Monoculture and Its Discontents - Kwangju Biennale 2000 - Statistical Data Included

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Frank Hoffmann

Perhaps this is why five photomontages by the promising Korean woman artist Kim Chong-son were immediately disparaged by two male Korean art critics (Kim Chong-gun and Kim Yong-ho, quoted in the local newspaper Mudung ilbo) as being "just pornographic." But these images are clearly less sexually loaded than many other pieces in the exhibition. Standing in front of Chosen-period Korean screen paintings, some of them from the former royal court, the artist poses with bare breasts, haft dressed in traditional Korean underwear, while wearing a court lady's coiffure or a horsehair hat once reserved for aristocratic gentlemen. Kim is not involved in any lascivious act, nor is her body even erotically appealing in these photos. What likely upsets these critics is just the opposite: the work is not sexy or eroticized but actually desexualized in a way that threatens to defile the objectified representations of female beauty and virtue that adorn Asian airline flight magazines.

Much less controversial was a video installation by Clang Yonghye, Cunnilingus in North Korea (2000). This work consists of seven TV monitors spread out on the floor, each playing the same 18-minute-long video. The tape shows a black-and-white photo of the North Korean leader Kim Chong-il with his Worker's Party membership book raised. A monotonous voice that the viewer is supposed to associate with the leader repeats an endless and exceedingly vulgar speech contrasting imagined sex practices in North and South Korea. Had this installation come from a North Korean artist rather than from a South Korean (a near impossibility under current political conditions), viewers might have taken it as a somewhat interesting piece rather than yet another tasteless joke about a tasteless dictator.

A substantial number of works attempted to blur gender boundaries and posit identities beyond male and female, thus subverting the "fate" that Freud found inherent in human anatomy. In an outstanding photomontage series, New York-based Dutch artist Inez van Lamsweerde manipulates the conventions of fashion advertising, particularly the use of bright shadowless lighting. She photographed various models posed in identical positions and then spliced their various body parts together using computer technology. Her life-size 1995 series of "men" with ecstatic facial expressions, adorned with lipstick and long polished nails, offers a disturbing challenge to received notions of masculine "naturalness." Similarly, Zoe Leonard tampers with gender-coded anatomical, traits, especially hair, in order to challenge our visual preconceptions. What at first appears to be a Playboy centerfold, for example, is in fact a bearded transsexual. The 1988 photo Doublonnage (Marcel) by Yasumasa Morimura, an homage to Duchamp, posits Rrose Selavy as a primary inspiration for the Japanese artist's cross-dressing self-portraits that seek to undermine the colonizing gaze of Western viewers and expose stereotypes of gender, race and beauty.