Friday, September 12, 2008
Ipgim
I checked out the exhibit, Places at the Table, at the Mills Art Gallery on contemporary Korean women artists from the collective Ipgim. It was beautiful, especially the billowing silk panels that run through the center of the installations. Very spare, they look like people (or a person) in motion. Just wonderful. I also enjoyed the paintings (sorry I didn't note the titles) of red beans, which I orginally thought were pomegranate seeds. Duh. My least favorite of the installations were the traditional style panels with contemporized content. I think the artist was Rhu Jumhwa. They just didn't bow my skirt up like some of the other work did. Fabulous--art being a language that connects different cultures. Sigh.
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The panels represented the 8 characters of Confucianism, which in Korean culture are always represented as male characters, so the power of that particular piece is that they were all given female qualities, like the high heels etc.. Many Koreans find the artist's mutation of the traditional characters alone to be very disrespectful, but to give them a female twist only heightens their anger a thousand times more. It's probably the most controversial piece of the whole gallery, if you consider the life of Korean women and how they are viewed and treated in their own country. For that reason alone, it's one of my favorite pieces.
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