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Your Bright Future is one of the only American exhibitions in the last twenty years to focus exclusively on contemporary Korean art, and it is anything but homogeneous. Not all of the artists identify themselves, first and foremost, as Korean, and most have traveled extensively or have adopted a transnational lifestyle, splitting time between several different countries.
The pieces in this exhibition reflect attitudes, motifs, and ideas that are present on all sides of the international discussion that surrounds contemporary art. When looking at this exhibit, one must remember that contemporary art is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. Artists from all over the world search for common ground between peoples, while others investigate the significance and function of language. Still others attempt to reconcile past and present, while others examine notions of home, culture, and identity. This range of interests is reflected in Your Bright Future.
Despite having varying attitudes about participating in an exhibition based on nationality, these artists share the experience of growing up in country that, despite its rich history, remains politically fragmented, a fact that is inevitably reflected in their art. The works of these artists often reflect personal journeys across social, political, and cultural borders. These artists’ voices overlap in a chorus that challenges us to reevaluate the way we regard Korea, Asia, and ultimately ourselves.
Note: In conjunction with Your Bright Future, the MFAH commissioned YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES to create a series of artworks to serve as introductions to this web feature; play them randomly by clicking the panel at left. Two more commissioned works by YHCHI are in the exhibition.
In East Asia, family names are written first, followed by the given name. Sometimes names are written as two separate words; other times they run together. Some of the artists in Your Bright Future follow East Asian conventions. Two also run their last and first names together. Others adopt Western conventions when they show their work in the West. We have capitalized the family name of each artist at the beginning of the section about his or her work.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and LACMA. In Houston, it is made possible by the Korea Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
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Your Bright Future • view all images
Bahc Yiso lived in Brooklyn, New York, from 1982 until 1994. There he fused his Korean and North American experiences in works exploring cultural identity. In preparation for his return to Korea, for instance, he marinated a baseball bat in soy sauce (Untitled, 1994).
In Korea, Bahc's work became more ethereal and abstract. His final piece, We Are Happy (2004), is a billboard or banner with these words printed in white Korean script against an orange background. The museum is currently displaying the work on a billboard facing west overlooking Highway 59 and Rosedale, where it will remain for four weeks starting November 16, 2009. In its resonant ambiguity We Are Happy questions what happiness is, and who is experiencing it.
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Happy Happy • view all images
The only artist in Your Bright Future who has not studied or lived abroad, Choi Jeong-Hwa proudly proclaims that he was "made in Korea." Renowned as the father of Korean pop art, he has produced a temporary outdoor installation for the exhibition. Happy Happy, located in the museum’s Cullen Sculpture Garden, is comprised of many green and red plastic containers that form a flowing, organic labyrinth. As has been the case for most of his large-scale outdoor installation works, the materials for Happy Happy were all obtained locally. In putting his piece outside, Choi shows that his work embodies his philosophy that art should be accessible to all.
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The Wild Korea • view all video+images
Gimhongsok's works often question South Korea's place in the world, and the role of language and popular culture in perpetuating that order. The Wild Korea (2005), a black comedy in documentary form, takes place during a (fictional) few months in 1997 when, to promote individual freedom, South Korea legalized gun possession. The video centers on an interview with a young man who finds himself kidnapped and persecuted for having a red face. Eventually, his face turns blue. The colors suggest the conflict between North and South Korea, and the United States' role in the country. Gim has said, "Wild Korea does not only pertain to the Korean situation. It is about the contradictions of binary thinking in the West and its influence in the East."
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The White House • view video
Jeon Joonho's digital animations appear to be playful, charming works that depict the artist traveling through miniature worlds, but they are serious in intent. In The White House (2005-6), a small figure slowly paints out the windows and doors of the presidential residence as depicted on the back of a twenty-dollar bill. Jeon effectively turns the White House, meant to be open to its people, into a bunker.
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An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle • view all video+images
Kim Beom's installations mix cryptically humorous sculptural objects, videos, and small ink drawings in settings that recall domestic spaces. An Iron in the Form of a Radio, a Kettle in the Form of an Iron, and a Radio in the Form of a Kettle (2002)—composed of three objects on a single shelf—is exactly what its title proclaims. For Untitled (News) (2002), Kim painstakingly edited together television news broadcasts into short clips that change what the reporters were saying. Their statements vacillate between the inane and the poignant. Kim also produces artist's books, such as Noonchi (2009). Often text alone, they hold tales that have the quality of fables.
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A Needle Woman • view all video+images
Kimsooja produces, directs, and acts in her videos. As A Needle Woman (2005), she penetrates the world by remaining still, her back to the camera. She stands on bustling city streets like a rock in a rushing river, altering the flow. Passersby also play a central role as they respond to or ignore her.
The delicacy of Kim's works belies the discipline they require. She must keep her eyes focused at a central point to maintain balance. She breathes from her stomach so that her shoulders don't move and wills different parts of her body to relax in order to promote circulation. But Kim does not consider her practice meditation. "Every moment of our daily life is [a] . . . meditation," she says.
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Mountain Fundamental • view all images
Koo Jeong-A makes photographs, drawings, and often tiny sculptures. Her materials—ranging from marble to sugar, from salt to mothballs—are always chosen for their physical rather than conceptual properties. Koo's materially elusive works often conceal her physical and psychic efforts. Mountain Fundamental (1997-2009) is a tiny landscape made of stones that the artist sanded into a fine powder. The book R (2005) reproduces Koo's 1,001 small drawings, a reference to the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade escapes execution by entrancing her husband, the king, with a story, each night withholding its ending.
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Wrong Question • view all video
Minouk Lim's video installation Wrong Question (2006) explores miscommunications created by class and generational differences in Korea. A taxi driver tells of how 1950s and '60s anticommunist strongmen Rhee Sungman and Park Chung-hee saved South Korea. But he conflates communism and democracy: "Those worthless democrats are ruining us," he says. "Why can't they see the ridiculousness of North Korea's system?" On the adjacent screen, Lim's little daughter says she dreams of her mother staying home. Her grandfather tells her to say instead, "I'll be a great painter like Mom." "What's a painter?" the child asks. The two seem to be holding different conversations, the products of radically divergent life experiences.
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MONOLOGUE monologue • view all video
In Jooyeon Park's photograph of an intersection in Seoul (Untitled, 2002-4), all signage has been digitally erased. In its place are blank, colored billboards. There is nothing to orient the viewer, but the beauty of the constructivist composition, revealed by the absence of words, compensates for the discomfort. The image reflects Park's conviction, forged during her student years in London, that language is a poor communication system. For MONOLOGUE monologue (2006), she recorded the voices of three Irish actors, who live in Seoul and support themselves teaching English, as they recall the landscapes of Ireland. Pictured on the screen are three of their Korean students lip-synching the monologues. An exploration of the nature of memory, the work also highlights how language functions as a complex social cue.
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Fallen Star 1/5 • view all video+images
In 1994, Do Ho Suh began using silk and nylon to create full-sized renditions of his childhood home in Korea and his apartment in New York. Transparent or translucent, these fabric pieces blur the distinctions between inside and outside, past and present, evoking notions of home and homesickness.
Although his materials have changed, Suh also combines personal history and architecture in newer works such as Fallen Star 1/5 (2008-9). In it, a traditional Korean scholar's house (like the one in which Suh grew up) has crashed into the building that housed his first U.S. apartment. The formal languages of Eastern and Western architecture reflect different social structures; the work depicts their violent collision.
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Storage Piece
Haegue Yang creates autobiographical works rich with intellectual meaning. Storage Piece started out as the artist’s response to a very common problem: the crisis of needing space but having none. The work consists of crated and wrapped paintings and sculptures that had been returned to her unsold after a previous exhibition. The piece has undergone a metamorphosis since its first showing five years ago. Yang turned the act of unpacking the contents of the crate into a performance and prepared a two-person show that contemplated the psychological and conceptual aspects of the artist’s situation. When German collector Axel Haubrok bought the piece in 2005, the status of the piece went from a commentary to a commodity. Its stop in Houston is the first time that Storage Piece has ever been presented without a script or corresponding series of actions. Yang’s goal is to remove the piece’s "voice" and have it communicate through its silence, transcending the need for actors and performance.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. Its C.E.O., Young-hae Chang (Korea), and its C.I.O., Marc Voge (U.S.A.) are based in Seoul. YHCHI has made work in 16 languages and presented much of it at the following institutions: Tate, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Whitney Museum, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center, Los Angeles, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Venice Biennial, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, the São Paulo Biennial, the Kitakyushu Biennial, and the Istanbul Biennial. BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, its first international solo show, was part of the inaugural opening, in 2007, of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. In June 2008, YHCHI received the Grand Prix Multimédia from the Société des Gens de Lettres, Paris. In October 2008, the duo were "digital artists in residence" in the Interrupt Festival, at Brown University. YHCHI just had its second solo show, from December 2008 to February 2009, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST).