VISUAL ART: TO HAVE OR TO BE: Contemporary Korean Art at Farmleigh Gallery takes its title from the theories of social psychologist Eric Fromm.
The show's reference is to his general theory of personality in the context of social structures, elaborated over the course of several books. He argued that people embody specific orientations in their relationships with life and the wider world. The receptive, exploitative, marketing and hoarding orientations, not surprisingly perhaps, typify people who live in "the having mode". Simply put, the term applies to the majority of people in contemporary consumer culture. Set against this is the productive orientation, descriptive of those who live in "the being mode", who are open to and focused on experience and who take responsibility for their own lives and actions.
Whatever you think of the rightness or accuracy of Fromm's theories, they make for an intriguing premise on which to base an exhibition of contemporary art. It's important to say immediately though that the curator, Choi Eun-Ju (director of the National Museum of Art, Deoksugung), is not adopting a critical stance to the artists, or their work, located in the "having" category. Rather his implication is that the artists he has selected look at life and society in terms that can be understood within Fromm's terminology, the more so given that Korean society continues to be shaped by the amalgamation and sometimes the clash of Western and Eastern values and ideas. In any case, as he says: "It is doubtful whether Fromm's idea - absolutely admiring the being mode and despising the having mode - is still valid today."
Choi's organising principle means that he neatly sidesteps the impossible task of summarising developments in Korean art now within the space of a compact, portable exhibition. It also provides a constructive way to avoid another option, a mono-thematic show. In the event, he has put together a bracingly diverse, consistently interesting and very user-friendly exhibition. Most of the artists, he notes, grew up through the 1960s and 1970s, experiencing a shift in emphasis from the collective to the individual in Korean society, and from relative economic stringency to affluence. This applies, of course, specifically to the Republic of Korea, which benefited from an economic boom in the decades immediately prior to Ireland's and was one of the four Asian economies from which we borrowed the Tiger epithet. It also, interestingly, managed to weather the bust that followed the boom.
Among the Haves, Jung Yeon-doo's large-scale, carefully concocted photographs undermine the veracity of the very stories they seem to tell: climbers scale a rugged rock-face that turns out to be a manufactured set, and the details of a beach scene similarly start to unravel the closer you look. In all his images, there is as well a subtext about the commodification of experience and environments, the suggestion that we deal with representations rather than reality. Yim Tae-kyu's vibrant graphic work captures the frenetic rush of modern life in cheerful though still slightly dark-tinged fantasies, speedily and fluently drawn with Indian inks and embellished with brilliant colours. It's traditional but contemporary.
Shin Ki-woun interrogates his own involvement with material values by taking a number of emblematic objects that he prizes or once prized, including an Astro Boy doll from a cult television series, coins and an alarm clock. To a soundtrack of popular songs, these items are incrementally ground to dust and, in reverse mode, magically reconstructed, by an electronic grinder the artist describes as his alter-ego. The images generated along the way are striking and strange. Sadly, the sculptural work by Yee Sookyung that is included in the catalogue, a ceramic piece fashioned from fragments of vases, is not on view, and her graphic work, Breeding Drawing, relates directly to it. Its conflation of women with ceramic pots is apparently derived from a Korean Shamanic epic.
Park Ji-Hoon makes animated films by cutting shapes into successive pages of daily newspapers, juxtaposing the flow of movement with a static record of each day's happenings. The almost random nature of the moving figures is a bit disappointing given the potential of the idea. Park has, for some reason, been transposed from his placement among the Haves to the room containing the Bes.
While it is a simple idea, Hwang Haesun's Being There must have been quite hard to achieve and is really effective. It's a video in which tea is poured endlessly into a china cup in which the level of liquid does not change. Time seems to stand still as we are called to reflect on the importance of daily domestic ritual and routine. Suk Chul-joo's delicate painting abstracts a craggy mountain vista in a work that explicitly refers to a masterpiece of 15th century Korean painting, an evocation of paradise, by Ahn Gyeon. The problem with invoking such a remarkable work is that you had better come up with something pretty impressive yourself, and good as Suk's piece is, it inevitably pales by comparison with the source.
Painting is strongly represented in the show overall though. Kim Taek-sang's subtly inflected, minimal composite Hue of Wind neatly expresses the experience of passing time and changing weather. Hong Soo-yeun creates ghostly, overlapping shapes of what look like thin glazes of poured pigment, generating a feeling of uncertainty and potential change, of a process still ongoing. Using mother-of-pearl, Kim You-son flirts with kitsch but ultimately manages to make something really outstanding in a large-scale piece that is described as a homage to a Van Gogh painting of a forest. The fantastically changeable, iridescent surface she achieves is terrific.
BREDA BURNS held a one-day exhibition of her paintings at No 10 Ormond Quay in Dublin last week. Much of her work is large in scale and she was tempted by the availability of a venue capable of displaying it, however briefly. The show's title, Death Valley + indicates that the starting point was a visit to Death Valley, but that the work evolved to encompass other concerns as well. The Death Valley pieces are expansive polyptychs. Burns likes intense colour and she takes chances with it that, on the whole, work out happily.
Most pieces are boldly conceived and followed through with spirit. She builds up images from layers of pattern, representations and text, applying paint in several different ways and generating surfaces that at their best recall the complexity of Peter Doig.
Because her mode of working is dependent on touch and spontaneity, occasionally things don't quite go smoothly, but more often than not she gets it right. The shimmering patterns of Dive Inn, the intricate layering of Double Figures and the feeling for texture in Across the Way indicate a lively, provocative talent.
To Have or To Be: Contemporary Korean Art, Farmleigh Gallery, Castleknock, Thurs-Sun and Bank Holidays, 10am-5.30pm, until Aug 24.
