Gang of Five + One
Sweet Talk and Art Toaster’s Toast First off, if you’ve been avoiding MONA because it’s “way out there,” I don’t blame you. The effects of sprawl definitely have an adverse effect on the ease of our cultural explorations. However, in this case at least the trip is more than worth it as I hope to convey in the following. The Gang of Five, plus One, that is the works of five Korean born artists curated by another (also showing, hence the plus One) offer an aesthetically exciting, creatively challenging, and overall invigorating and refreshing show. While the work is quite diverse, there is a definite shared sensibility that runs throughout. Adjectives out of the way, let’s take them up individually. First up, curator Hyun Jung Kim – clearly the “headliner” here if such a word works with the art world. Her work inhabits the old 7th House performance space with adjoining rooms all used to highlight and keep separate the unbridled display of creativity in terms of her range of ideas and invented mediums. The majority of the work was created by drawing with a glue gun – creating forms both solid and almost invisible at the same time. (A sliver of this work was last seen at the Cranbrook degree show . She uses this technique to form delicate flower drawings and large graceful fish, scales and all, using magazine collage as a backing – giving the object color and a secondary contextual meaning. She takes a different tack with the glue in a side room, with glue drawings which are superimposed over the images of the label on common products – creating a conversation between what’s printed and what’s suggested by the shadow form. On the sculptural side of things – in one room are hung dozens of identical figures – “space bunnies” – which look a bit like space-suited rabbits, and also like little sumo-dolls, complete with rabbit tails and ears, and a visor (like a TV screen) which reads “Be a Playboy Club Bunny.” The writing adds another layer of meaning and demand that these cute figurines be looked at from a different perspective. Other works include TV’s which look like the bunnies’ helmets and a rose with petals of cast human toes. Kim offers a lot to take in visually and leaves the viewer with plenty of questions and a “wow!” feeling – like “I would never have thought of that in a million years but I like it!”
Moving upstairs, brings the viewer into contact with another fount of creativity in the work of Ji Yeon Lee (another recent Cranbrook grad.) Suction-cupped onto the room’s window are a large assortment of individually crafted paper mailboxes (not unlike tiny bird houses) complete with flags and doors (open or closed.) Images adorn inside and outside, indicating another world within. Lee’s next body of work features homes of another sort now worn on a creature’s back – these are drawings of Snails (snail mail, perhaps?) Loosely drawn in solid black ink on heavy paper disks, where the snails’ shells would be is cut out to reveal another image. This world within a world – features a similarly drawn snail trekking through various animated landscapes. (The cutout form indicates that perhaps more images could be found if we rotated these disks – ala Volvelles – that is disks laid upon one another with slits on the outer layer to reveal different information on the other(s). Whether Lee’s snails actually rotate or not, they do suggest the possibility of the rotation as would the spirals of a snailshell itself and the multiple worlds that might be found within each turn.) Lee follows up these delightful drawings with a sculptural installation – taking up the home metaphor to another level altogether. These are chains of islands, crayfish mud homes, colonies of microorganisms mounted on the wall. Up close we see palm trees and more meticulously crafted, and in the hole within the island (a crater, a portal, a doorway) a view into yet another fanciful world, dropping down the rabbit hole once again into this land of wonder that Lee builds in various complex yet quite accessible forms. Everything here is about the joy of discovery and Lee is one such find. The idea of colonies gets picked up with So Yeon Yang’s obsessive, detailed, brightly colored intimate drawings. These are quite playful and show a touch of the naďve in terms of drawing quality. They are observational though on an almost microscopic scale. Whether looking closely at blades of grass, a pile of stones, or a colony of bacteria, as the drawings zoom in on their subjects, what started out as representational begins to be more about color and pattern and ultimately almost textile-like abstractions. That evolution or back and forth created by the two connects these contemporary style drawings to a greater history of art making especially in the East.
This Eastern sense of color combined with calligraphic markmaking, constitute Hee Kyung Chun’s collaged and painted works. The backgrounds are sensuous bright skies on which Chun has overlaid marks, patterns, and specific representative imagery. The forms escape the boundaries of the frame, just as the frames themselves often take on the form. Floral paisley motifs provide a dreamlike backdrop for the surrealist elements that inhabit these spaces.
Collage as sculpture is Kyoon Hee Shin’s modus operandi. Purses and lamps become animated figures and dresses – clever and whimsical, with a hint of social discourse. Her person sized and shaped cloth stuffed sculptures take up the political context in a much stronger way. One such is a figure clad entirely in black, with knees drawn up the chest held together by the arms – an upright fetal position. The figure as is has no hands (the arms in front of the knees are tied together), but over where its featureless head would have ears are placed a pair of cloth flesh-covered hands. We think of political prisoners, faceless, nameless, with no mouth to speak and the only escape is within. It’s surreal, disturbing, and powerful all at once.
The sixth and final artist we come to (though I’ve not arranged these spatially but thematically) is Hyun Seon Kang and a single photograph. It is giant, printed on fabric and stretch around three walls of the room it is displayed in. The image is of a woman (I’m assuming the artist) peering through a slit-like opening in blue fabric one eye visible and weary and fingers holding the fabric apart. It’s a look of paranoia, fear, we might imagine this is someone looking through a veil. But possible interpretations don’t stop there, as perhaps it’s suggestive of a newborn taking its first look at the world. Or perhaps, and this may be a stretch, it’s the artist looking through the blue cloth (walls painted to match that color) as in Alice in Wonderland, long since dropped down the rabbit hole, and done shrinking so as to see blades of grass and pebbles as landscapes, and is now a giant peering out into her world that is like her dollhouse, and the viewers are simply her creations. We’ve entered her house, her installation, and she wants to check in on us. In any case, it’s aesthetically and conceptually quite striking and it’s scale and imagery linger. This may no longer be the Seventh House, but Jef Bourgeau has managed to transform the space into quite a house of play and wonder. In addition to the main exhibition, there is the MONA regular space featuring artists’ interview videos, digital works, a clever twist on “centerfolds,” and numerous different works by various artists that may or may not be Borgeau himself. All of it is varied and interesting, and in a region in which many are clamoring for a contemporary art museum, Bourgeau seems determined to do it all by himself. And in this case at least, he succeeds quite admirably. – Nick Sousanis for The Detroiter (www.thedetroiter.com)
|
|
