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Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography

Since July 3, when the “Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography” exhibition opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), visitors have been delighting in the experience. While SBMA’s fine collection of traditional Asian art is well known, museum goers are excited about this view of contemporary Korean culture. One visitor commented: “The most impressive and thought-provoking exhibition I have seen in a long time.”



Since July 3, when the “Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography” exhibition opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), visitors have been delighting in the experience. While SBMA’s fine collection of traditional Asian art is well known, museum goers are excited about this view of contemporary Korean culture. One visitor commented: “The most impressive and thought-provoking exhibition I have seen in a long time.”
Chaotic Harmony is not an exhibition about “Koreanness.” Rather, through the works of 40 artists, all of whom are residents of Korea, the exhibition examines Korea as a dynamic source of complex and stimulating visual ideas, which are expressed through the medium of photography. The paradoxical name of this exhibition, Chaotic Harmony, suggests the parallels and tensions that define Korea’s modern cultural atmosphere. Contemporary artists straddle the divide between the chaos of modern life and the harmony of tradition between the complex history of their country and the equally complicated future.
Two distinct generations of Korean photographers are represented in Chaotic Harmony: those born in the mid-1950s and 1960s, during a succession of military dictatorships when the country was still largely agrarian, and those born in the 1970s, who came into maturity in Korean cities during the new democratic era beginning in 1987. The photographs in Chaotic Harmony are divided into six thematic sections: Nature; Urbanization and Globalization; Family; Anxiety; Cultural and Personal Identity; and Memory.

Nature
The first section of the exhibit, “Nature,” features some of the oldest works, including a stunning photo by Bae Bien-U from a series entitled “Sonamu” – it is among the earliest Korean photographs by his generation to be exhibited in a fine-arts context abroad. For 20 years, Bae has photographed the groves around Gyeongju, which are considered a national treasure. Pine trees are symbols of justice, beauty, and transcendence, while Bae seeks to emphasize these qualities in his long, narrow prints, which are almost six feet high.

Cultural Identity
Photographers have begun to take an almost anthropological approach to rediscover and depict Korean culture as expressed in folklore, religious practice, and the natural world. In this section, Bohnchang Koo’s photograph of a delicate white porcelain vessel pays homage to these true masterpieces of ceramics. Vessels from the Joseon Dynasty are considered among Korea’s iconic artistic achievements. He has described each of these pieces as “a soul-embodying vessel, with unlimited capacity to embrace the heart of its viewer and its potter.”

Urbanization and Globalization
After World War II, as the Korean economy stabilized and flourished, Seoul, the capital city of Korea, grew from just one million people in 1945 to over ten million today. Yet this rapid change was not without dramatic effects. Ahn Sekwon began to the dramatic physical changes in a single neighborhood from 2003-2007 in a series titled “Seoul New Town.” In his haunting triptych, you can sense the silence – the silence of night, of evicted residents, of voices lost as history is erased. In the first photo, taken in 2003, the frame is filled with a bustling shanty town. All the houses are brightly lit against the sky. In 2005, the same scene takes on blue hues as the houses and lists are beginning to disappear. The third photo, taken in 2007, shows the nearly-complete destruction of the town, with a single illuminated cross now the only sign of life.



Personal Identity
The Korean focus on identity, as a conceptual basis for photographic inquiry, is astonishingly recent. The section on individual identity begins with a diptych by Yeondoo Jung, one of the most prolific and best-known installation and photographic artists in Korea. Jung’s two images, from a series he began in 2001 titled “Bewitched,” records both the everyday reality of an adolescent’s life and then an elaborate tableaux of the teenager’s dreamed-of profession. Here, a girl wearing a pink apron poses with mop in hand at her daytime job at an ice cream parlor. On the left, Jung transports her to the Antarctic, her mop morphing into a spear, while the ice cream is replaced by ice and snow.

Family
For thousands of years, Koreans have maintained their homogeneity, yet today, 1 in 10 marriages in Korea is mixed. As Kim Oksun photographed international marriages in Korea and New York, including her own to a German professor, she consistently encountered the same refrain: “We are happy together.” This banal statement contradicts the cultural divisions Kim emphasizes in her works. By asking one partner to look into the camera and the other to look away, the image is compositionally and emotionally divided, yet wonderfully compelling.

Memory
Personal memories, though often painful and emotionally charged, have become a catalyst for the work of younger photographers. Jae Kwang Yang’s “Night Swimming” series reflects his bewilderment and shock when his beloved grandmother, in his words, “broke” and was suddenly gone. This particular image references a recurring childhood dream where a person with a chicken head would take children and disappear. A chilling sense of menace is powerfully communicated by the crouched figure with a chicken head. Yet, by using a single ray of light to illuminate the young girl in the foreground, Yang also communicates a sense of hope.

Anxiety
Of course, the overriding anxiety in modern Korea today is that nuclear missiles lie about 100 miles from Seoul. In his series titled “Real World 2,” Seoungwoo Back positions an army of toy soldiers in a backyard at night. The silent army creeps toward a window, where the silhouette of a woman can be seen against the glass. The soldiers hint at the unseen but threatening military presence of North Korea. This same awareness has informed the work of many of the artists.
The exhibition is spread over two large galleries, leaving ample room for visitors to linger over their favorite photos. In the second gallery, visitors are encouraged to browse three iPads loaded with biographies of the exhibition artists, contemporary Korean music videos, and traditional Korean music. In addition, the reading room at the end of the exhibit is filled with wonderful artist books and four TV screens looping Korean dramas. Chaotic Harmony is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through September 19, 2010.

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