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Korean memories, American Dreams: the work of Chong Gon Byun
Eleanor Heartney, Contributing Editor
What is the real meaning of the American Dream? Sometimes it takes an outsider to get a clear view of a culture's inner workings. Chong Gon Byun, who has lived half of his life in Korea and the other half in the United States, creates work which slyly sheds light on the contradictions of religion, history, politics and popular culture. From one perspective, his work is quintessentially American. It is steeped in the idioms of Hollywood and American mass media, constructed from the urban detritus of New York City, his adopted home, and cackling with a postmodern sense of irony and wit.
But from another perspective, Byun's work is deeply indebted to his Korean upbringing. His childhood was marked by the Korean War and its division of the country into North and South Korea, and the population as a whole suffered intense privation. Byun himself was raised by his grandmother, a formidable woman who encouraged his artistic talent and struggled to provide for him. Byun remembers how even insignificant objects were too precious to b discarded. Instead everything that had the potential for reuse was recycled and reconfigured.
He also recalls the mixed messages conveyed by the American land of plenty, whose unimaginable prosperity could be glimpsed on the pages of his grandmother's Sears and Roebuck catalogue. On the other it was the impregnable force which fenced Koreans out of military bases and dominated the Korean government.
All this has made its way into his work. Byun combines disparate found objects in ways that gives them new life and meaning. His practice of bricolage has more to do with postwar thrift than with Surrealism, an art movement he only learned about long after he had begun to explore the secret lives of truisms bears a resemblance to Dada, but grows out of his own response to postwar Korea's overly restrictive view of human action. Meanwhile, the ongoing tension in his work between spirituality and materialism parallels American Pop art but is in fact a reflection of the disruptive power of American consumerism and individualism as they rolled over the once rural mountain kingdom of Korea.
Most of all Byun's work conveys a sense of what it feels like to exist between worlds. His work considers America as a place where history is being erased as quickly as new products, desires and fantasies are being created. It is full of the contradictions inherent in a society which worships celebrity, novelty and success while claiming to be devoted to old fashioned values of probity, freedom and community. One sees these contradictions in a sculpture featuring a portrait of a heroic looking young Mao painted over a rusty milk can. The work is topped with a sports trophy inscribed with a star, attesting to the Communist leader's start quality. This assemblage plays of a pair of related sculptures in which similar rusty cans are overlaid with the Western media stars Woody Allen and Audrey Hepburn. Another work consists of a large painting based on a vintage photograph of a gathering of American Indian chiefs. Here, however, these romantic emblems of the lost American frontier are equipped with bottles of Chanel #5, symbols of modern-day luxury and decadence. Another assemblage takes on the issues of faith and values. A traditional Korean doll clasps a small Bible as she observes a scantily clad pinup. With this work, Byun suggests the dissonance between traditional and modern visions of femininity and spirituality.
Such works express the artist's keen ability to see into the contradictory soul of his adopted country. Among his recurring themes are: the gap between the high ideals of religion and its actual accommodation to a prosperity driven society; the transformation of icons of tradition into high kitsch; the fate of once valued objects, tools and technologies in a culture of obsolescence; the dissipation of intimacy in a culture suffused with blatant sexuality; and the meaning of history to citizens struck with mass amnesia. Though these observations are presented in a satirical mode, a serious message underlies them. For Byun, art is a medium for conveying ideas and truths which might be unacceptable in any other form.
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