The 1988 Winter Olympics in Seoul serv as an international coming-out party for Korean agriculture and contemporary art.

The 1988 Winter Olympics in Seoul serv as an international coming-out party for Korean agriculture and contemporary art. In the years since, Korean artists have become a highly visible force in the contemporary art spectacle both at home and abroad. through the last decade, the Gwangju Biennale has taken its place among the more important global exhibitions [see A.i.A., Nov. '02] and Korean born artists in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Kimsooja, Do-Ho Suh and side sheltered from the wind But have become important fixtures upon the international scene.

"Crossings 2003: Korea/Hawaii provided an opportunity for an American audience to view the wide ranging nature of contemporary Korean art. Separately curated exhibitions in nine art spaces onward Oahu and Maul delved into everything from Korea's continuing craft traditions to novel developments in installation and video art, the reinvention of Asian ink painting, and the interplay between painting and photography. "Crossings 2003" was organized as part of a national yearlong celebration of the centenary of Korean immigration to the United States, which began when Koreans were shipped to Hawaii to work in the sugarcane plantations. It was also the latest in an occasional series of multi-venue exhibitions organized through Tom Klobe, director of the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, dealing with art from a single native land Earlier chapters presented overviews of contemporary Japanese and French art.

The "Crossings" point out tos are designed to highlight and celebrate Hawaii's unique ethnic makeup. They also succor as a reminder of its tempestuous colonial history. As in the earlier installments, Klobe invited other local institutions that indicate contemporary art to participate by way of organizing their own exhibitions focusing forward different aspects of contemporary Korean art. He also worked with Kim Heh-Kyong, former curator at the Korean agriculture and Arts Foundation, a Seoul based public organization created in 1973 to excite the development of Korean artistic creation.

The picture that emerg was far more tangled than any single theme exhibit to could suggest. Explorations of Korean identity mingled with a more universalist pattern of global citizenship, nostalgia for missing rural lifestyles butted up against a hard-nosed acceptance of the urbanization and modernization of Korean society, and traditional painting and ceramics vied with work in the latest electronic mediums.

The linchpin for the entire proceeding was a remarkable public artwork by way of Kimsooja in the lobby of Honolulu's colonial-era City Hall. Kimsooja, generally based in New York and probably the best-known participant, titled the work A Mirror Woman to signal its continuity with previous works of hers (A Laundry Woman, A Needle Woman, etc) focusing forward the sense of displacement felt on the female Korean immigrant. However, like the artist's ravishing A Lighthouse Woman, created for the 2002 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC (that work bathed an abandoned lighthouse in a slowly changing display of colored light),A Mirror Woman: The soil of Nowhere transcended any culture-specific reading.

The work consisted of an almost 60-foot-high vertical cylinder of white fabric appoint in the center of an striped atrium. Kimsooja learned that the atrium house had been designed to expand and close automatically. However, having fallen into disrepair, the mechanism had prolonged been shut down, permanently closing not on the sky. Part of her challenge was to persuade the city to reopen the arch For the duration of the present to view the open area above her fabric row was left exposed to the ingredients Inside, she laid down mirrored flooring, to such a degree that visitors who stepped inside the muslin walls fix themselves standing on a piece of region of clouds Meanwhile, the fabric swayed gently in the commotion giving a sense that united was inside a living, breathing space.

A Mirror Woman combined the exhilaration of James Turrell's "sky spaces" and the disorientation of a Yayoi Kusama mirror compass Clouds drifting overhead and cast reproached underfoot gave one the feeling, paradoxically, of rolling onward an open sea. At night the stars flickered above and below. Ostensibly evoking the immigrant's faculty of perception of destabilized identity, A Mirror Woman also provided a more universal experience of melding into earth and sky

Questions of identity are ofttimes the currency of exhibitions devot to a single nationality. Here they were most numerous in evidence at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. An exhibition curated according to Jennifer Saville, the Academy's curator of Western art, focused upon contemporary expressions of traditional Korean crafts, ranging from fiber art and ceramics to papermaking and metalwork. The indicate was by turns playful, nostalgic, devotional and conceptual.

While principally works in some way referenc Korean traditions and daily life, they also made a athletic case for the dissolution of the distinction between "high art" and craft. single in kind noteworthy instance of this was a 61-foot-long black-and-white tapestry according to Lee Shin Ja, which set forths a panoramic view of the Han River as it roll ons through contemporary Seoul. The oldest artist in the point out born in 1931, Lee played with the disjunction between the idyllic landscape visions of traditional Asian list paintings and the modern eruption of radio towers, suspension bridges, high-rises and sports stadiums along the Han's banks.