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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Contemporary Art of Korea, Vietnam and the United States

A “transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix” exhibition offered a rare opportunity to view contemporary art works by 16 critically acclaimed artists from Korea, Vietnam, and their diaspora in the United States. The featured artworks explored interconnections between Vietnam and Korea, including their intersections of history, trauma, and popular culture. The exhibition showcased a diverse range of art forms, including works of video, photography, installation, digital-print sculpture, and painting, by artists from Korea (6), Vietnam (6) and the United States (4).



The Korea Foundation’s grant support enabled an international tour of this exhibition from its December 2007 premier in Seoul to three cities that traversed the Pacific Ocean. The first stop of its transpacific journey was Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (August 2008). Next, it was shown in Irvine, at the University Art Gallery on the campus of University of California at Irvine. And lastly, audiences in San Francisco can view the exhibition (December 5, 2008-March 15, 2009) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).
At each of these cities, a multidisciplinary approach was reflected in the creation of resource areas for the display of varied and multifaceted materials, such as books, articles, chronology, music selections, and event posters, in addition to supplemental activities, including symposiums that brought together artists, scholars, and relevant specialists. For the symposium being held at the YBCA, the event will be jointly sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Center for Korean Studies of UC Berkeley. The symposiums and exhibition catalog listed multidisciplinary and transnational contributions by leading scholars of various disciplines.
In an interdisciplinary fashion, the exhibition theme was conceived during a lunch, in the Korea town area of Los Angeles, between the two co-curators (myself and Viet Le, a fellow artist, scholar, and independent curator) of budae jjigae, translated as “army base stew” – a spicy Korean goulashlike holdover from the Korean War days, when coveted surplus canned meats, such as spam, were combined with ramen and other leftovers, in a kind of historic example of culinary fusion. The resulting project reflects our interests in history and the dynamic pulse of inter-Asian cultural flows, as well as the influences of media and migration. The “trans” component of the exhibition title refers to key thematic concerns: translation, transnationalism, and transgression, while “remix” acknowledges the prevalent pop cultural practice of appropriation and reconsideration in the creation of new possibilities.

Interaction and Cultural Exchanges
Though the interaction between Vietnam and Korea spans centuries, for “transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix,” its start point is their shared history of a highly accelerated modernization process and militarism rooted in the Cold War. During the Vietnam War, Korea was the second-largest foreign military and economic presence in Vietnam, behind only the U.S., with over 300,000 combat troops and another 24,000 skilled workers. The legacy of the Cold War is evident in the establishment of large Korean and Vietnamese ethnic communities in the U.S.
A noticeable indicator of accelerated modernity can be seen in the overlapping areas of fine arts and popular culture. The three-way relationship between Korea, Vietnam, and the U.S., forged through war in Vietnam, is also manifest in the crosspollination of cultural influences and exchanges. Since the late 1990s, Vietnam and Korea have witnessed a pronounced development of popular culture, fostering greater cultural proximity, locally and abroad. A transnational phenomenon known as the “Korean Wave,” has notably popularized Korea’s TV dramas, pop stars, music, films, and fashion trends throughout East and Southeast Asia, and beyond. As part of a growing inter-Asian flow of pop culture, the Korean Wave has also been especially influential in Vietnam, spurring numerous joint efforts between the two countries.



Korea’s Cultural Influencs
This project examines the ways in which the Korean Wave phenomenon represents a vivid exception to a general consensus that soft power, in terms of cultural influence, is contingent upon or derived from nations with established hard power, based on a coupling of political and economic strength. In this light, Korea has unexpectedly attained notable status, under which its cultural exports have managed to promote a “Korean Dream” notion, thereby positioning Korea as a developmental model for lesser-developed countries.
Relevant scholars have pointed to several developments that gave rise to Korea’s cultural ascendancy: (1) Korea’s concerted policy of globalization, segyehwa, (2) harnessing of new Internet technology that gave rise to a Korea-centered moniker, netizens, and (3) recognition of the consumer potential of today’s youth, sinsedae. The prominence of the Korean Wave in Asia followed on the heels of Japan’s reign in the spread of cultural influence during the 1990s. To many Asians, a notion of cultural proximity places Korea and Japan, rather than the West, as a more palatable translator of modernity and the contemporary life style. Transnational flows of Asian popular culture, coupled with the profound influence of new Internet technology, capable of transcending geographic distance, have enabled the construction of new Asian subjectivities, within Asia as well as Asia’s diaspora communities. These developments signal a seismic shift, from a previous, deeply entrenched Euro- American “gaze,” to a more overlapping and multidirectional flow of culture.

Exhibition’s Artists and Their Works
As for the Korean artists featured in the exhibition, the works by Bae Young-whan, Choi Min Hwa, Choi Chul-hwan, Kwon So-won, Lee Yong-baek, Oh Young-seok, Area Park, Song Sang-hee, and Yoon Soon-mi, showcase a lively mix of media and process, generational influence, geographic location, and thematic orientation. Mindful of the fact that artworks can be shortchanged when regarded as mere illustrations of thematic concepts, works were selected for evincing a dynamic synthesis of conceptual criticality with inventive visual strategies. Numerous overlapping thematic concerns and approaches are evident in the various works, but those of Choi Min-wha, Choi Chul-whan, Song Sang-hee, Area Park, Kwon So-won, and Yoon Soon-mi can be distinguished for their focus on the construction of history and memory, while the varied works of Bae Young-whan, Oh Young-seok, and Lee Yong-baek give particular emphasis to the operation as well as the emotional affects of popular culture in the formation of historical memory.

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