Inside Lee Inchin’s studio (photo by David McClelland)

Bento had a chance to touch base with artist Mei-ling Hom in advance of the talk on contemporary Korean ceramics that she and independent scholar David McClelland will present this Saturday, February 9, at 2 pm in the Freer’s Meyer Auditorium.

Bento: We know you as a sculptor and installation artist, but what is your relationship to ceramics?

Mei-ling Hom: As an undergraduate at Kirkland College my major was ceramic sculpture. After Kirkland I moved to Philadelphia and worked solely in clay for 15 years until I entered the graduate program at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 1985. That’s when I started working in installation and exploring the nuanced understanding of spatial perception in varying cultural contexts. After graduate school, I returned to my teaching position in Philadelphia, where I taught ceramics and three-dimensional design for 26 years.

B: What inspired you to focus on contemporary Korean ceramics?

MH: While I was teaching at the community college, the NEH sponsored the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP) to infuse Asian content into existing curricula, thereby bringing diversity to American educational systems. I knew that Korea had a lively art scene but I knew very little about it, so I applied to ASDP. I was one of twelve teachers accepted into this program nationwide. We were flown to Hawaii, where we had three weeks of academic lectures, and then onto Korea for another three-week lecture program with field trips and official government luncheons. To my dismay, there was nothing addressing contemporary art in the six-week course. So I applied for a Fulbright grant to return to Korea and conducted the research myself.

B: Tell me about the year you and David spent in South Korea on a Fulbright.

MH: To work successfully in Asia it is important to have the right contacts. When we arrived we had two: Lee Inchin, the director of the Ceramic Research Institute at Hongik University, and Cho Chung Hyun, an emerita professor of ceramics at Ewha University. We had studied with her 26 years earlier in Edwardsville, Illinois, when she was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Our first line of business was to define a list of candidates to interview. We spent days at the Ceramic Research Institute poring over exhibition catalogs to compile our “artists of interest” list. We also had to prove our credibility to the ceramic community, so we enrolled in intensive Korean language study, attended every weekly gallery opening, and introduced ourselves. As Korean artists learned of our project, they suggested ceramic artists we should contact.

About three months into the Fulbright, we started interviewing artists. Our Korean language skills were very sketchy so we usually traveled with a translator if the artist did not speak English. David would usually photograph the studio and the artist while I conducted the interview. In the beginning we had one interview per day, but as artists learned of our project we sometimes had to schedule five or six per day. We tried to spend a lot of time with each artist so we could really develop a sense of his or her work and process.

The majority of our interviewed artists live in Seoul, where one-fourth of Korea’s population resides. By the end of the summer we were traveling outside of Seoul to visit pottery studios and conduct interviews. For the appointments in the southern tip of the peninsula we took an extended journey and found lodging along the way. The artists were extremely generous. Often they would take us to meet other potters in out-of-the way locales, and of course they shared their delicious local cuisines with us.

An unexpected side benefit to our stay in Korea was learning about Korean classical music and the new compositions being produced for classical instruments. One of the potters we stayed with in Kwangju played the Korean bamboo flute. He would wake us in the mornings with the lilting notes of his flute and in the evenings local musicians would gather at his studio to jam together. For the our CD on Contemporary Korean Ceramic Artists, we used Hwang Byungki‘s music on the kayageum, a zither-like string instrument, in the background.

B: What defines contemporary Korean ceramics? How have time-honored traditions changed in the hands of the artists you met?

MH: Ceramic artists in Korea draw on their thousand-year history of working with high-fire stoneware and porcelain. But porcelain can be used in ways far removed from Chinese prototypes. Yoon Sol has forms and a size range that clearly are influenced by his youthful obsession with putting together plastic fantasy models. Now he has translated his “hand thought” (a delightful West African term for craftwork) into a rather severe, Northern European-influenced precisionist model—which is really Korean, because it echoes a cultural preoccupation with the clarity and beauty of high-fire porcelain (itself an echo of the purity and hardness of jade).

Other artists, such as Lee Kang Hyo, Yoon Kwang Cho, and Cho Chung Hyun, draw directly on the form and surface decoration of historical pots. Their works are not recreations of any specific era but sit comfortably with their predecessors while pointing in a new direction. Shin Sang Ho is sui generis. His work can not be easily inserted into the flow of art history and perhaps we shouldn’t try. I’m sure he would quote Popeye: “I yam what I yam.”

B: For your 2005 installation at the Sackler, “Floating Mountains, Singing Clouds,” you said that you were drawn to clouds because “they travel everywhere and are perceived by different cultures in different ways.” Can a similar statement be applied to clay?

MH: The cloud is different because you cannot touch and manipulate it—it is an experienced phenomenon we understand through a mental and emotional process. Clay is utterly responsive to every nudge, squeeze, and pull of the hand. So in touching clay, a very personal and direct impulse can be conveyed.

B: How has your time in Korea influenced your own work?

MH: When I returned from Korea I was anxious to touch clay again. At the time I was involved in two large public art commissions, one for the Philadelphia International Airport and the other for the Raleigh Durham International Airport. I was, however, able to work with a country potter in North Carolina for two months. There I produced a body of wood-fired ceramic clouds, which were exhibited at the Fleisher Ollman Gallery in 2010.

Black ink-like smoke rises from the tree, mimicking the flow of traditional Chinese brush painting.

At 3 pm today, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang created an “explosion event” in honor of two birthdays: the Sackler Gallery’s 25th and the State Department’s Art in Embassies Program’s 50th. Both institutions will join forces in the future, enabling artworks to be displayed at the Sackler before they are shipped off to embassies abroad.

In a series of three timed explosions, Cai Guo-Qiang created the illusion of a second tree of smoke drifting from the original pine tree, mimicking the flow of Chinese brush drawings. From prose, poetry. The archived event will be live soon.

Tomorrow, the celebrations continue with a conversation with artist Xu Bing, an Asian art and culture book fair, classical Arabian music, birthday cupcakes, and the much-anticipated opening of the Pure Land digital cave. Learn more on the Sackler at 25 page.

In addition to being our go-to guy for all things technological, Hutomo Wicaksono is the F|S videographer, creating features on exhibitions and special events. Here’s how he put together the time-lapse of the installation of Ai Weiwei’s work Fragments in the Sackler pavilion.

We mounted the camera high on the wall, very close to the ceiling, with the camera running for approximately eight hours each day. Every two minutes it took a picture, giving us about 250 photos each day. That part of the process took four days to complete, so by the end of day four, I had collected about 1,000 images.

Then it was on to two days of editing. I combined all of the photos together as a continuous action video using Adobe After Effects. Because we wanted to see fast-action movement, I set up the timing of each photo to be 0.05 second, so we could see about twenty photos per second. Once that finished, we searched for background music, created a video bumper, and shot some closing stills. I put everything back together in After Effects, added some mojo, and voilà, six days later, it was finished!

A rendering of Ai Weiwei’s installation “Fragments” in the pavilion of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s monumental work Fragments opens at the Sackler this Saturday, May 12. Exhibition designer Jeremiah Gallay gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into what it takes to prepare for a new installation.

We exhibition designers generally love to draw, and we try to draw things as accurately as we can. Our job is to create scale drawings and models, perspective renderings, and mock-ups to study display options and to provide instructions for the production and installation processes. The rendering shown here, for Ai Weiwei’s Fragments in the Sackler pavilion, was one of about a dozen options drawn up in multiple views, using computer software that allows us to create complex digital models and place them within architectural environments.

In addition to design visualizations, we create detailed production drawings for wall demolition and construction, cabinetry, electrical work, painting, mount-making, environmental graphics, and other custom fabrications. It’s always fun to see the drawings come to life—to walk into a real space after designing it on paper.

Sangdon Kim, Garden of Discord, 2010- , permanent outdoor garden made of recycled flowerpots, adopted plants, and donated seeds at Art Space Pool, Seoul. Copyright Art Space Pool, Seoul

In advance of her talk at the Freer on Thursday night (April 5 at 7 pm), Heejin Kim chatted with Bento about art, Seoul, and her work as director of Art Space Pool, an alternative art space.

Bento: How would you describe the contemporary art landscape in South Korea?
Heejin Kim: The current contemporary art scene of Korea, whether be it in Seoul or in other cities, seems active and dynamic. Compared to the time of liberal government 4 years ago, the current climate of the cultural scene of Korea is relatively depressed and exhausted. But seen from the average pace in other regions, the Korean cultural scene is still super fast and prolific.

What I am concerned about is this disparity between the quantity and quality, and psycho-political depression heavily looming over creative workers. Among the art people, there is to be sure a general disappointment at the populist cultural policy of the conservative government that cared only for the number and spectacle, and drastically cuts down the budget for an infrastructure and long-term, immaterial, not-market-friendly cultural production. However, the reason is not just a bad cultural policy or a subsequent poor art market situation. It’s coming from many other comprehensive social concerns, about labor, social welfare, economic polarization, unemployment rate, education, environment, and recurring corruptions, censorship, and surveillance. No wonder there emerges an undeniable number of off-the-road informal pursuits among cultural producers as a way to sustain themselves while detouring smartly around pitfalls.

This complex strategy makes tired cultural producers. At this point, the Korean contemporary society is exhausted, yet excited about two [upcoming] elections, one of which is on April 11. We don’t expect an absolute ideal, but at least here comes a chance for reformation and change, hopefully in a better way.

Bento: What was it like growing up in the 1980s in one of the headiest times in Korea for artists and politics?
Heejin Kim: It would be a lie if I say I knew what was going on in society as a teenager. When I was in high school, students stayed at school from 6 am to 11 pm [to prepare] for college entrance examinations, repeating drills and memorizing tons of textbooks, especially English. Generally youngsters shared this sense of suffocation. I felt like there’s a huge hand oppressing and binding so hard from nowhere. And unconsciously we all knew if we shake ourselves from the grip, it will choke you in a minute.

There came some sporadic shocks right into your face, like flyers strewn at the school playground by college students’ guerilla actions. They were mostly on the Gwangju massacre of May 18, 1980, with vivid journalistic images. The shock used to last for some months, making you physically sick and full of guilt. Simply the fact that we were alive while not knowing the recent history that had occurred in our country made us sick.

Meanwhile, we heard about serial suicide protests ongoing among college students and factory workers, sometimes four times in one month. I felt sorry to be alive, in a way, and intimidated by what might come in my near future. I was mad at the reality that trapped me in the time of paradox. I entered college in 1989 and I saw the last chapter of democratization struggle getting on a sad, anti-climatic path.

Bento: As director of Art Space Pool since 2010, what do you envision as the collective’s aims for the near future?
Heejin Kim: I used to have a long-term master plan for Art Space Pool, but who can guarantee what will happen in a year? At this point, I can only tell what I’ve done so far. [There are three] very challenging goals: 1) sustaining the value of integrity and productivity without being institutionalized, 2) balancing between the artist-run space quality and realistic, efficient professionalism, and 3) balancing between regional criticism and internationalization. Practically? I wish Pool could get away from the annual nightmare of in-between fiscal year hardships at a minimum survival level.

Bento: Can you give us a little preview of your talk on April 5?
Heejin Kim: I will convey some stories on the art practices by local fellow artists around my two spaces, Pool (meaning “Grass”) and Ccuull (meaning “Honey”). Since my spaces, compared to museums, are situated almost at the forefront of artists keeping intimate and everyday relationships, I think it is my role as a curator to portray what’s going on, instead of analyze. I hope my talk could be useful for those who want to complement the Korean film and video screenings currently ongoing at Freer|Sackler, and to explore more information on contemporary art practices, art resources, art spaces, and the art system in Seoul.

Bento: For you, what is the role of the artist in society?
Heejin Kim: Helping you see, sense, recognize, remember, think, and dream better in reality by means of imaginary languages.