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

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Frank Hoffmann

The entire North America show (which concentrated on the U.S. and Canada, since Mexico was covered in the Central & South America section) included little other than self-portraits and multiple mirrors reflecting back these self-portraits. Finkelpearl, who aimed to juxtapose "American individualism" with what he perceives as "group orientation" among Koreans, supplemented the pictures with travel-guide quotes posted on the gallery walls to illustrate clashes between Korean and U.S. mores. The problem with this approach is, of course, that its narrow East-West dualism relies on social and cultural stereotypes, a reductionism at odds with the internationalism so characteristic of today's art.

More than haft of the North American artists were women, and several used gender as a major theme. Julie Heffernan's baroquely painted mythic scenes often include stylized depictions of herself in vulnerable, girlish poses. The painter Su-en Wong, much concerned with the awkward passage from childhood to adulthood, also portrays herself as a teenager with a girlish attitude, frequently trying to emulate objects of the male gaze so as to reveal social and sexual stereotypes projected onto Asian women. In her installation, Rachelle Viader Knowles appeared as a video projection, hovering across from the image of a man on the other side of the room.

Ellen Harvey plays with, in her words, "the convention of the self-expressive serf-portrait" (the catalogue includes a brief artist's statement or critic's profile for every participant). For her series I See Myself in You, she invited some friends to dress and pose to match her childhood snapshots. Harvey then photographed these surrogates and made paintings based on the Polaroids, eventually putting the depictions together as pairs to evoke "archetypes of female representation: the girl in nature, the child with her animal, etc."

Some of the Biennale's staff members and several Korean journalists were upset to see Nikki S. Lee make her Kwangju debut in the North America section, given her Korean citizenship and lack of permanent residence in the United States. (Going by the book, Byron Kim should have appeared in the North America section, not the Korea/Oceania section.) Lee almost always photographs herself as a member of some U.S. social group, in direct contrast to Finkelpearl's focus on American individualism. And the culturally marginal subgroups she enters (whether Hispanic "gangster," poor white or New York punk) nicely accommodate her within their ranks. Yet, in its disavowal of pure estheticism and visual idealization, Lee's work seems more American than Korean. Her oversized pseudo-snapshots include the date marker, so as to simulate documentary photos. The images convince through irony. As Lee explains: "Good documentation of a simulation does, in fact, make the simulation more real."

In a highly politicized variation on serf-depiction, the photo-based works of Lyle Ashton Harris and Glenn Ligon address some of the same identity issues as the group shots of Nikki Lee. But they do so counterintuitively--using a single human body to represent the collective "body" of gay black male artists, one of the most underrepresented groups in modern art.