Hybrid identities - Korean art; various artists, Queens Museum, New York, New York

Art in America, Sept, 1994 by Eleanor Heartney

Exploring cross-cultural issues, the Queens Museum recently paired Korean protest art of the '80s with newer works by Korean-American artists.

The most vivid image of Koreans for many Americans has been shaped by the well-publicized travails of Korean merchants in the L.A. riots and the boycotted grocery in Brooklyn. Thus an ancient and venerable culture is reduced, in the American imagination, to a nation of vegetable sellers. Yet the bellicose greengrocer is only one stereotype that Korean immigrants must suffer in their adopted country. They are also subject to the general cliches about Asians which depict them as a people who are rigid and inscrutable, socially hierarchical and commercially merciless.

The image of the greengrocer is invoked in several of the works displayed in "Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art," an exhibition of works by 24 Koreans and Korean-Americans organized by the Queens Museum. The exhibition is divided into two parts, the first of which was organized by Queens Museum curator Jane Farver and spotlights the work of 12 Korean immigrants or American-born Koreans who struggle with the ambiguities of their hybrid identities. The second, organized by Korean curator Young Chul Lee, represents a cross section of Korean artists associated with Min Joong, or People's Art, a movement of political protest which emerged in Korea during the tumultuous events of the 1980s.

One might expect a divide to open up between these two groups, and, in fact, there are distinct stylistic differences. The most hard-core of the Min Joong artists cling to an esthetic that owes a great deal to Chinese Socialist Realism, although some of the younger among them have begun to explore a more diverse range of artistic options. Many of the Korean immigrants, by contrast, adopt the terms of the current American debate on ethnicity and identity, and several are perhaps too well versed in the deconstructive language of contemporary political art, which seems to have become a form of art-world Esperanto.

But despite these differences, one of the most striking aspects of this exhibition is its demonstration that concern about the preemption of Korean tradition by Western-style industrial development, consumerism and urbanization is equally powerful for Koreans living in New York and for those in Seoul. Nostalgia permeates the work of both groups, whether it is the Korean-Americans' longing for the lost Korea of their own or their parents' childhoods or the Min Joong artists' sorrow over the disappearance of the old rural ways of life.

Among the most poignant of the Korean-American works are those that deal with the immigrant's sense of dislocation. A set of folding screens by Jin Me Yoon chronicles, through text and photographs relating to her own family's immigration to America, the growing alienation of daughter from mother in the new land. The rift culminates in a letter in which the artist's mother confesses that she cannot understand her daughter's art. The difficult situation of Korean-American Women, caught between traditional expectations and new possibilities, is captured by Yong Soon Min. She offers a mannequin representing a traditional Korean bride who unrolls a carpet that welcomes the viewer to walk all over her.

The gap between native and adapted culture takes on an absurdist tone in a video installation by Mo Bahc that presents an English-language lesson tape in which Korean and English speakers politely conduct a real-estate deal, job interview and social encounter, and offers sing-along conversational Phrases. A comic air of unreality pervades the proceedings, which take place in a never-never land of boundless goodwill and cultural understanding.

The Korean grocer makes his appearance in works which focus on the harsh realities of the immigrant's new life in the United States. In memory of the L.A. riots, Sung Ho Choi created a replica of a greengrocer's storefront, complete with charred canopy and live plants growing from the ashes of the incinerated vegetables. David Chung's wall drawings depict the kaleidoscopic world of the young Korean immigrant in which greenmarkets, billboards and bustling urban streets mingle with memories of Korean legends and history. Hung Su Kim's computer-generated photographs focus on such details as the mix of English and Korean languages in advertisements or the church vans covered with Korean signs which reveal the strange hybrid culture emerging in places like L.A.'s Koreatown.

Meanwhile, Western stereotypes about Asian culture form the raw material for Michael Joo's witty though at times overly obscure investigations of cultural cliches. Using a pseudo-scientific format, he presents such "studies" as a comparison of the shapes of the eyes of famous Asians and Westerners.

While the Korean-American artists wrestle with their hybrid identities, the Min Joong artists deal with more clearly defined instances of political and social oppression. Since its emergence in response to the bloody government suppression of the Kwangju uprising in 1980, Min Joong has striven to be the voice of the oppressed. This exhibition includes work by some of the leaders of the movement, as well as documentation of posters and performances that were part of political demonstrations. Min Joong has recently begun to suffer the contradictions of history, as the worldwide collapse of socialism and the recent election of a former dissident to the presidency of Korea have removed some of its most inviting targets.