Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Seoul Pop

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Seoul Pop

by John McGee

Traditional Korean wedding dress and feast (Images courtesy Setagaya Art Museum)

This "Year of Japan-ROK National Exchange 2002" is a time to contemplate cultural differences. Korean free tissue packs, for example, are nearly twice as big as Japanese. Similarities? Korean music group K-Pop could easily pass for any "Johnnies"-managed boy band (think SMAP). With photographs, videos and ephemera cataloging Korean street culture, housing, media and rituals, "Seoul Pop," at the Setagaya Art Museum, is laden with latent comparisons. 

Curator Yukiya Kawaguchi says that Japanese are already familiar with Korean antiquities through exhibitions like "Dynastic Heritage of Korea," up now at the Tokyo National Museum. And contemporary Korean artists like Lee Bul have become popular in Japan over the last 10 years. "But we have no idea about everyday Korean people, " Kawaguchi said, "I wanted to introduce the everyday life and values of today's Koreans." He asked his counterpart at the private Sunkok Art Museum in Seoul to gather things that Koreans see when they buy rice, shop for a condo, plan a vacation, and generally go about living. 

A Korean warning sign: 
Watch out for falling humans!

This kind of quasi-anthropological exhibition, and the similarly themed "Seoul Style 2002—Life As It Is With The Lee Family" (a Korean family's furniture, clothing, and effects) at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka begs the question of how one culture can represent another in a sensitive, accurate, and meaningful way, especially when the two are like estranged brothers. "Seoul Pop" favors the catalog style of Japanese magazines—one of everything—with train and street noises as soundtrack. 

Though a little cheesy at times, the show progressively draws you in. It starts with a tourism center. Posters and videos from the "Visit Korea 2001" campaign show families admiring autumn foliage and women in traditional hanbok strolling through cultural sites. Snapshots of the urban landscape in the "my trip" section convey the sensory overload that makes travel fun: street stalls crammed with colorful baskets, signs for toy stores and hostess clubs, an Elvis statue peddling videos. Street photos of locals aren't up to the level of  "Fruits" magazine (the Harajuku street-fashion bible), but they do record recent trends—chunky shoes, baggy hip hop pants and denim skirt suits. 

Remember your first few days (years) in Japan, when all the street signs were so interesting to look at but totally illegible? The Korea depicted here feels the same. Safety and construction signs have a socialist utopian and/or nostalgic '50s cartoon feel: If you touch a Korean high voltage box, your eyes will pinwheel. 

Korean weather report

At the recreated newsstand, you can tachiyomi (stand and read) magazines like The Cindy Perky (fashion), Korean and English-language newspapers, and manga like Cake: Yummy Comic Paper. Or just relax among monitors screening movie trailers, music videos, commercials for Popeye's chicken and OB Lager, period dramas, educational cartoons, and news footage from 1953-1994. Some clunky additions detract from the strong graphic core of the show. An enormous bibinpa bowl—filled with detritus like old computers and empty chips bags—is an awkward "mix" metaphor. And in a tacked-on concession to contemporary art, Korean artist Jihyun Kim and Japanese artist Noriko Umano blandly follow the tourism theme with a time-lapse video around Seoul and Beat Streuli-style photos of faces in a crowd. 

Faults aside, the show gives a Seoul-ful, often-funny look at contemporary Korean street life. It may even spur an overseas trip, if only to get those supersize tissues.

The Seoul Pop exhibition was held May-July 2002 at the Setagaya Art Museum, Kinuta Koen (Yoga), Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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