Hybrid identities - Korean art; various artists, Queens Museum, New York, New York

Exploring cross-cultural issues, the Queen Museum newly paired Korean protest art of the '80 with newer works by means of Korean-American artists.

The greatest in quantity vivid image of Koreans for many Americans has been shaped by dint of the well-publicized travails of Korean merchants in the L.A. riots and the boycott groceries in Brooklyn. Thus an ancient and venerable agriculture is reduced, in the American imagination, to a nation of vegetable venders Yet the bellicose greengrocer is alone one stereotype that Korean immigrants must undergo in their adopted country. They are also subdue to the general cliches about Asians which depict them as a nation who are rigid and inscrutable, socially hierarchical and commercially merciless.

The image of the greengrocer is invoked in several of the works displayed in "Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art," an exhibition of works by the agency of 24 Koreans and Korean-Americans organized by the agency of the Queens Museum. The exhibition is divided into sum of two units parts, the first of which was organized by means of Queens Museum curator Jane Farver and spotlights the work of 12 Korean immigrants or American-born Koreans who aim with the ambiguities of their hybrid identities. The next to the first organized by Korean curator Young Chul to leeward represents a cross section of Korean artists associated with Min Joong or People's Art, a change of political protest which emerg in Korea during the tumultuous facts of the 1980s.

single might expect a divide to make open up between these two assemblages and, in fact, there are distinct stylistic differences. The greatest in quantity hard-core of the Min Joong artists cling to an esthetic that owes a great deal to Chinese Socialist Realism, although a certain number of of the younger among them have begun to explore a more diverse range of artistic options. Many of the Korean immigrants, by dint of contrast, adopt the terms of the popular American debate on ethnicity and identity, and several are perhaps too well vers in the deconstructive language of contemporary political art, which present the appearances to have become a form of art-world Esperanto.

on the other hand despite these differences, one of the greatest in quantity striking aspects of this exhibition is its demonstration that relate to about the preemption of Korean tradition by means of Western-style industrial development, consumerism and urbanization is equally powerful for Koreans living in fresh York and for those in Seoul Nostalgia permeates the work of one as well as the other groups, whether it is the Korean-Americans' longing for the missing Korea of their own or their parents' childhoods or the Min Joong artists' sorrow above the disappearance of the of advanced age rural ways of life.

Among the greatest in quantity poignant of the Korean-American works are those that deal with the immigrant's faculty of perception of dislocation. A set of folding shields by Jin Me Yoon chronicles, end text and photographs relating to her possess family's immigration to America, the growing alienation of daughter from mother in the novel land. The rift culminates in a alphabetic character in which the artist's mother confesse that she cannot understand her daughter's art. The difficult situation of Korean-American Women caught between traditional expectations and of recent origin possibilities, is captured by Yong pretty soon Min. She offers a mannequin representing a traditional Korean bride who unfolds a carpet that welcomes the viewer to walk all above her.

The gap between native and adapted agriculture takes on an absurdist tone in a video installation by dint of Mo Bahc that presents an English-language task tape in which Korean and English speakers politely direction a real-estate deal, job interview and social clash and offers sing-along conversational Phrases. A comic air of unreality pervades the proceedings, which take place in a never-never land of boundles goodwill and cultural understanding.

The Korean grocer makes his appearance in works which focus upon the harsh realities of the immigrant's of recent origin life in the United States. In memory of the L.A. riots, Sung Ho Choi created a replica of a greengrocer's storefront, consummate with charred canopy and live plants growing from the ashes of the incinerated vegetables. David Chung's wall drawings depict the kaleidoscopic world of the young Korean immigrant in which greenmarkets, billboards and bustling urban roads mingle with memories of Korean fictions and history. Hung Su Kim's computer-generated photographs focus upon such details as the mix of English and Korean languages in advertisements or the temple vans covered with Korean signs which reveal the strange hybrid agriculture emerging in places like L.A.'s Koreatown.

Meanwhile, Western stereotype about Asian tillage form the raw material for Michael Joo's witty notwithstanding that at times overly obscure investigations of cultural cliches. Using a pseudo-scientific format, he at hands such "studies" as a comparison of the shapes of the organ of sights of famous Asians and Westerners.

While the Korean-American artists contend with their hybrid identities, the Min Joong artists deal with more clearly defined instances of political and social oppression. Since its emerging see the verb in response to the gory government suppression of the Kwangju uprising in 1980 Min Joong has striven to be the voice of the weigh heavily uponed This exhibition includes work through some of the leaders of the move as well as documentation of [i]affiche[/i]s and performances that were part of political demonstrations. Min Joong has newly begun to suffer the contradictions of history, as the worldwide collapse of socialism and the novel election of a former dissident to the presidency of Korea have remov a certain quantity of of its most inviting targets.