LACMA

4 Feature TO WATCH A SLIDESHOW OF WORKS FROM THIS EXHIBITION, VISIT LACMA.ORG. clockwise: Choi Jeong-Hwa, Happy Happy (detail), 2007, © Choi Jeong- Hwa; Jeon Joonho, The W hite House, 2005–2006, © Jeon Joonho; Haegue Yang, Storage Piece, 2003, the Haubrok Collection, Berlin, © Haegue Yang, photo by Werner Maschmann And are there themes that unite their work? There are loosely defined themes that unite the artists. By focusing—often humorously—on the ephemeral nature of life, time, and identity, as well as on the limi- tations of communication across languages, cultures, and generations, they make presence, absence, and change the center of their work. A number of works in the exhibition are site spe- cific; some have even been commissioned just for this exhibition. Can you tell us a bit about each? Yes, we're very excited to have a number of works that we've either commissioned or that will premiere here. Self-defined web artists Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries have created a two-part work for the galler- ies titled Suckerdom: Please Come Play with Me Baby and Suckerdom: Please Don't Thank Me, and one work for the web also titled Suckerdom. Like most of their work, the web piece combines text with sound in animations that employ no images and little color, only written language. Everything is in Monaco font. Their words come at the audience with great rapidity, pulsing in the mode of television advertising, insistent like com- mercial signage. The subject matter is provocative and irreverent. Also, recently they have been creating longer narratives, and that's what we will find in the galleries as opposed to the web. Choi Jeong-Hwa is presenting three site specific works made especially for lacma. For Welcome, Welcome, he has stretched bolts of colorful fabric from the roof of the Ahmanson Building to its balustrade across the south and west facades. There are two works called Happy, Happy. Both are made of commercial plastic containers. In the BP Grand Entrance, these colorful items are strung together in strands that reach from the ceiling almost to the floor, creating a veritable for- est of containers. Choi's other work, also titled Happy, Happy, is an interactive, educational project. Visitors are invited to make their own sculptures out of plastic containers and hang them on five chain link fences situated on the lacma campus near Sixth Street and the driveway to the underground parking garage. Haegue Yang's Storage Piece, a sculpture with a per- formance component, has been shown in locations around the world. Usually the performance takes place at the beginning of the run of the exhibition. At lacma it will be presented at the press preview, the private opening, and the public opening. Storage Piece is composed of crated and wrapped works by the artist. Unsold, they were returned to her after an exhibition; she had a show coming up and, with no space to store her old pieces, she decided to exhibit them wrapped. The viewer is confronted with stacked plastic beverage crates, wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and packages covered in bubble wrap, all piled on wooden palettes as if ready for shipment. This is a visual, physical, and conceptual pun, and it is amusing, but there also is a genuine complaint embedded in the work. Artists have an ongoing problem with the accumulation of work, which they frequently can't afford to store, and which too often takes over their studios, a constant reminder of the failure to sell. Yang's gesture was meant to call attention to the disconnect between the public's expec- tation for artistic expression and her self-consciously absurd solution to a private storage problem. The two, she thought, would remain "non-negotiabe and irrec- oncilable." However, when the work was purchased by a private collector, a note of self-critique was injected into the project, as the artist noted, turning an ironic commentary onthe gallery system into a saleable com- modity. For the first time, and with the owner's coop- eration, Yang unpacked Storage Piece for an exhibition in Germany; she will do so again over the run of the show at lacma. For this occasion, working again with the collector, she has composed a new scene about the unpacking. It will be presented in the galleries on September 10, towards the end of the exhibition when Storage Piece is fully unpacked. While exploring the exhibition, is there a specific question or goal being addressed we can look for? This exhibition raises the question of whether, in today's globalized environment, it is relevant to iden- tify artists solely by nationality, especially a group as diverse in their living situations as these artists are. Yet, regardless of whether they are in New York, Berlin, or Seoul, they all retain an intimate relationship to Korea that informs the work they produce. The pur- pose of this exhibition is not to locate the artists physi- cally but rather to locate Korea in the contemporary international art world. Hopefully this project repre- sents the beginning of a much longer conversation. This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in association with samuso: Space for Contemporary Art, Seoul. It is made possible by grants from The Korea Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Los Angeles presentation of Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea is made possible by Hanjin Shipping Co., Ltd. Additional support was provided by lacma's Wallis Annenberg Director's Endowment Fund. In-kind media support provided by The Korea Times–Hankook Ilbo.

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