s o u l i z b l o g

Went to the press preview of LACMA’s new exhibit, Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea on Wednesday. It was the museum’s off day, but the BCAM wing was bustling with reporters, photographers, and artists, all awaiting the premiere of the first show at a museum featuring only contemporary Korean artists in the US. It was a really great exhibit to experience. Some really fun and smart pieces were showcased. 

Free food, woot woot

That’s a traditional Korean house smashed in, Wizard of Oz style, into a western home. 

detail

Fellow intern, Janice!

Managing editor, Michelle! Thanks for inviting us~

Behind “Urban Light” in the BCAM courtyard is an installation called “Happy Happy”. It’s made of colorful plastic containers all bought at the various 99cent stores scattered throughout LA. Artist Choi Jeong Hwa uses it to demonstrate how art should be accessible, cheap, and happy. Us KoreAm girls were just hanging out around his installation, taking pictures against the colorful backdrop, when the artist himself popped up out of nowhere and asked if he could take pictures of us hanging out. He encouraged us to touch go inside the strings of … plastic. Interaction with art is always fun. I took a picture of him too, he was too cute: “Your heart is my art”. <33333!!

According to the LACMA tweet, it’s Frank Stella’s birthday today. His long career in the arts has spanned over fifty years, crazy! He’s well known for many of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture, but his series of black paintings put him on the map as one of the most significant artists of the today.

Tomlinson Court Park, 1959

It’s completely lacking in emotion and complexity. There is no foreground or background, no distinct images to be represented in any fashion, as was done in the past. Just unmodulated black stripes that stretches from one end of the canvas to the other as Stella recognizes the presence of canvas and paint as one. Regularized, anti-gestural movements.

William de Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1953

His were pretty radical paintings in the 50′s, where Abstract Expressionists like William de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were the trendsetters of the art world at the time. Stella ‘debuted’ as an artist with these paintings that totally went against the movement that tried to express as much movement and expression in one image with one that was totally stoic, impersonal, and calm. Can you imagine what an artist who’s painted the work above would say to Frank Stella?

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 1959

The canvases are quite large in size as well, demonstrating a rivalry or perhaps even a complete superseding move against the Abstract Expressionists. He’s not just trying to do his own thing in a subtle way, u know? He was making a statement against what’s already out there. As a 23-year old artist at the time trying to school his art world seniors must have been quite a daring thing to do.

Getty Tomb, 1959

Getty Tomb is the one of the series that is on view at LACMA. A curator at the museum says that it “is not an abstract painting. Rather it is just an object. It is what it is, and what you see is what you get”. I usually hate that expression, “it is what it is”, mostly because people annoying people say it just to belittle an otherwise important or complex situation, but I don’t mind accepting this painting as it is. Just because there is a lack of pictoral representation and emotion that is replaced by a simplistic, mechanized application of paint does not imply a simplistic visual experience! Let’s go feel the echoes of his rectangles~ haha. Happy birthday again, Frank Stella.

You can see the Getty Tomb and hear the curator speak about it on the campus map(#732). Too cool!