Koreans, Vietnamese Share History and Art

By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter

Contemporary Korean and Vietnamese art come together in an engaging and fresh mix of history and pop culture, through an exhibition ``transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix'' at the Arko Art Center.

``transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix,'' featuring works of 16 artists from Korea, Vietnam and the United States, opens on Dec. 18 and runs through Feb. 28.

The idea for the exhibition exploring the interconnection between Korea and Vietnam was formed while the two U.S.-based curators Min Yong-soon and Viet Le were dining in Koreatown in Los Angeles. Min and Le, who are also artists, realized their common interest in the history and contemporary pop culture of their respective native countries.

```transPop' is an attempt to create a new word, combining transnational and pop. It tries to convey our interest in examining the transnational flow of culture. Hallyu is a very strong force in this transnational flow of culture. … `Korea and Vietnam Remix' is taken from hip-hop, where you mix the music and take some of the elements and create something new,'' Min said, in a meeting with reporters Wednesday.

Min, who was born in Korea but moved to the U.S. in 1960 when she was only seven years old, said the exhibit is part of her on-going quest to learn more about her connection to Korea. ``The exhibition reflects my two areas of interest: history and popular culture. I'm a huge fan and addicted to TV dramas. … And the particular mix of U.S., Korea and Vietnam comes from the background of the Korean involvement in the Vietnam War. The war becomes the historical movement that influences the exhibition,'' she said.

During the Vietnam War, Korea was the second-largest foreign military and economic presence in the country, after the United States. It is also well known that Korea's economy received a big boost from its participation in the Vietnam War. However, the historical and cultural ties between the two countries are not often explored.

Le's own experience as a child when his family escaped from Ho Chi Minh by boat after the Vietnam War, led to his interest in ``historical trauma, pop culture and modernization.''``As an artist, I am interested in what is remembered and what is forgotten. Some of that is represented through pop culture, movies and propaganda. Both Korea and Vietnam have gone through rapid modernization progress. … Modernization can also be traumatic and violent,'' Le said.

Both countries share common experiences in war, and subsequent rapid modernization, Korea in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1990s. In the 1990s, the presence of many Korean companies in Vietnam led to the influx of Korean dramas, which became widely popular and even influenced the development of Vietnam's own pop culture.

>Tiffany Chung, a Vietnamese-American artist based in Hanoi, will show a video about Vietnamese pop star Lam Truong. ``He is the first Vietnamese pop icon. The video shows him and how Vietnamese are starting to idolize and worship pop stars. This is an influence of the Korean Wave. He does a lot of covers of famous Korean pop songs. This isn't just about him, but also about the new Asian identity,'' Chung said.

During the exhibition, there is a lounge where visitors can read books and other materials on the project, listen to K-pop and V-pop music and watch Korean and Vietnamese videos.

On Jan. 18 and 19, there will be a symposium focusing on ``transnational exchanges and the intersections of history, trauma and popular culture'' and with experts from Korea, Australia, Japan, Vietnam and the U.S.

After Seoul, Min said the exhibit will be shown at the University of California Irvine University Art Gallery in October, and Verba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in November. While they would love to bring the exhibition to Vietnam, the curators admit it is difficult but are still trying to work it out.

Tickets are 2,000 won for adults and 1,000 won for children and students. Visit www.arko.or.kr or call (02) 760-4598.

cathy@koreatimes.co.kr

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2007/12/148_15558.html

Unique 'Degas and the Art of Japan' Exhibition in Final Month at Reading Public Museum

READING, Pa., Nov. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The works of Edgar Degas were deeply influenced by Japanese art, yet surprisingly, there has never been an exhibition devoted to this subject...until now. Degas and the Art of Japan at the Reading Public Museum, on display now through Sunday, December 30, 2007, is the first exhibition of its kind to bring together a variety of works by Degas with an illuminating selection of Japanese objects, including a work actually owned by Degas and many images he knew and admired. Displayed side-by-side with the art of the famous Impressionist, these dynamic scenes of Japanese life are revealed as the inspiration for many of Degas' most inventive pictures of dancers, cabaret singers, laundresses and the French countryside.

This unique exhibition of over 60 works, organized by the Reading Public Museum, includes works by Degas borrowed from museums and private collections in the United States, Canada and Europe -- as well as three extraordinary pictures by Degas belonging to the Reading Public Museum's permanent collection. The Degas works are complemented by Japanese objects from major national institutions, as well as from the Museum's own extensive collection.

As the exhibition progresses, Degas' debt to Japanese art comes alive in portraits, pictures of women bathing and combing their hair, scenes of theater-goers and ladies of leisure, and in fans... one decorated by the artist himself. Previously unidentified links between Degas' pictures of laundresses and their Ukiyo-e prototypes are brought to light, as will other little-known aspects of the French artist's sustained engagement with the art of Japan.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalogue written by exhibition curators Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall, who also organized the groundbreaking exhibition Degas and the Dance in 2002-3 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This exhibition is underwritten by the Marlin and Ginger Miller Exhibition Endowment and Sovereign Bank. Additional grants have been made by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Jerlyn Foundation, Yuasa Battery, Inc., and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

The Reading Public Museum is located at 500 Museum Road, Reading, PA. Web: http://www.readingpublicmuseum.org/.
READING PUBLIC MUSEUM

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,229696.shtml

Joyful paintings in "Japan Envisions the West"

A group of maps sets the stage for Part I of "Japan Envisions the West: 16th-19th Century Japanese Art from the Kobe City Museum." They demonstrate the distortions of scale and location lodged in people's minds when European interactions with Japan began in the late 16th century. The collection of painted screens and scrolls, woodblock prints and assorted decorative arts highlights the early cultural exchange between Japan and the West and celebrates the 50th anniversary of the sister-city agreement between Kobe and Seattle.

A lovely woodblock print by the great 19th-century master Hokusai stands as a perfect emblem of the show. "Two Ladies Looking through a Telescope," from a series called "Fanciful Presentation of Seven Useless Habits," shows traditional Japanese women in their kimonos and manufactured hairdos mesmerized by the magic of an imported telescope. That image may seem incongruous, but stranger things crop up.

From distortions of place, "Japan" goes on to document the odd (and occasionally monstrous) cultural hybrids born when European painting and decorative styles began mingling with their Eastern counterparts. Japanese artists dabbled in the strange medium of oil paint and pondered such curious Western inventions as hot-air balloons and locomotives, and the unfathomable behavior of a Dutch man and wife who walk together arm in arm down the street. And what about those weirdly assembled white faces, with their pale hair and curly beards? The net effect of the artworks is a floating sense of dislocation. Where are we?

A 17th-century "Comptoir with Landscape Design" survives as a kind of cultural battle-of-the-bands that takes furniture design to new heights of ostentation. The Japanese-made lacquered-wood chest begins sanely with a spare and lovely gold and black landscape image. But that gets gussied up with a regiment of golden metal hinges. Then some Dutch craftsman apparently got hold of the piece and added a carved wooden stand so over-the-top with curves, flowers, frills and gold that the whole thing ends up resembling Cinderella's fairytale carriage.

What's on display now is the first segment of a two-part show. It ends Nov. 25. Beginning Nov. 30, SAM will host a two-day international symposium with presentations by Dutch, Japanese and American scholars. On Dec. 1, Part II of the exhibition will open to the public.

Beckoning from the adjacent galleries is the joyful exhibition "Gaylen Hansen: Three Decades of Painting," spotlighting more than 30 of Hansen's big, exuberantly colored, tacked-to-the-wall canvases. The casual presentation, which moves chronologically from the 1970s to the present, is part of their charm.

Hansen, who has lived in Palouse, Wash., since 1957, is one of the state's most admired and original painters. In a recent interview with The Times, Hansen talked about his early interest in illustrated books and how a copy of the novel "Don Quixote" made a big impression on him as a boy. It's nice to keep that famously misguided Spanish adventurer in mind as you wander through Hansen's show. Kernal Bentleg, a recurring character, stands as a sort of alter ego for the artist and roams the Palouse countryside on horseback in very quixotic way. There's a mythological undertow to the work even at its most humorous. The Kernal often finds himself face to face with the overwhelming force of nature, embodied in plagues of grasshoppers the size of porpoises, or a buffalo built like a tank.

Even Hansen's recent simple still lifes resonate with some kind of subversive meaning. One of my favorites is the 2003 "Yellow Jar and Glove," which is just that. A yellow jar with a dark lid standing shoulder to hip with a nearly black work glove. Just a jar and a glove, in a pool of yellow light with a pale shadow extending straight right, and a darker yellow line, like an escaped part of the painted frame, underscoring the image — so tense and unfathomable, so hard to turn away from.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company

Fearing divorce, Japanese men learn to say 'I love you'

TOKYO (AFP) — Perched on a beer case serving as a makeshift podium in central Tokyo, a group of middle-aged men are standing up to save their marriages -- and, they hope, marriage in Japan generally.

In a country where reticence about one's private life is the norm, these men are trying to prove their worth to their wives by making their vows as public as possible.

"I'm sorry I always forget to put the toilet seat down," said one man in a suit and tie confessed as he balanced on the beer box on a recent Saturday in Shimbashi, Tokyo's hub of "salaryman" corporate workers.

"I hereby declare that I will stop going to the hostess bar, I'm sorry," said another man as his wife looked on amid a crowd of curious bystanders.

Said another man: "I love you, even though I don't really say it."

The 20 men taking part in the unlikely rally chant their slogan together: "Say 'thank you' without hesitating. Say 'sorry' without being scared. Say 'I love you' without being shy."
The gathering is the brainchild of Shuichi Amano, a magazine editor in the southern city of Fukuoka and founder of the National Teishu-Kampaku Association, loosely translated as the Chauvinistic Husbands Association.

He started the group when, in 1999, he felt the need for drastic action to prevent his own marriage of more than 20 years from falling apart. He was then in his late 40s and found that many of his friends were also on the verge of marital breakdown and divorce.
In a social phenomenon that has even been turned into a popular television drama, a growing number of Japanese women have begun suing their husbands for divorce once the men retire. The aim of the women is to bring an end to longstanding marital problems caused by the indifference of their husbands as well as their incompetence in the home.
"Many husbands are making a living managing risks at their businesses, but they neglect the ones at home," Amano, now 55, told AFP.

"The old ways don't work anymore and we husbands have to get out of our little fantasy of having ultimate power over our wives. We have to show our ability to change ourselves for the sake of our marriage," he said.

"Marriage is like a triathlon to love one person throughout the race. Winning or losing isn't important -- you have to overcome every bump on the way to complete the race."
Amano tried to devote himself to pleasing his wife by doing laundry and dishes and, he admitted, pretending to listen when she chatted even if the conversation did not interest him.
Through his own interviews with women, Amano said he found that everything boiled down to the desire of wives to hear their husbands say "three magic phrases" more often: "Thank you," "Sorry," and "I love you".

He describes his technique in saving marriages as "smileage" -- husbands accumulating the goodwill of their wives. Even in his own case, he said, the words seemed empty at first, coming as they did from a man who throughout his life had rarely displayed any emotion.
"My wife was pretty suspicious of my change at the beginning but after a couple of years, I believe that she has regained her smile," Amano said.

The association brings members together to exchange experiences about marriage, with public events that build confidence.

Teruo Manabe, a 67-year-old who recently joined in the hope of preserving "family harmony," said he had learned to compliment his wife in front of others.
"I believe people from the older generations like myself should take a lead in change," he said.
His wife, Shinko Manabe, said she saw the differences.

"He now easily says thank you, and has started saying sorry as well, but I still don't hear him saying he loves me," she said with a smile.

Divorce has steadily become more common in Japan, although the rate remains well below that in most Western countries. Middle-aged divorce is particularly on the increase, with more than 45,000 couples married for more than 20 years divorced in 2002 -- three times the level of three decades ago, according to the welfare ministry.

Japan's divorce rate is widely expected to rise as the baby-boomer generation prepares to retire.

A change in the law this year entitles divorced women to receive part of their former husbands' pensions. The pension system is under increasing pressure as Japan's population rapidly ages, with many young people choosing to delay starting families.

Amano said the root of the problem lay in the fact that many older men had been raised to be bread-winners and to believe their wives, like their mothers, should take care of the home without complaint.

More than 80 percent of married women, regardless of whether they work outside the home or not, say they do most of the housework, including cooking, cleaning and washing, according to a recent survey by the state-run National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
Amano said young people in Japan are increasingly growing up in school and work environments in which men and women are considered equal. But he said real change in society, including the declining rate of marriage, would not come about without a broader change in households, along with the workplace.

"Nowadays there's a sense in society that it's supposed to be gender-equal," Amano said. "But I believe that if husbands change, then families will change, and then Japan as a whole would change."

His association now includes some 4,000 members nationwide -- an astonishing number given that some of the things they pledge to do, such as publicly apologising for not replacing the toilet seat, are emasculating for even the most modern-minded Japanese male.

And none of the members, who vary in age from their 20s to their 60s, have divorced, Amano said, having learned to survive and overcome many problems -- from communication breakdown to nastier situations including fights in front of their children, a complete end to their sex lives and extramarital affairs.

The group has set up 10 levels to determine good husbands. The first level is the husband simply believing that he is still in love with his wife.

Amano, despite spearheading the group, acknowledged that he has only reached level five -- being able to walk hand-in-hand with his wife.

He said he is still working to get to level 10: not feeling shy when he says, "I love you."
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gA-v_zXrY-AuihPNkcYhb920tuZQ

How the West was done in Japan

By N.P. Thompson
Northwest Asian Weekly

Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s O-ban woodblock print “Shun the Great” may not be the most serious or the most historically significant object in “Japan Envisions the West,” an exhibit of 16th-19th-century Japanese art from Kobe City Museum that opened at the Seattle Art Museum last week. To my eye, however, it’s one of the more memorable pieces in a set of antiquities that, by and large, have just made their maiden voyage across the Pacific.

Kuniyoshi (1797-1861) shows a marvelous sense of perspective in placing the dwarfed figure of a laborer, bent over tilling the soil, in between a pair of pale gray, almost white, pachyderms. One elephant faces us; the other turns his massive derrière to the viewer, raising his trunk in profile so that it reaches the line of distant mountaintops, directly overhead the peasant tending the grounds.

What’s noteworthy here is the coexistence of comic-grotesque elements with a feeling of utter serenity. Brown birds nestle on the hide of the forward-facing elephant, whose sharp tusks point in the landscaper’s direction. The worker in the red tunic devotedly goes about his task, perfectly at peace. The elephants could destroy him at any moment; his salvation is a job well done, no matter the circumstance.

While impressive prints, scrolls and multipaneled screens loom throughout the galleries, some of the greatest pleasures on view are easy to miss. Ceramicist Ogata Shuhei’s “Eight Plates With Dutch Figure Designs” serves as a striking example of what essayist Oka Yasumasa terms “hollandisme,” or the influence of Europe on Japanese art and the subsequent “craze” for Western-inspired items. Shuhei (1788-1839) painted outdoor designs on English creamware, depicting the leisure-class Dutch as oddly featured shapes with prominent noses, either bulbous or pointy. Their wardrobes, ostensibly European, also betray signs of Japanese garments. The result is an elegant fusion of styles, neither wholly Western nor Eastern.
Among the larger-scale works, the anonymously painted hand scrolls “Scenes of Dutch Settlement in Nagasaki,” based on sketches by the city magistrate’s official inspector Watanabe Shuseki (1639-1707), portray trader-host relations as they might have been. In reality, the Dutch were confined to Dejima, a landfill island in Nagasaki harbor that the traders considered a prison.

The picture, nonetheless, displays a kind of harmony: Through open windows of a warehouse-residence, we can spy into a dinner party in one room; in another, musicians play the viola da gamba and other European instruments to regale a visiting samurai.
Two boxes are well worth seeking out. In the first, the anonymous black and gold-lacquered “Jewel Box With Landscape Design” conveys a sense of secrecy and isolation. On its lower front panel, two birds hover above an empty pagoda, the black expanse of the background seeming like the darkest possible night; beyond this, on the panel that curves to meet the top lid, another open-air structure stands forlornly abandoned, the only life in the scene once again being avian, and all flocking in the opposite direction.

There are humans represented here, a pair of lovers, but they’re “hidden” from our scrutiny, at least until we walk around the box and find them sequestered on the right side. The two figures positioned in mid-air appear to be floating, until you notice the woman riding on the man’s back, as if he were a magic carpet.

The second box contains a treasure within a treasure. “Peep-show Box” (circa 1764-81) belongs to the megane-e form, in which optical paintings, specifically landscape paintings, are viewed through a convex lens. The dimensions are small, yet what a dazzling panorama lurks within! Peek inside, and there you find Utagawa Toyoharu’s “View of Nakanomachi at Shin’yoshiwara,” a visually arresting vast perspective that takes your eye across layers of starry firmament and travelers on a high road in the distance.

In the foreground, Toyoharu (1735-1814) stages kimono-clad revelers traversing a crowded street, with the main sources of light in the painting emanating from bright lanterns and pavilion windows. It is a rapturous achievement, even if you have to crouch a little to take it all in.
Visit “Japan Envisions the West: 16th-19th Century Japanese Art From Kobe City Museum” at the Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., Seattle, Oct. 11 - Jan. 6. For more information, visit www.seattleartmuseum.org.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.
http://www.nwasianweekly.com/200726043/art20072643.htm

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