From the outside looking in

Gallery directors in Korea were long thought of as being like the daughters of royal families. They had reputations for arrogance ― showing up at art fairs in their fur coats, lunching with wealthy collectors, treating curators like their personal secretaries and never shaking artists’ hands. Kim Hong-hee, the director of Ssamzie Space, also had one foot within a royal circle. At least, she started there. She was the wife of a diplomat living in New York, where perhaps she could have stayed longer. Like other wives of prominent men, she could have volunteered at the Met, mingled at charity auctions and taken a few painting lessons ― a life, Ms. Kim explains, she rejected mostly out of what she describes as “a fear of wounding my pride.” Instead, she became the kind of gallery director whose computer boasts a bumper sticker from “Motel Prada,” an underground art show that satirized obsession with luxury. As the director of one of Korea’s most noted platforms for young, alternative artists, Ms. Kim offers unusual justifications for hosting particular shows, such as the reason she gives for showcasing the late Korean-American artist Theresa Hak-kyung Cha, an exhibition that opens on Sept. 5. “Cha faces every obstacle to being presented in a favorable light in the mainstream American art world,” Ms. Kim says. “Her works don’t pose a striking spectacle; they are subtle; they are subversive; they are non-Western. Most of all, the artist is dead.” The show, titled “The Dream of the Audience,” features work on loan from the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California ― films, poems and drawings that depict Cha’s experience migrating from Korea to Hawaii and her longing for home, which she desperately sought to define through fragmented imagery and phrases, leaning heavily on her childhood memories. Language is an essential part of Cha’s work. In “Mouth to Mouth,” for example, one of her black-and-white films, a human mouth, filmed close-up and resembling a void, tries desperately to pronounce the vowels of the Korean alphabet shown on screen. Yet the repetitions of the vowels are constantly intruded upon by other noises, such as static and running water. The artist’s suffering over losing her mother tongue is made all too real and haunting for the viewer. Texts appear in the form of distorted phrases, in ways that transcend their original meanings. Words jump from one language to another, as if the act of translation itself were part of a cultural migration for the artist. As the French word for “dictation,” “Dictee,” the title of Cha’s single literary collection ― published a week before she was murdered in a New York parking lot in 1982 ― suggests the homogenizing experience of diasporas. There was a striking moment, Ms. Kim says, in which she experienced a holistic understanding of Cha’s work. Two years ago, she was at a symposium dedicated to Cha at Berkeley, where the artist had taught. During the symposium, there was a tranquil moment when one of Cha’s untitled poems was read by an American feminist art historian, Moira Roth. “It just suddenly all made sense how Cha would have read that piece of text if she had been alive,” said Ms. Kim, who had only encountered the artist through her work, at a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992. “I could sense the air, what kind of woman she was like, and it was incredibly charming, all very real,” she says. Contemporary Asian women artists aren’t hard to find in California, Ms. Kim admits. In the U.S. art world, where being a non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual artist is sometimes seen as a privilege, Cha could be considered an artist who made it simply because she represents a “third world” viewpoint. “It’s true among academic circles that a certain amount of sympathetic attention is given to Asian women, in a way that functions very differently from how other mainstream artists come into power,” Ms. Kim says. “It’s a political position, which the mainstream academics allow to marginalized groups.” Yet many U.S. artists see this as fair, given that mainstream art circles around the world exclude many young, experimental artists by taking an “either-you-are-in-or-out” attitude. The key, Ms. Kim says, is how an artist uses the chance he or she is given. “Many artists get the attention but they just end there,” she says. “It’s difficult to find artists like Cha, who manage to take their talents beyond the attention by illustrating an intellectual ability to articulate a subject while maintaining the poetic sensibility of an artist.” In a country where for decades art museums were run by the wives of heads of conglomerates and corporate museums were the brainchilds of plutocracy, Ssamzie’s exhibition of the work of Cha ― who is little known in Korea, if at all ― is seen by local art critics as a healthy sign of a democratic spirit in an institutional museum. Ssamzie, funded by the clothing and accessory company of the same name, is one of the first major corporate galleries to advocate experimental art. “Surely, they’ve come out with an ideal model of how a corporate investment and art can benefit each other,” says Jung Hun-I, an art history professor at Hanseong University. “Ssamzie is quite frank that they are not a charity organization, and that every show they do is related to their mother company’s image-making,” Mr. Jung says. “Yet they are one of the first corporate galleries that have taken their power and used it to support programs for young artists and bring people like Theresa Cha. I think that is because a person like Kim Hong-hee knows what’s missing in our art world.” As a director and curator who helps decide how images project reality, Ms. Kim is sensitive to the influence that cultural representations have on identity in real life. In overseeing “Landscape of Differences,” a Korean pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale, Ms. Kim dismissed the complaints of a some European journalists who felt the Korean exhibit was “too inauthentic.” While reserving judgment on the question of cultural “authenticity,” Ms. Kim agreed that there was little of traditional Korea in the work of the three artists chosen to exhibit at Venice. But the same was true of the American pavilion, the French pavilion and the Italian pavilion, which received no such criticisms. Perhaps that was precisely what Ms. Kim intended when she chose artists who dealt with the fluctuating identities of contemporary Koreans, and invited Byul, a young Korean alternative New Age band, to perform on opening night. “I wanted a show that deviated from the conventional notions of Asianness which the European audience would expect from the pavilion,” she said in an interview at the time. “I wanted to represent the country’s changing values, something that captures the minds of Koreans today.” For years, she has been doing just that ― particularly when it comes to bringing feminism and technology to the center of the discussion. In 1999, Ms. Kim curated “Patzis on Parade,” one of the major exhibits displaying the works of Korean women artists. During the Gwangju Bienalle, she organized one of the biggest digital art exhibits. Since then, those two areas of art have become the hottest of Korea’s contemporary art world. Over a casual dinner about a year ago, Ms. Kim, 58, said to some close artist friends that she saw herself as an outsider in the local art scene. Her friends would almost have taken it for a joke if Kim hadn’t sounded so composed. “It just hasn’t all been easy,” she sighs, finishing a glass of mango juice in her tiny office on the 7th floor of Ssamzie, where she shares space with four other staffers. “I didn’t major in art,” she says. “I am not part of the powerhouse alumni, the advocate of ‘people’s art’ or of the modern traditionalists ― the two old boys’ schools that divide local mainstream art. Plus, there are still some men of my generation in the art world who just can’t take the fact that people like me get in their way.” Included in “Dictee” is a letter Cha wrote to her mother, finding a parallel between the struggles of the Korean diaspora and the students’ uprising in Seoul in 1963. It’s an excerpt that Ms. Kim clings to: “Our destination is fixed on perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile here in my return in 18 years the war has not ended. We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle, seeking the same destination.” By Park Soo-mee / Staff Writer To get to Ssamzie Space, take subway line No. 2 to Hongik University station, and use exit No. 8. Walk toward Sinchon from the university entrance until you see Sanullim Theater on your left. The gallery is across the street.