Alienation and Assimilation
An exhibition of modern South Korean art
By Eunice Park

Alienation and assimilation. The two words are at uneasy odds with each other and by design. Special art exhibits have a remarkable penchant for giving themselves intriguingly paradoxical names, which only the artists and most probably the exhibit organizers can fully understand. The poor layman nods his head uncertainly, pretending to understand upon entering the exhibit, no doubt “sold” by the provocative premise of contrasting, combating words.

The conflicting phrase, Alienation and Assimilation, is the title of the world’s first large-scale exhibition of works by photographers and multimedia artists from South Korea. Featured at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco from Feb. 9 to April 30, the exhibition showcases pieces from sixteen artists and encompasses objects ranging from silver gelatin prints to slides and video installations to three-dimensional multimedia.

The first thing that confronts the viewer as they enter the exhibition is a jutting, blank white wall with the words, “Alienation and Assimilation” stamped imposingly upon it. The title directly recalls the parallels and tensions that define Korea’s modern cultural atmosphere, as well as suggesting political and social confrontation.

In the last 50 years, the unfamiliar aesthetic standards of the Western world have been wholeheartedly adopted by Koreans ready to shed their country’s image of the isolated “Hermit Kingdom.” In many places Burger King has replaced bul-goki (Korean barbecue ribs), and where old temples used to sleep in stately repose, glittering skyscrapers now vie for attention. In a country steeped in traditional Confucianism, confusion now abounds as the younger generation seeks to break free of the ancient alienation of Korea and embrace more global, democratic thought processes in their lives.

The wavering conflict between old and new, familiar and foreign, began largely with the use of modern photography, which arrived only after 1945, when the Japanese colonization of Korea ended.

The 1970s saw the development of photography as an art form for both personal expression and journalistic purposes. In the 1980s, artists led by Nam June Paik and Park Hyun-Ki experimented with photography and video to express views that differed from the status quo. The artists of the 1990s differed radically from their predecessors in that many of them had grown up watching television. Immersed in the culture of reflected, increasingly global images, they used cartoons, magazines, television, videos, movies, billboard and electronic signs in their work -- signs of a rapidly shifting South Korea. Thus, a dichotomy between older and newer artists exists; some regard tradition as an inspiring inheritance, while others prefer to create a new artistic identity, independent of artistic tradition.

Some artists, like Bae Bien-U and Park Hyun-Ki try to re-establish the importance of nature in a country that heedlessly follows the alluring call of urbanization and technological change. Others, like Kim Seok-Jung and Kwon Yeo-Hyun explore the essence of what is identity, whether it is defined by gender, ethnicity, class or generation. The last category of artists, including Choi Jeong-Hwa and Yook Keun-Byung involve the more direct social commentary on mass consumption, historical awareness, government corruption, and the continuing divided state of North and South Korea.

After the viewer passes the first imposing wall, they are confronted by an indelible greeting image, a steel tubular video installation perched on tripods. The video, created by Yook Keun-Byung and titled, “Survival in History,” belongs to the last category of artists, and shows video footage of events in history like war and evolution, interspersed with flashing images of earth, water and fire. The images implicitly refer to the cycles of life and death, and while they fade and shift continuously, the human eye wanders from side to side at the top of the screen. It bears constant witness to the wars (especially the Korean War) and the arbitrary sequence of parading tadpoles and magnolias that flicker beneath it. The artist calls the gazing eye the “mirror to the mind” and is the sole pillar of constancy standing in the disconcerting mass of shifting pictures.

Choi Jeong-Hwa makes a less ambitious statement on society with her piece, “Rotten Art, Rotted Art,” a series of photographs of rotting food juxtaposed with pictures of idealized plastic models of food. She comments on the replacement of nature with manufactured culture, as preservatives and coloring agents standardize foods so much that the boundaries between imitation and reality are obscured. The rotting and perfect foods are plopped on refrigerator-white, bland backgrounds and enclosed by mocking parodies of frames, vulgarly gilded serving platters, which connote cheap elegance.

Contrasting sharply with this spread of crass reality, is a series of subdued photographs, “Sea of Cheju at Night,” by Bae Bien-U, who seeks to reassert the relevance of nature in modern society. The eight photographs incorporate only the most elementary components, the sea, sky, horizon and the few scattered lights of fishing boats. The series is placed side by side and is blurred, creating continuous, abstract bars of black sea and a virginal white sky across the gallery wall, punctuated occasionally by streaks of timid, quivering fishing-boat light.

Fulfilling the same motive as Bae Bien-U, Park Hyun Ki’s “Reflection Series” is contained in a box-like room of its own. Against a powdered square of hardwood floor, a video of a calm, yet tumultuous mountain spring is projected from a hanging video camera. Another contemplative stream of water is projected onto a slanted screen wedged into the ground. Accompanied by the soothing music of flowing streams, the viewer is immersed in a surreal, four-dimensional cocoon of water. By creating these pseudo-rooms of nature, the artist skirts the tenuous boundary between reality and fabrication.

The quest and exploration of Korean and general human identity characterize the remaining group of artists. Kim Seok-Jung’s “Museum Project” is comprised of a series of strange, quirky photographs of men and women trapped in the glass display cases found in museums. The naked, faceless people are curled into fetal positions or stand abnormally straight, rigid in their anonymity and imprisoned in their glass cells. These boxes are placed in random places, an empty night street, a museum. The artist reflects on the negative impact of a controlling society on humans, the invasion of their fragile self and space, and implies that humans are no more than mere specimens to each other, to be wryly observed and commented on.

While most of the pieces convey a somber mood or cool detachment, the exhibition ends on a humorous, lightly satirical note, with a series of photographic “self-portraits” by Kwon Yeo-Hyun. Stretching the normal conception of the “self-portrait,” the artist has captured his likeness in a variety of disguises, ranging from a Generation-X rock singer to a man dressed in traditional Korean costume to a woman muffled in a mink coat. He uses sly parody to display the rich diversity of humanity. In his words, he “reduces the breadth of human experience into six categories: society, religion, history, science, need, and love.” This spectrum of the human experience is represented by his panoply of figures, all unified by the artist’s distinctly sardonic smile.

The exhibition’s final space is a resource room, where visitors can participate in a Video Diary. One can walk into an installation of alternating Korean and English text to a private booth where personal responses to the exhibition, experiences of both estrangement and assimilation, are videotaped. Here, the viewer realizes that alienation and assimilation are not unique to Korean people but are universal emotions, felt both personally or collectively.

The viewer, that poor layman, finally understands the meaning of the enigmatic title: that alienation and assimilation walk hand in hand, in both art and in real life.