Seoul is the latest major city to establish itself as a significant international hub for new art. With that distinction comes the expected propagation of ambitious museum exhibitions seeking to articulate, illuminate and cogitate over its local history of modern art, which is little known.
“Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s” is the latest. It follows “The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art,” which a year ago covered 1897 to 1965 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“Only the Young,” organized last year by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, working with Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, is at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood through May 12. It’s the first show of its kind in North America. With 29 artists and nine artist groups, the exhibition is anchored by varieties of Conceptual art, which became the leading form internationally in the decades under review. The result is work that feels at once recognizable and unfamiliar, which sometimes makes for a bit of a tough haul, if also a nicely curious experience.
The history of the participating Korean museum suggests some of what you’ll find explored in the show. The institution, founded in 1969, smack in the middle of the exhibition timeline, has now branched out into four satellites — Gwacheon, Deoksugung, Cheongju and Seoul, most of them in and around the nation’s capital. Those sites represent shifting centers of power, influence and reigning cultural philosophy within the country, beginning with the isolationist Joseon dynasty that ruled for half a millennium, before the tumultuous modern era.
Of the 29 artists, all but two, Jung Kangja and Lee Hyangmi, are men. That’s one indication of the deep social conservatism of an era of rebuilding after the Korean War, which was led by strongman Park Chung Hee. His tenure — Park took power in a 1961 military coup and was assassinated while still in office in 1979 — brackets the show’s “experimental” era.
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A timeline of Korean performance art leads to Song Burnsoo’s “Take Cover I-V,” five silkscreen images.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Jung’s participation in a satirical 1968 performance stands out. In a happening that parodied academic female nudes painted by men, her male colleagues, Chung Chanseung and Kang Kukjin, attached transparent balloons to her semi-naked body. The balloons then were popped, one by one, to fully expose the 26-year-old artist.
A hit with their avant-garde coterie, partly for its virtually unprecedented feminist insistence on a living, breathing woman’s centrality to the project, the event didn’t go down well everywhere, including in a scandalized Korean popular press. (Police were also on hand to observe.) Two years later, annoyed authorities shuttered a survey exhibition of Jung’s work.
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Jung, Chung and Kang had all been students in the department of Western painting at Seoul’s Hongik University. That such a department existed shows where certain official Asian ambitions lay: The Western establishment was the standard for what “modern” meant. Many young Korean artists worked in groups, affiliated formally or loosely, which may suggest just how minimized experimentation was. (There’s strength in numbers.) Amid churning local political controversies around national identity, the students surely were looking to developments in Europe and the United States for artistic inspiration, with contemporary art magazines as a guide.
At the Hammer, “Transparent Balloons and Nude” is represented by a slightly blurry photograph, displayed with other still and video images of performance art in a helpful timeline that spreads across a wall. The performance indicates obvious debts to slightly earlier Western works.
Among them are Yves Klein’s 1960 performance in Paris, “Anthropometry of the Blue Period,” in which nude women were slathered in blue paint and then imprinted their bodies on canvas; and Yoko Ono’s 1964 “Cut Piece,” first performed in Tokyo and then London and New York (at Carnegie Hall, no less), where she sat alone on a stage while members of the audience were invited to come up and cut off pieces of her clothing. Neither of these cutting-edge Western precedents required police to be in attendance, which yields dramatic — and courageous — resonance for the Koreans’ performance.
Park Hyunki, “Untitled (TV Stone Tower),” 1982, mixed media.
(Hammer Museum)
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L.A. is home to the largest Korean diaspora, but the country’s history, which may or may not be familiar to Hammer visitors, illuminates what artists were up to. It was not always to profound effect. For instance, Andy Warhol is an obvious marker for Song Burnsoo’s “Take Cover I-V,” five silkscreen images that repeat a gas-masked face, its sequence of solid colors representing coded government alarms related to threats from North Korea. The work’s Pop social commentary is pretty thin.
More intriguing is Park Hyunki’s “Untitled (TV Stone Tower),” which inserts a television monitor within a short stack of hefty stones, surrounded by additional scattered rocks. (Here the show fudges a bit, since the work is dated 1982.) In this Brancusi-inflected “endless column,” commercially produced and ephemeral mass imagery is juxtaposed with an actual, if abbreviated, mass drawn from nature, creating an oddly poignant sense of loss. The effect is only enhanced by learning from the show’s excellent catalog that Park’s composition refers to traditional Korean doltap, stone piles erected at temples to drive away evil spirits.
Two of the show’s simplest works are among its most hauntingly beautiful. Lee Seung-taek’s “Tied Ceramic” and Ha Chong-Hyun’s “Work 73-13” both date from the early 1970s, a time of serious national distress that included ramifications from participation in the Vietnam War.
“Tied Ceramic” leaves the tracks of a rope that, before firing in a kiln, were wound around a white porcelain moon jar, an exquisite traditional form highly revered during the premodern Joseon dynasty. The wrapping marks, cut into the clay like a memory made concrete, oscillate between signs of painful bondage and a warm embrace, a tension both social and artistic in 1970s Korean culture.
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Lee Seung-taek, “Tied Ceramic,” 1975, porcelain.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
“Work 73-13” is a large, earthy, monochrome abstraction, its mottled muddy color achieved by pushing brown oil paint through rough jute from behind. Almost 4 feet tall and nearly 8 feet wide, the plane is wrapped in a strict grid of barbed wire. The aesthetic effect is of nature, tradition, human effort and modernity imprisoned but unstoppable. It will all ooze out.
A kind of exclamation point marks the final room, where a tall, severed tree stump rises from a big, precisely carved cube made of soil, gravel and concrete. Lee Kun-Yong’s sculpture “Corporal Term,” which sits atop a wooden pallet, is remade whenever it is shown, its natural elements scavenged from local sources. (A Hammer label is careful to note that this particular tangled stump was found as is; no trees were harmed to make the art.) The title “Corporal Term” describes the bodily lifespan of the sculpture, the human effort to fabricate the form, the viewer’s experience of it — even, perhaps, the long arc of Korean history that has brought the object here. The work is a lovely meditation on mortality and endurance.
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Kim Kulim, who worked in Los Angeles in the 1990s, emerges from “Only the Young” as an essential artist for the experimental activity that erupted in 1960s Korea. At the show’s entrance, his painting “Death of the Sun II” (1964) is a scarred, all-black panel, made from paint covered with a petroleum-doused vinyl sheet that was set on fire and then smothered. The battered panel — painting as performance art — takes a cue from Shōzō Shimamoto, Saburō Murakami and other Gutai aesthetics of 1950s Japan, which emerged from the apocalyptic ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Ha Chong-Hyun, “Work 73-13,” 1973, mixed media.
(Ariel Ione Williams)
“Death of the Sun II” metaphorically destroys both the revered Korean tradition of black ink painting and modern Western abstraction, whose epitome was said to be the structural void represented by the all-black paintings of 1950s American artists Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella. As the show unfolds, Kim turns up in several disparate guises — making films, producing happenings, wiring a big electrified panel of dancing lights — leaving one to wonder what a full solo retrospective might reveal.
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Conceptual art was both an extension and a critique of modernism. A common though mistaken assumption is that varieties of Conceptual art erupted in New York and eventually spread out to cover the art globe, as Abstract Expressionist, Pop, Minimal and street art are often erroneously claimed to have done. Rather than representing a cultural center and its periphery, however, the artistic shift in the 20th century’s second half had multiple points of origin all over the globe. Seoul and its environs formed one of them. “Only the Young” does an admirable job of presenting the Korean dialect of Conceptual art’s emergent international language.
‘Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s’
Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood When: Through May 12. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; closed Mondays Admission: Free Info:hammer.ucla.edu, (310) 443-7000
In cinema logic, sharks, especially great whites, make excellent characters in animation. From Bruce in Finding Nemo to Mr Shark, the master of disguise in The Bad Guys, these apex predators turn their great gummy mouths with many pointy teeth into jolly good fellows.
In Hoppers, the 30th animation film from Pixar, there is a great white called Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who, despite being a scary assassin, has such sweet, shining eyes and a warm smile that one cannot help but grinning back.
Hoppers (English)
Director: Daniel Chong
Voice cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Storyline: A fierce animal lover uses a new technology to converse with animals and save their habitat from greedy, self-serving humans
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Runtime: 104 minutes
We first meet Mabel (Piper Curda) as a little girl trying to set all the animals in school free and being sent home for her pains (and also because she bites one of the teachers trying to stop her). Her busy mother drops Mabel with her grandmother (Karen Huie) who shows her the peace and quiet that can be hers if she only stops to listen.
The glade where grandmother Tanaka teaches her this valuable life lesson becomes a special place for Mabel. Years later, after her grandmother has passed, 19-year-old Mabel is a college student and still fighting for animal rights.
Matters come to a head when the mayor of Beaverton, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) plans to blow up the glade to build a freeway. Mabel tries to get signatures from the citizenry to stop the freeway plans, but that comes to naught as people quickly turn away from the zealous Mabel.
Frustrated, with no recourse in sight, Mabel chances upon a beaver making its way to her university’s biology lab. First worried that her biology professor Sam (Kathy Najimy) is doing some unspeakable animal experiments, Mabel is nonplussed to find that Sam, with her colleague Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and graduate student Conner (Sam Richardson), have developed a revolutionary technology to transfer human consciousness to robot animal.
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Mabel uploads her consciousness into a robot beaver and sets off to thwart the mayor. Seeing the world from the animals’ perspective gives Mabel a unique point of view. Hoppers has jokes, chases, largeness of heart and solid science — not consciousness-switching with robot animals or flying shark assassins but the fact that beavers are the environmental engineers of the natural world.
The voice cast is wonderful, from Bobby Moynihan as the beaver king, George to Dave Franco as Titus, the prickly butterfly who becomes the insect king after Mabel accidentally kills his mum — the Insect Queen, played with terrifying grandeur by Meryl Streep.
The animals are delightfully delineated, from the spaced-out beaver, Loaf (Eduardo Franco) to Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor) the grumpy bear. The animation is lovely, with each of the animal and human characteristics clearly outlined. From the mayor’s grasping to Sam’s brilliance, Mabel’s fervour to Loaf’s stillness, and the different animal monarchs’ regality, it is all given marvellous life.
ALSO READ: ‘The Bride!’ movie review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glam-goth Frankenstein can’t hold its stitches
The “pond rules” ensure that the animals are not completely anthropomorphised — a sticky point in animation films where carnivores and herbivores hang together without even a sneaky licking of lips!
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Smart, funny, exciting, honest, and touching, Hoppers is the kind of film you can watch with the bachcha party and elders alike, with a happy grin. And then there is Diane of the red, red lips and sparkly white rotating teeth — yes, Hoppers boasts that level of detailing.
A moment of silence for all the comedians, late-night-show writers, political satirists, memers, animators and random influencers who just lost a wealth of inspiration.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, was fired Thursday by President Trump, ending the 13-month tenure of a political figure whose bravado, cruelty, incompetence and commando cosplay inspired more wickedly funny material than Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Sean Spicer combined.
Social media’s so-called ICE Barbie, the first Cabinet secretary to leave the Trump administration during the president’s second term, was a font of material for “South Park,” “SNL,” late night and thousands more sketch artists, impersonators, musicians and everyday trash posters. She never disappointed, unless you were looking to her for feasible, humane immigration policy enforcement.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)
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Drama and spectacle marked her brief career, from posing in front of a packed holding cell at El Salvador’s maximum security prison CECOT, where the DHS had shipped and detained deportees, to casting herself as an agent of action in multiple ICE raid videos. Donning a big gun and long, flowing locks of hair, she insinuated herself into operations, vamping for the camera in a bulletproof vest while masked agents rounded up fellow humans like cattle.
Grim, to be sure, but at least she contributed a shred of comic relief (unintended, of course) to our new, sad reality of federal agents invading American cities and abducting people off the streets, out of their cars and from their homes.
“South Park” skewered Noem in unprintable ways. “SNL” brought back Tina Fey to play Noem. Dressed in a lavender pantsuit, too much makeup and brandishing a massive firearm, she introduced herself as “the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: a brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”
The endless stream of memes across social media date back to 2024, when in her memoir Noem recalled shooting and killing her 14‑month‑old dog, a wirehaired pointer named Cricket, after deciding the dog was “untrainable.” Gov. Gavin Newsom later trolled the DHS and Noem with a meme captioned “Kristi Noem’s Dog Obedience School: She’ll Treat Them As Good As She Treats Brown People.” The mock ad featured a smiling woman holding a gun and kneeling beside a dog.
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If it seems cruel, consider that the DHS posted holiday-themed deportation memes around Christmas, proclaiming that federal agents were stepping up removals “for the holidays,” with a “holiday deal” offering a free flight and $1,000 to those who self-deport. One X post featured an AI-generated image of federal agents in Santa hats with the caption, “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME.”
Noem’s dismissal comes on the heels of two congressional hearings this week where she was questioned about her response to the ICE killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis (she incorrectly called Good a domestic terrorist and claimed Pretti was involved in an act of domestic terrorism). She was grilled about the department spending $172 million for the purchase of two jets, the nature of her relationship with top DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, and her $220-million DHS ad campaign starring none other than Kristi Noem. She testified in the hearings that Trump approved the ads. He said he knew nothing about them.
Her firing triggered an immediate rush of snarky content across social media, and a sharp a comment or two from prominent politicians. “Shouldn’t let the door hit her on the way out,” said Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker.
But all is not lost for those needing a laugh at Noem’s expense, or at the expense of the DHS, for that matter. The president said Thursday that Noem would take on a new, freshly invented role: Envoy for The Shield of the Americas. He described the position as one that will lead “our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.” The job title and description already sound like the basis for a villainous political satire, without even trying.
And for the new guy taking the post? He’s Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former MMA fighter. Let the memes begin …
The satirical romp Josie and the Pussycats (2001) is a fun movie. But is it a great rock ‘n’ roll movie? Eh, not so fast on that second one. Welcome back to Glide’s quest for what makes a good rock ‘n’ roll movie. Last month, we looked at Almost Famous, a great launching pad because it gets so much right. And every first Friday, we’ll take another look at a rock ‘n’ movie and ask what it means in the larger pantheon. This month, the Glide’s screening room brings you Josie and the Pussycahttps://glidemagazine.com/322100/almost-perfect-why-almost-famous-sets-the-gold-standard-for-rock-movies/ts. The film is a live-action take on the classic comic-and-cartoon property of a sugary, all-girl rock trio that exists in the world of Riverdale, a.k.a. fictional home of the iconic Archie Andrews.
But this Josie has next to nothing to do with Riverdale and is instead a satire of consumerism and ’00s boy bands. A worthy target, and a topic that has stayed worthy in the quarter-century since Josie dropped. The film was not a hit, but it has become something of a cult classic (like many movies featured in this series).
The plot is fairly simple. Wyatt Frame, an evil corporate type, is making piles of money off boy band Du Jour. They start to wise up to his evil scheme and have to be… taken care of. Frame needs a new group to front his plot, which revolves around mind control to push consumer culture. Enter Josie and the Pussycats, who are about to have a whirlwind ride to the top. And along the way, foil a plot with tentacles so far-reaching they have ensnared… Carson Daly?
Josie is a fun, clever movie, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to say about real rock ‘n’ roll, unless you want to simply accept a perspective that it’s just another cynical consumer-driven product. Even that is an argument that can be made, as long as you’re willing to ignore underground and indie scenes and passionate artists making amazing music.
And it is true that this is a theme of Josie. The band triumphs at the end via their authentic music. But it somehow doesn’t feel authentic, which makes it something of a hollow victory. Let’s consider the criteria already established for a good rock ‘n’ roll movie, and how Josie delivers on that front. The first is in the characters department. The film dodges the previously established Buckethead Paradox, which states that “The real-life rock stars are so much larger than life that you can’t make up credible fictional versions. There is no way someone like Buckethead would come out of a writer’s room and make it to a screen.”
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For better or worse, Josie dodges the Paradox by essentially embracing it. The characters themselves are cartoons, and there’s no effort at realism. Given that intent is a huge part of art, it seems unfair to call these characters “cartoons” as a criticism, and it should probably be a compliment. At the same time, they aren’t particularly memorable, which is not a great quality.
And—as a bonus—Tara Reid is perfectly cast as drummer Melody Valentine. Josie was a few years after her turn in Around the Fire (1998), an unintentionally hilarious classic that plays like a jam band afterschool special from the producers of Reefer Madness (look for this amazing film in an upcoming piece). The acting in general is good, with Rachel Leigh Cook as Josie McCoy and Rosario Dawson as bassist Valerie Brown rounding out the band. And Alan Cumming almost steals the show as sleazy corporate weasel Wyatt Frame.
The character of Wyatt is the film’s funniest riff on a rock ‘n’ roll archetype: the sleazy, corporate manager accompanied by assorted crooked accountants. From Colonel Tom Parker to Albert Grossman to The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. It’s all about the benjamins. Which is where the music comes in. If the music is good, that’s what makes it worth it. And Josie’s music has aged particularly well. It’s well-recorded, produced and executed. The songs are particularly catchy. The vocals are by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo. Much of the soundtrack sounds like a lost album from The Muffs, and one wonders why Kim Shattuck wasn’t involved.
There’s an argument that power pop was never supposed to be dangerous, and that the Muffs aren’t dangerous either. Fair on the surface, but they played real punk clubs and came from a real scene. There’s not even a hint of that in Josie. So an argument that they play pop punk (which they kinda do) is really lacking the punk part. And it was produced by Babyface, of all people. While that doesn’t seem like it should lead to great rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes preconceptions are wrong.
That said, this is a very commercial product and sound—as catchy as it is—so maybe it’s not a misconception. Maybe the right question to ask is whether it’s all too perfect? And that’s what gives this ostensibly rock ‘n’ film a smoothed-down edge? After all, the basic ingredients are there. But part of what makes good rock good is that it feels actually dangerous. Maybe there are some actual subversive messages, or a genuine counterculture scene. And Josie simply isn’t that film. The soundtrack is fondly remembered enough that Hanley appeared live and performed the songs at a screening in 2017. That appearance also included the film’s stars Cook, Dawson and Reid.
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It’s worth noting that while Cook and company obviously lip sync to the songs in the film, their performances are credible. They went through instrument boot camp, so they pull off the parts.
In the end, the film is primarily a satire of consumer culture. And even more strangely, is loaded with actual product placement. Clearly, the joke was intended to “hit harder” with real products, but having Target in the film constantly makes it feel like more of what it is parodying than a parody. Where’s the joke if the viewer actually pushes to shop at Target while watching the film? And if the filmmakers actually took money (which they almost certainly did)?
And perhaps that is the lesson for this month: a great rock ‘n’ roll movie needs to have something to say about the larger meaning or culture of the music. And while Josie may have a lot to say about culture in general, and it may say it in a fun and likeable way, it’s just not very rock ‘n’ roll. There’s no grit. Now, does it have some things to say about being in a band? Yes, though they are arguably true of most collaborations.
If someone in a hundred years wanted to understand early 21st century rock, Josie and the Pussycats is a bad choice. It doesn’t show the sweat of a performance or the smell of beer. But it’s a great choice for anyone looking for a light-hearted, fun watch with a great soundtrack. We could all use some sugar in our lives these days. Join us again next month, when we’ll look at one of the inspirations for Josie, A Hard Day’s Night, the legendary first film from The Beatles
