BOULDER — Just as you enter the new exhibition of work by Korean artists at the CU Art Museum, the show tells you that the days of painting’s dominance are over.
There on the wall are Kiwoun Shin’s video screens, on which are looped high-definition, slow-motion videos of crashes. Inspired by the artist’s experience of losing friends to car accidents, the videos show an individual sitting at a table holding a glass of wine that is then knocked down or smashed by raining toy cars or a swinging Hello Kitty head. We get to gawk at the crash as it unfolds in deliberate detail. The image hangs flat on the wall, just like a good old painting. But the image moves. It’s dynamic. The crash isn’t just implied, it occurs.
The show, “Keeping it Real: Korean Artists in the Age of Multi-Media Representation,” runs through May 12, featuring work by eight Korean artists working in Seoul, New York and Europe. The exhibit puts them forward as leaders in their field — Hyungkoo Lee “has emerged as a rising star in the Korean and international art scene” we’re told, and Yeondoo Jung is “one of the most celebrated of the new generation of artists from Korea” — so it serves as a glimpse at pioneering work by a vanguard of Korean artists.
Kiwoun’s Shin videos are visually striking and conceptually provocative. Some other work in the exhibit is merely clever.
A piece by Kyung Woo Han appears at first to be a static video projection of an American flag. When you walk up to it, however, you realize that you’ve just entered the projection somehow. Look around and you notice a set of items, including a closed-circuit video camera, seemingly arranged at random behind you. The items in fact are arranged just so, and together compose the American flag when pictured in 2-D. Spaces in them allow sections of the visitor’s body to be included in the composition. The piece may be interpreted as a statement on surveillance in modern America, but its impact derives mainly from ingenious engineering.
Hyungkoo Lee’s contribution is an installation that includes two animal skeletons. One is larger and set to pounce on the smaller one, and they’re presented as if in a display of fossils at a natural history museum. But read the wall card and you discover that they’re the artist’s homage to the cartoon characters “Tom and Jerry.” Clever. And funny.
Yeondoo Jung presents large photographs of campers who happen to be graduate art and art history students from CU. The photographs are of the same species as snapshots taken by campers everywhere. But it doesn’t take long to register the fine composition, careful exposures and stylized color that went into these pictures, and indeed the artist is said to have choreographed and staged them. They show us happy campers, but the preternatural black of night in these forests leaves us feeling uneasy, even a touch worried for these young people.
The exhibition provides at times exhilarating suggestions of what art can be, especially in Kiwoun Shin’s videos. The videos can make a simple oil painting on a wall seem quaint, the same way that link-sprinkled text on a screen makes printed literature feel dry.
Drawbacks accompany progression, though. A viewer loses prerogative when watching a video. The terms of the relationship are slanted more toward the work than the viewer. When you look at a painting you take it in at your own pace. When you look at a video, the moving pictures dictate exactly how long they will take to reveal themselves. This is a new reality.
KEEPING IT REAL: KOREAN ARTISTS IN THE AGE OF MULTI-MEDIA REPRESENTATION. An exhibit of work by Kyung Woo Han, Young-ho Ji, Yeondoo Jung, Shin-il Kim, Sun K. Kwak, Hyungkoo Lee, Jaye Rhee and Kiwoun Shin. CU Art Museum, on the campus of the University of Colorado Boulder. Free. Through May 12. cuart
