lee
Osang Gwon is represented by Arario Gallery in Cheonan, Seoul, Beijing, and New York and Avanthay Contemporary in Zurich. A monograph, published by Arario in 2006, is available.
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[ Do Ho Suh ] |
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Do Ho Suh View more images » |
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| Celebrated Korean artist Do Ho Suh has followed his own path from the very beginning. After receiving an MFA in painting from Seoul National University and
a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Suh jumped forms, studying at Yale's sculpture department. Internationally exhibited
and collected, Suh splits his time between Seoul and New York, where Artkrush editor Paul Laster recently sat down with the
artist to discuss his work and its sublime interpretation of notions of displacement, identity, and karma. |
AK: What do you recall from your early years in Korea?
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DHS: I was born in 1962, after the military coup that brought Park Chung Hee to power. When I started college in 1981, it was shortly after the Gwangju massacre, a civil uprising against Chun Doo Hwan's military dictatorship. It was a turbulent, militaristic time in Korea, and school uniforms were mandatory. However, my
family background was quite different and unique.
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AK: How did your home life contrast with the politicized public environment?
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DHS: My father, Se Ok Suh, is a painter who pioneered the merging of traditional and modern Korean art. He's always been open to new things, but his
background is rooted in traditional culture. Also, my mother is from a very old family, and so she grew up with traditional
costumes and cuisines. Ours wasn't an affluent environment, but it was culturally rich. To me, leaving home to go to school
everyday was a kind of displacement — I had to leave an unreal environment and enter reality.
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AK: You've made many works involving uniforms, including Uni-Form/s: Self-Portrait/s: My 39 Years, which covers a 39-year period of attire. What do uniforms signify to you?
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Lee Ufan: Encounter with the Other
Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe
Steidl
Born in South Korea in 1936, Lee Ufan briefly studied art at Seoul National University before enrolling in Japan's Nihon University in 1956 as a student of philosophy.
Lee returned to painting in the '60s and co-founded the Mono-ha (School of Things) art movement, whose members were renowned for their use of simple, barely manipulated materials. Lee's
paintings and sculptures, which juxtapose the natural with the industrial, are characterized by repeated, minimal gestures
that are continually updated. In this comprehensive monograph, art historian Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe offers a detailed examination of a few select series from Lee's oeuvre: the Relatum installations of found stones with glass and steel plates and the From Point, From Line, and Correspondance paintings. Berswordt-Wallrabe draws on Lee's own writing to explain his philosophical approach to art, while contextualizing
his work in relationship to Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Sam Francis, and other contemporary masters.
- Paul Laster
Lee Ufan's work is on view in a two-part installation, which is accompanied by a catalogue, at PaceWildenstein in New York through October 25. A book of the artist's writings was published this spring by London's Lisson Gallery.
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Cover Art
Atta Kim
The Museum Project #149, 2001
C-print
46 x 64 in./ 122 x 162 cm
Courtesy the artist
All Rights Reserved
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