Beccy Kennedy reviews the KAA’s Invisible Bonds exhibition at the KCC
The latest exhibition at the Korean Cultural Centre, Invisible Bonds, explores the unobvious unions which continue to develop between Korean artists and British people, places and spaces. It is the annual show from the Korean Artists Association UK and it aims to build on and reinforce the existing community of Korean artists and their audience base in London. The four curators of Invisible Bonds – Kang, Jun-Im Mclaughlin, Park and Song – are also contributors to the art selection, which consists of mixed media pieces by thirteen artists, most of whom have studied and/or live in Britain.
Bada Song (director/curator/artist of the show) offers the largest piece, Match (2010) – a spread of impressively intricate and thoughtful pencil drawings of locally found sticks, many of which look like fallen tree branches. These extend across the entire wall of the back of the KCC theatre. ((Where Korean singers, musicians and dancers gave memorable performances at the exhibition opening on Friday night. )) Song hereby renders the mundane into the meticulous and the magnificent. She also represents each stick’s scale using a life-sized drawing of a matchstick in one corner, thereby juxtaposing the natural quality of her drawing with the machine-manipulated, scientific-looking match.
Each of the British based Korean curators of the exhibition offer a different medium, style and approach to the exhibition’s theme. Soon Yul Kang produces seductively serene hand woven tapestries which border between seen landscapes and imagined sanctuaries. Kang is interested in stillness, simplicity, emptiness and meditative contemplation. Her tapestries appear to embed all these concepts but whilst they offer a peaceful, pictographic refuge away from the tangles of the inner London urbis, they also signify the assiduousness of handmade endeavours. The threads are woven using a carefully selected palette of colours intermingled gently across the surface, manifesting in both vertical and horizontal gradations of hue. From a distance they could be mistaken for paintings, but where paint pigments swell once given to water then merge across their surface once they leave their brush, wool has to be manipulated in order to evolve into an image.
Kitty Jun-Im Mclaughlin carefully layers delicate Korean hanji paper, paint and ink on Western Modernist style canvas, making semi-abstract compositions, inspired by Korean calligraphy and Eastern and Western philosophies. Each layer seems to represent and capture her experiences as an artist and more personally as a survivor, who embodies her duality of Korean and British cultures and encounters.
Sunju Park uses glass as her surface, onto which she paints or prints mysterious, acid etched or silk screened images, before firing them in the kiln at 600 degrees. A little like Kitty, she uses layering to achieve a multifaceted and enigmatic composition, placing the printed glass pieces on top of each other so the pictures merge. The transparency of the surface gives the images a unique, ethereal quality. If you look closely you will find a still from Franco Zefferelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, an upside down building from Gyeongbok Palace or hundreds of miniature photos of parts of Park’s everyday life. Or you can refuse to recognise the familiar and, instead, imagine the unfamiliar.
Other fine art highlights in the exhibition, include painter Joo Hee Chun’s abstract, layered formations of semi-calligraphic black and golden swirls caught inside translucent areas of polymer acrylic;
… current Goldsmiths student, Sung Feel Yun’s black, flat yet terrifically textured vortex;
… and Yun-Kyung Jeong’s optically invigorating, organic patterns which collaborate influences of Gothic architecture with Eastern animism.
Photographic contributions to the exhibition are equally stunning and thought provoking, including Jung Hoi Jung’s black and white, 1970s captures of traditional Korean life;
… Mi So Park’s delicate shots of elderly people’s personal and religious rituals in Korea and Britain;
… and Seong Hee Jo’s digitally collaged scenes of London by night. Running on a loop is Jihye Park’s psychoanalytically charged, beautifully granular film which presents a short, esoteric narrative about a woman who appears to bundle up and drown her unwanted self:
Unifying most of the art works is a subtle attention to colour; mostly presented in monochrome or pastel shades, working to symbolise invisibility or, perhaps, rather, the nuance of fusion. But the exhibition doesn’t just seem to concern the fusion of Korean culture within British surroundings, but also the fusion of our consciousness and our unconsciousness, our rationalisation and our imagination, capacities which comprise or are comprised by the human condition. When confronted with an image, the eye looks and the mind behind perceives. The visibility of the bonds, the patterns and the creations depends on your perceptions.
Sunnee Park, the President of the Korean Artists Association UK is a Dancer. She started her training in Korean traditional dance at 7, progressing to become a member of the Korean classical dancing troupe Little Angels that performed worldwide. While studying at Sunhwa Art School, she joined the Korean Universal Ballet Company. On completion of an MA in Dance and Music and a PhD in Korean Shamanistic Trance at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, she practiced as a dance instructor in Tokyo for ten years, performing throughout Japan during this time. She has lectured on Shamanism throughout the world and has published academic papers on Shamanistic Trance practices. She is currently studying an MA in Dance Movement Therapy at Roehampton University, as well as teaching and performing Korean dance in the UK. 
Ji Eun Jung is a professional player of the traditional Korean stringed instrument, the Kayagum. She is an initiator of an Important Intangible Cultural Asset of Korea No.23, Sanjo in the style of Jook Pa Kim. She has a BA in Korean Traditional Music (Ewha Womans University) and MA in Asian Music (Dong Gook University). She taught Kayagum at primary schools in Korea, and is currently teaching at the Kingston Korean School. She has performed publically on numerous occasions in the UK and abroad. As Director of the KAYA Trio her repertoire extends to include modern and Western pieces performed with other instruments. 
Jeung Hyun Choi is a Korean traditional percussion player and currently working as managing director of DULSORI, the Korean traditional Music World Group. She has taught Korean traditional percussion and traditional songs for over 20 years. She has been working as a professional instructor for Pung-mul teachers since 2001. She has led many international workshops in Korea and abroad. 
황동윤 (Dong Yoon Hwang, Daegum) 
Seo Young Choi is a professional Kayagum and Kayagum byung chang (Kayagum with singing) player. She is a national initiator of Korea’s Important Cultural Asset, Sanjo in the style of Sukseon An. She majored in Korean Traditional Music at Jeonnam College and was awarded the prizes from Jeonjudesaseup, Tangum and Goryung Kayagum competition. She has taught Kayagum byung chang at a private Korean traditional music institution and primary and secondary schools for fourteen years.
Sung Min Jeon is a Korean guitarist and folk singer songwriter. He mainly plays a steel string acoustic guitar with a harmonica. He started playing the guitar when he was 13. His passion for music was inspired by his family. His father plays various instruments and is also a great singer, while his mother used to run a record shop. His uncle is the leader of the greatest Korean folk duo, Sunflower. Since 2005 Sung Min has been living and performing in the UK.
Se Ho Lee studied Piano (BMus, summa cum laude) at the Chugye University for the Arts and Opera Coach (Artistic Diploma, summa cum laude) at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, Korea. He earned a MMus with distinction in Piano Accompaniment at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) in Glasgow, UK and recently completed a PGDIP in Opera Repetiteur at the Alexander Gibson opera school of the RSAMD. He won numerous music competitions, including the first place in the 2008 Piano Accompaniment Competition at the RSAMD, the audience’ prize and special prize in the Osaka International Competition in Japan and the second prize (without the first prize) in the Alberta Conservatory Competition in Canada. As a soloist as well as an accompanist Se Ho Lee has performed on numerous occasions, including St. James Palace RSAMD concert (in the presence of Prince of Wales), “Garibaldi Concerto” by the invitation of the Italian Institute of Culture in Scotland, Jacqueline du Pré Hall in Oxford, Alexander Gibbson Opera Studio, and Academy Concert Hall in Glasgow. He is much in demand as an accompanist and has performed with many choirs, singers and instrumentalists not only in Korea and UK, but also in Japan, Australia and many countries in Europe. In September 2010 he will start the Pianist for Dance course at the RSAMD, supported with a full scholarship. 
Born in South Korea, mezzo-soprano Bohae Kim studied music at Sang-Myung University in Seoul before joining the Korean National Opera Choir in 2002 where she worked for five years as a full time member. She came to Scotland to study Master of Music (Opera) at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) with Patricia Hay. She was highly commended in the Ye Cronies Opera Competition 2008. In the RSAMD’s production of opera scenes, Bohae sang the roles of Dorabella (Cosi fan tutte), Mercedes (Carmen), Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier) and 2nd Norn (Gotterdammerung). Bohae Kim played the role of Mere Marie in March 2008 in the RSAMD’s production of Les Dialogues des Carmelites, She has also appeared in Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges (Theatre Royal, Glasgow and Edinburgh Festival Theatre) in January 2009. Her concert engagements include Clonter Opera Gala in 2007, Opera Gala with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in May 2008, Recital for opera arias in September 2008, Mozart Coronation Mass, Vivaldi Gloria in March 2010, Opera gala concert in April 2010 and the recital for Korean songs in May 2010. Her most recent opera role was The Composer in R. Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in March 2009. In October 2009, she completed Master of Opera at the RSAMD where she had been supported with a full scholarship. In October Bohae Kim will be performing in the 2010 Summer Season La bohème and Euridice with the British Youth Opera.
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