Kukje Gallery
7 March – 6 April 2008
The exhibition of MeeNa & SaSa at Kukje Gallery is one of the most impressive I have seen in recent years. There is not much in common in their individual media and styles. So for the audience, it might be difficult to see what brings this exhibition together. But they share common experiences from living and studying in both the US and in Seoul, and for many years having been reflecting on social and cultural phenomena.
Their work is a critique of mass media culture, about how media makes people dull and passive even when facing serious news, and just as in Andy Warhol’s prints, they use and reflect images of accidents and everyday events. This was in particular present in SaSa’s photographic works.
I think the best example of this is the image “Hit the water! Hit the water!”. It is a typical still from TV news with a river floating, with the text in the water as a subtitle, as indicating an approaching disaster.
In addition to the photographs and video works in the main room, SaSa shows a series of text works relating to the lives of famous people, printed in white on a black background and framed on the walls in the first room. They have something in common with Andy Warhol’s portrait prints; just as Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy became modern versions of the Vanitas-motives in historical art, also these text works by SaSa [44] relate to the fleeting character of our lives. These stories are told in a matter of fact style, contrasting the glory of their myth to the commonplace stories told in the text. As if they were saying “wasn’t there more than this?”.
MeeNa recent works are a series of “Dingbat Paintings”. In these she uses signs and symbols familiar to us from our modern everyday life – traffic signs, symbols for danger and instruction (like the laundry labels in cloths). But, like the bitmap picture of ‘Shrek’ with gloomy colors and a dull face hanging just by the stairs to the 2nd floor, she also reworks them, making them more into cartoon characters and caricatures. They are flat like prints in appearance, which in a way contradicts their nature as paintings.
There is plenty of references to fire in MeeNa’s paintings. Fire like in arson, people fleeing from fires with flames coming from their clothes, a factory in flames – almost all fires from accidents, but also contrasted to the fire from an open stove. Also that gives the audience a hint of potential danger.
Like commercial advertisements, their artworks are likely to be focused on visual aspects. Visuality is the most important aspect of their work. SaSa [44]’s texts with various fonts (in Japanese and English) written on the walls have strong graphic outlines and colors, juxtaposed to his photographic “ready-mades” collected from mass media. In MeeNa’s works, color is an efficient language; in fact, she has studied colors almost scientifically, and also applied these studies to her previous works. It even seems to me that SaSa’s use of colors on the walls has been influenced by MeeNa.
MeeNa and SaSa truly describe today’s pop culture and society. Actually, Pop Art was visible already in the 1980’s Minjung Art in Korea. For some years now, pop art has been “hot” in the Korean art market.
Most of these new Korean pop artists from late 1990s and 2000s, including Dongi Lee, Nancy Lang and other young artists, are mainly concerned with their individual hobbies and entertainment, with their own personal favorites and flings of taste. Most of them avoid touching on any serious social or political issues. But in this exhibition MeeNa and SaSa [44] are earnestly concerned with social and political issues, bringing it out to the commercial art market. This might be an indication of where the new pop art of Korea is moving.
KANG Soomin
