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

Another exhibition, at the Koa Art Gallery of Kapi'olani Community College, focused on younger media based artists. Also curated by Sul Wongi, it was uneven but offered some gratifying moments. The slickest work was a video by Park Hye Sung titled Ingres and His Friends. Actors dressed to resemble figures from paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet, Frida Kahlo, Paul Delvaux, Rene Magritte and Marcel Duchamp arrange themselves in familiar tableaux. In some cases motifs front different paintings are mixed and melded. The apparently effortless re-creation of impossible realities (roses rained over Kahlo's self-portrait, Magritte's giant flower swelled to overwhelm a room) reveals the natural synergy between Surrealism and video. A similar point was made by Kim Joon's video in which tattooed body markings seem to swell and become animate.

Kim Changkyum's The Prayer for Those Who Remain had a more political underpinning. This video offers a montage of news images of war and disaster (including the Twin Towers, whose destruction, one suspects, was the impetus for the work) combined with clips depicting politicians, commercials and Hollywood celebrities. Interspersed throughout are video passages of a more quotidian nature presenting students strolling in slow motion through the university area of Seoul. A soundtrack of mournful chanting gives the whole work an elegiac quality. In a more clinical spirit, Chang Jia contributed The Abnormal Changes in the Senses by Drug Abuse, a near-real-time video chronicle of the progressive loss of motor control experienced by a white-robed "patient" who has just ingested a large quantity of drugs.

The show was rounded out by an exhibition at the Contemporary Museum's branch at First Hawaiian Center of works by Korean artists living in Hawaii. Curated by Allison Wong, the work here ranged from Hyeyoung Kim's Surrealism-indebted staged photographs of tunnels and stairs to Kloe Kang's paintings of floating rice bowls and Geoff Lee's elaborate installation featuring bell-shaped vessels poised over bowls containing objects relating to the three classes of tradition Korean life: rice for the peasants, paper and pen for soldiers, and gold leaf for the aristocracy.

Given the number of Korea-related exhibitions that have appeared internationally since 1988, this one ran the risk of revisiting well-trodden ground. However, the show was engaging and fresh, and presented a surprising number of new faces. The multi-venue format made a variety of very different perspectives available, effectively blasting any myths about the monolithic nature of Korean art or identity. Instead, "Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawai'i" presented contemporary Korean art in all its splendid complexity.

"Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawai'i" took place in nine venues: Honolulu Hale (City Hall) [Sept. 14-Oct. 31, 2003], the Contemporary Museum [Sept. 19-Nov. 16, 2003], Honolulu Academy of Arts [Sept. 18-Nov. 9, 2003], University of Hawaii Art Gallery [Sept. 14-Nov. 7, 2003], East-West Center Gallery [Sept. 14-Nov. 14, 2003], Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College [Sept. 17-Oct. 22, 2003] and the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center [Oct. 3, 2003-Jan. 6, 2004], all in Honolulu, along with Gallery 'Iolani at Windward Community College, Kaneohe, Oahu [Sept. 16-Oct. 18, 2003], and Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center, Makawao, Maui [Dec. 27, 2003-Feb. 1, 2004]. The bilingual catalogue includes essays by Kim Heh-Kyong and Kim Hong-Hee.