Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Three Young Artists from Korea

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

Three Young Artists from Korea

by John McGee

Visitors really eat up Sora Kim's Cracker Lounge, 2002
(Photos: Yasuaki Yoshinaga)

The third-graders are in heaven. They're lounging like sultans on mounds of floor pillows scattered over a pink carpet, snacking on an endless supply of shrimp chips and Pocky and watching soap operas on flat screen TVs. Hanging chandeliers made of clear, cast-plastic crackers and chips complete the decadent Candyland scene. Like Pinocchio's fate, you expect them to turn into donkeys any moment. So kids, do you like this exhibition? "Suki!" Why? "Okashi-yama!" 

The okashi-yama (mountain of sweets) is a landslide of Korean and Japanese rice crackers, potato chips, cookies and other treats piled six feet high against the back wall and sloping down to the floor of MDS/G Gallery in Yoyogi-Uehara. 

Visitors are encouraged to indulge. Around 3:30pm on school days, local kids stop by and mine deep into the unstable grade to find their favorite spicy kimchi chips or choco-pies before packs of vegetable crisps can slip down and bury them.

Yi-Chul Shin, Gender—Taxidermy of
Image, 2002, clay, wire, wax, wood

Artist Sora Kim is the life of this art party. She installed the red, pink, and patterned brown carpet strips, threw in muted-tone pillows, coordinated the Felix Gonzalez-Torres-esque cascade of Crunkies, and, should you get thirsty, installed a Coke machine (though it's not free). Korean is kool in Tokyo's galleries and museums now, and Kim is one of the three artists in a show looking at the  diverse work of young Korean contemporary artists. 

Kim, 37, who built an igloo out of electrical appliances in last year's "My Home is Yours, Your Home is Mine" show at Tokyo Opera City Gallery, deals with concepts of gift-giving and forced social interaction between otherwise strangers (concepts also employed by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija). 

The work of the two other artists is less rambunctious. Yi-Chul Shin's clay and wire bio-morphic sculptures—skeletal crayfish, pods with flagellating appendages—are partially submerged in pools of wax inside wooden boxes. Shin, 38, says the shapes, which are similar to Lee Bul's organic cyborg creatures, explicitly reference sexual organs (a gallery attendant explains this to the schoolkids). The bilateral symmetry and vaguely suggestive forms could be read as male and female genitalia, or, just as likely, plankton.

Shin says that he wants to address the difference between sex (biological) and gender (social), positing humans as more than just instinctual, reckless animals driven by selfish hormones. In another piece, Shin cut similar, but much larger two-dimensional shapes out of rainbow tape and stuck them high on the gallery windows.

Haiyoung Suh, Brick Puzzle, 2002, black tape and silkscreen on black mirror. 

Haiyoung Suh, 33, used black tape to wrap two-dimensional angled brick walls around the paper tube columns forming the gallery's interior divider. Applied to flat walls, the tape creates illusions of perspective. On these curved surfaces however, the brick effects are interrupted and warped. Suh also silk-screened brick motifs onto six square black mirrors. 

Curator Kyung-Hwan Won says that young Korean artists are currently processing a chaotic influx of ideas from around the world, giving Korean contemporary art a "rather confusing" look. This show effectively introduces some of these different trajectories, but it leaves you feeling like the kids who eat too much of Kim's work—a little giddy, but unsatisfied. 

Fashion designer Issey Miyake started MDS/G (Miyake Design Studio/Gallery) as a gallery space in the Shigeru Ban-designed building in 2000. Their three to four shows a year, usually organized by Miyake, have included Los Angeles artist Tim Hawkinson and industrial designers from the Royal College of Art in London.

The Three Young Artists from Korea exhibition was held June-July 2002 at MDS/G in Yoyogi-Uehara, Tokyo, Japan.

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