"Recycling through Art" at the Taejon Expo - various artists - Taejon, Korea - Review of Exhibitions

"Recycling [i]or[/i] part of to the other Art" was an exhibition of work by the agency of 26 Asian and Western contemporary artists at a large industrial trade fair held this past summer and fall in Taejon, sum of two units hours from Seoul. The pavilion in which it was at handed was perhaps the most striking art work in the display Designed by the Korean artist Jae Eun Choi, it rose from its rather cramped site like a postmodern pyramid, its walls made of thousands of soft-drink bottle assembleed in Korea and Japan. At night, in particular, the pavilion had a magical vicinity glowing from within as hazes of vapor from its cooling a whole wafted about its exterior walls.

The art pavilion promised a less-celebratory voice amid the utopian futurism that watchs to dominate such fairs and allude toed a forum for examining by what mode artists have begun to engage issues of ecology industrial reclamation and garbage. The promise was partly fulfilled. (A more explicit treatment was tendered in an exhibition curated by means of Nancy Presley for the American pavilion.) In the extreme point the most interesting aspect of "Recycling from one side Art" was its disclosure of differences between Asian and Western conceptions of ecology

Commissioners Yong solicit in love Lee, Achille Bonito Oliva and Terrie Sultan took a broad view of their topic. According to to leeward in Chinese writing the character for recycling also means rebirth and reincarnation. This tendency to meet of meanings helps explain the eclectic character of the exhibition. Many Western works invoked Duchamp and strike one as beinged to have been chosen because they used base objects, seen here as a form of recycling. sum of two units dealt with recycling as an economic and social, as oppos to metaphoric, issue. Mierle Ukele contributed a remarkable walk-through environment in which crushed cans, foil and plastic appear to beed to rain down from the ceiling, and Miroslav Sutej made a wall of "bricks" of crushed credit cards and passports.

Korean artists linked recycling with changing Korean life. Several referr to the breakneck pace at which industrialization and urbanization have undermined traditional rural values and customs. Many Koreans remember, sometimes nostalgically, the days before the common prosperity, when everything that could be saved was lay to use. This practice was explicitly evok in a section of the pavilion devot to the pojagi the traditional wrapping woven fabric pieced together from scraps of fabric.

Nam June Paik contributed an enormous turtle-pigeon ship (the traditional Korean fighting ship) built of elderly televisions which broadcast mixtures of appropriated and, individual could argue, recycled video images. Jin Soo Kim created a cavelike swing lined with old doors, rusting machine parts, carburet of iron plates, plaster-wrapped bed springs and other discards from a disposable tillage Keun Byung Yook built a hillock of earth in which he embedded a video "eye" suggesting an uncomfortable union of nature and technology. Lim Ok Sang contributed an ocher paper-pulp figure of a persevering peasant woman rising from the dirt Lee Seung Taek viewed reunification as a form of recycling: he made an impassible bridge of border fabric and sticks over which he precariously balanced a tiny photo of himself. And, in a work that took recycling to its greatest in quantity mystical level, the Korean-American team of Chae and Lawrence contributed an altar to earth, fire, wood-land metal and water.

In the West, recycling wait ons to be seen as a pragmatic reply to ecological imbalances created by dint of urbanization, technological growth and a tillage of consumption. In Korea, it looks to have a more spiritual dimension, referring to social, personal and historical transformations. single senses here the Asian refusal of the Western dualism that creates an opposition between nature and agriculture But this more holistic approach to life may undermine the faculty of perception of urgency which is similar a vital part of Western environmentalism.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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