Exhibit of the week: Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists From Korea

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through Sept. 20

Quick, who’s your favorite Korean artist? said Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times. Most people couldn’t name a single one, a situation the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hopes to remedy with this exhibition, “intended to shine a strong light on a region that is usually in the art world’s shadows.” Your Bright Future certainly will raise the prominence of the 12 featured artists. But this “sprawling show of multi­media installations, video art, computer animation, and sculpture” will frustrate any attempt to identify broader themes in contemporary Korean art. In fact, considering that many of these artists no longer live in Korea and instead have settled in the West, it raises the question: “In an age of globalization, is there any such thing as Korean contemporary art?”

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Based on the evidence here, I’d say no, said Richard Chang in the Orange County, Calif., Register. There are certainly few “links to Korea’s grand traditions of painting, sculpture, calligraphy, and ceramics.” Instead, these artists, all born after 1955, mostly create conceptual art based on current events and pop culture. Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Happy Happy is a hanging wall made of “candy-colored bowls, bins, cups, colanders, and plates” purchased from 99-cent stores. It’s not quite clear, though, what this “showy” indictment of disposable culture has to do with contemporary Korea. Bahc Yiso’s Your Bright Future consists of 10 spotlights shining on a blank wall. It’s possible this is a wry political comment “on unquestioning fealty to North Korean ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il.” Then again, it may mean something more uplifting—“or, perhaps, nothing at all.”

Sure, there’s a lot of artwork here that “warrants forgetting,” said Christopher Miles in the LA Weekly. But the show also “features fantastic work—work I’m still thinking about, work I’ve gone back to see again.” The best of the bunch is by Do Ho Suh, who has created “ a meticulous scale model of a traditional Korean home” that appears to have flown across the globe and crashed into the artist’s Rhode Island apartment building. Providing a peek into two very different ways of life, the work “marries the sort of humor one finds in the recent Disney-Pixar hit Up” to a serious statement about the trauma of being transplanted to a new culture. Suh stays true to his Korean roots while reaching out to a wider world, and all by himself makes this an exhibition “not to miss.”