Korean Crossing: a recent multi-themed exhibition at nine venues around Hawaii presented a broad range of contemporary art from Korea

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

The 1988 Winter Olympics in Seoul served as an international coming-out party for Korean culture and contemporary art. In the years since, Korean artists have become a highly visible force in the contemporary art scene, both at home and abroad. Over the last decade, the Gwangju Biennale has taken its place among the more important global exhibitions [see A.i.A., Nov. '02], and Korean born artists such as Kimsooja, Do-Ho Suh and Lee But have become important fixtures on the international scene.

"Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawaii provided an opportunity for an American audience to view the wide ranging nature of contemporary Korean art. Separately curated exhibitions in nine art spaces on Oahu and Maul delved into everything from Korea's continuing craft traditions to recent developments in installation and video art, the reinvention of Asian ink painting, and the interplay between painting and photography. "Crossings 2003" was organized as part of a national yearlong celebration of the centenary of Korean immigration to the United States, which began when Koreans were shipped to Hawaii to work in the sugarcane plantations. It was also the latest in an occasional series of multi-venue exhibitions organized by Tom Klobe, director of the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, dealing with art from a single country. Earlier chapters presented overviews of contemporary Japanese and French art.

The "Crossings" shows are designed to highlight and celebrate Hawaii's unique ethnic makeup. They also serve as a reminder of its tempestuous colonial history. As in the earlier installments, Klobe invited other local institutions that show contemporary art to participate by organizing their own exhibitions focusing on different aspects of contemporary Korean art. He also worked with Kim Heh-Kyong, former curator at the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, a Seoul based public organization created in 1973 to promote the development of Korean artistic creation.

The picture that emerged was far more complex than any single theme show could suggest. Explorations of Korean identity mingled with a more universalist model of global citizenship, nostalgia for lost rural lifestyles butted up against a hard-nosed acceptance of the urbanization and modernization of Korean society, and traditional painting and ceramics vied with work in the latest electronic mediums.

The linchpin for the entire proceeding was a remarkable public artwork by Kimsooja in the lobby of Honolulu's colonial-era City Hall. Kimsooja, currently based in New York and probably the best-known participant, titled the work A Mirror Woman to signal its continuity with previous works of hers (A Laundry Woman, A Needle Woman, etc.) focusing on the sense of displacement felt by the female Korean immigrant. However, like the artist's ravishing A Lighthouse Woman, created for the 2002 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. (that work bathed an abandoned lighthouse in a slowly changing display of colored light),A Mirror Woman: The Ground of Nowhere transcended any culture-specific reading.

The work consisted of an almost 60-foot-high vertical cylinder of white fabric set in the center of an uncovered atrium. Kimsooja learned that the atrium roof had been designed to open and close automatically. However, having fallen into disrepair, the mechanism had long been shut down, permanently closing off the sky. Part of her challenge was to persuade the city to reopen the roof. For the duration of the show the open area above her fabric column was left exposed to the elements. Inside, she laid down mirrored flooring, so that visitors who stepped inside the muslin walls found themselves standing on a piece of sky. Meanwhile, the fabric swayed gently in the breeze, giving a sense that one was inside a living, breathing space.

A Mirror Woman combined the exhilaration of James Turrell's "sky spaces" and the disorientation of a Yayoi Kusama mirror room. Clouds drifting overhead and reflected underfoot gave one the feeling, paradoxically, of rolling on an open sea. At night the stars flickered above and below. Ostensibly evoking the immigrant's sense of destabilized identity, A Mirror Woman also provided a more universal experience of melding into earth and sky.

Questions of identity are often the currency of exhibitions devoted to a single nationality. Here they were most in evidence at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. An exhibition curated by Jennifer Saville, the Academy's curator of Western art, focused on contemporary expressions of traditional Korean crafts, ranging from fiber art and ceramics to papermaking and metalwork. The show was by turns playful, nostalgic, devotional and conceptual.

While most works in some way referenced Korean traditions and daily life, they also made a strong case for the dissolution of the distinction between "high art" and craft. One noteworthy instance of this was a 61-foot-long black-and-white tapestry by Lee Shin Ja, which represents a panoramic view of the Han River as it flows through contemporary Seoul. The oldest artist in the show, born in 1931, Lee played with the disjunction between the idyllic landscape visions of traditional Asian scroll paintings and the modern eruption of radio towers, suspension bridges, high-rises and sports stadiums along the Han's banks.