Entertainment
Upheaval wrestles with tradition in Korean art of the 1960s and ’70s at the Hammer Museum
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Rose of Nevada is a genuinely poetic movie that pushes the boundaries of the Groundhog Day-style time-travel narrative while carving out an identity completely its own. Rather than relying on the familiar mechanics that audiences have come to expect from the genre, the film approaches the concept through a more reflective and emotional lens. The result is a movie that feels thoughtful, ambitious, and surprisingly moving.
It makes a huge on-screen presence felt through its cast, particularly George MacKay and Callum Turner, who both deliver performances that elevate the material beyond a simple science-fiction premise. Combined with breathtaking visuals and a strong directorial vision, Rose of Nevada becomes something far more memorable than many of its genre contemporaries.
George MacKay continues to prove why he is one of the most compelling actors working today. Following his acclaimed work in 1917, he once again demonstrates an ability to carry a film through sheer presence and emotional authenticity.
Every scene feels grounded because of his performance, even when the story ventures into more abstract territory. Alongside him, Callum Turner delivers what could easily be viewed as a breakout performance. The chemistry between the two leads helps anchor the film, allowing audiences to connect with the characters even as the narrative challenges conventional storytelling expectations.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is its visual presentation. The cinematography is nothing short of earth-shattering. Nearly every frame looks like a carefully crafted painting, capturing both the beauty and mystery of the world these characters inhabit. There is a dreamlike quality to the imagery that perfectly complements the film’s themes of time, memory, and destiny.
The camera lingers on landscapes just long enough to allow viewers to soak in their beauty without ever slowing the pace. It’s the kind of cinematography that demands to be appreciated on the largest screen possible.
Director Mark Jenkin continues to establish himself as one of the most distinctive voices in modern British cinema. Following the atmospheric and haunting Enys Men, Jenkin once again crafts a story that feels deeply connected to folklore and place.
The British backdrop becomes a character in itself, with rugged coastlines, open landscapes, and isolated locations contributing to the film’s unique atmosphere. His direction never feels showy or excessive; instead, he trusts the audience to absorb the experience and interpret its deeper meanings.
What makes Rose of Nevada especially fascinating is how it recalls classic time-travel films without simply copying them. There are moments that evoke the spirit of The Final Countdown, particularly in the sense of wonder and uncertainty surrounding the temporal elements.
Yet the film remains firmly rooted in its own identity, focusing more on emotion and introspection than spectacle. It invites viewers to engage with its ideas rather than simply consume them.
This is also one of those rare films that benefits from reflection after the credits roll. It is not a movie designed to provide easy answers. Instead, it lingers in the mind, encouraging discussion and interpretation. The more time you spend thinking about it, the more rewarding it becomes. Much like a fine wine, Rose of Nevada continues to improve with age, revealing new layers and details upon reflection.
Overall, Rose of Nevada is a beautiful, ambitious, and visually stunning piece of filmmaking that deserves to be experienced on the big screen. Powered by exceptional performances, remarkable cinematography, and confident direction, it stands as one of the more unique takes on time travel in recent memory.
Overall Grade: 4/5 Stars
Entertainment
Kylie Jenner hit with third lawsuit as former chef claims Palm Springs party led to miscarriage
Less than two months after being sued by two former housekeepers, Kylie Jenner has been hit with a third workplace lawsuit. The beauty mogul’s former private chef alleges a grueling workload led to her miscarriage.
Filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court, the complaint alleges the woman routinely worked 11- to 12-hour shifts, five days a week, and was assigned physically demanding tasks despite alerting supervisors to her high-risk pregnancy.
A representative for Jenner did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
According to the filing, reviewed by The Times, the woman was told she was selected to work as Jenner’s private chef around Thanksgiving 2024. In early December 2024, the woman claims she informed her supervisors, also named as defendants, that she was three months pregnant and “required reasonable accommodations to protect her health and pregnancy.”
On New Year’s Eve in 2024, supervisors who had allegedly been hostile with the former chef directed her to “lift and transport heavy food items across the street and uphill without assistance,” the documents say.
As a result of the physical exertion, the former chef claims that she “became dizzy, began choking and gasping for air, and required assistance from security personnel, who intervened by providing water and aid.”
Around Feb. 1, 2025, the then-chef, five months’ pregnant at the time, was assigned to work Jenner’s child’s birthday event in Palm Springs, where she wasn’t provided “adequate support” despite the scale and demands of the party, according to the lawsuit. The former chef claims that when she asked for help and expressed concern over the workload, she was ignored by supervisors.
“Due to exhaustion and overwhelming physical strain, [she] broke down emotionally in the bathroom during the event,” reads the suit. “That evening, [she] experienced extreme physical exhaustion and heaviness throughout her body as a result of the prolonged and intense workload.”
The next morning, while the former chef was still in Palm Springs, the filing states that she awoke experiencing severe hemorrhaging and drove herself to the emergency room. “At the hospital, [she] was informed that there was no detectable heartbeat and that she had lost her unborn child.”
According to the former chef, she informed her supervisors of the miscarriage and medical emergency and, in the following days, was “falsely accused of leaving the kitchen and refrigerator in disarray following the Palm Springs event,” the lawsuit states.
The court documents claim that the former chef suffered severe hemorrhaging again on Feb. 8 and collapsed in her bathroom. The filing states that after the miscarriage she suffered severe depression and emotional distress, and claims that a supervisor reprimanded her, saying, “Stop it, just stop it. You are upsetting Kylie. You are making her depressed.”
“Celebrity status does not exempt anyone from California’s employment laws. We look forward to presenting the evidence in court and allowing the facts to speak for themselves,” attorney Della Shaker told The Times.
The former chef is seeking an unspecified amount of damages and claims that in addition to suffering accommodation failures, pregnancy discrimination and harassment, she was misclassified as an independent contractor, did not get paid on time or for the appropriate hours she worked, and was wrongfully terminated.
After being let go, the former chef claims that she sent a formal written complaint to co-defendant Tri Star detailing the alleged discrimination, harassment and wage theft. The lawsuit states that on May 22, 2025, the management team sent her an email offering a settlement and release agreement (essentially offering her money to sign away her right to sue).
The legal filing follows two lawsuits brought by former housekeepers of the embattled reality star. Less than two weeks after one woman on Jenner’s cleaning staff sued her, claiming her co-workers harassed and discriminated against her, another housekeeper came forward with allegations claiming the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star didn’t intervene while she suffered abuse from fellow staff, despite the housekeeper slipping the reality star a letter pleading for help.
Shaker also represents Angelica Hernandez Vasquez, who filed the suit against Jenner on April 17, and Juana Delgado Soto, who filed her lawsuit on April 29.
James Gunn isn’t exactly crushing it.
Named co-chairman and chief executive officer of the newly formed DC Studios in 2022, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker wrote and directed the division of Warner Bros. Discovery’s largely disappointing “Superman,” released last year.
This week, DC Studios’ second big-screen affair, “Supergirl,” lands in theaters with similarly underwhelming results.
‘Superman’ review: James Gunn gets DCU off to rocky, overstuffed start
Starring Milly Alcock as the movie’s namesake Kryptonian heroine — who also goes by Kara Zor-El and is the cousin of David Corenswet’s Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El — “Supergirl” isn’t distractingly zany the way its 2025 sister film was. Instead, it’s tonally boring, a chore of a movie chock full of thinly drawn characters and increasingly bombastic and violent.
To be clear, Gunn isn’t at the helm for “Supergirl.” Instead, it’s the typically dependable Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya,” “Cruella”), working from a script by Ana Nogueira, making her less-than-impressive feature-writing debut.
This planet-hopping adventure in the new DC Universe isn’t a complete space wreck, however, thanks largely to the spunky performance by Aussie Alcock, best known for portraying the younger Rhaenyra Targaryen in the early episodes of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”
When we catch up with Kara, she’s basically as we left her late in “Superman”: a super-sized mess. She’s out with her beloved, rambunctious dog, Krypto — the peppy and powerful pup having already been a major player in “Superman” — and enjoying a 23rd-birthday pub crawl among planets under a red sun. (Quick reminder: Supergirl, like Superman, draws her incredible powers from a yellow sun, like Earth’s, so she’s at least vaguely normal under a red sun and, importantly, can become intoxicated. The color of suns is a major factor throughout “Supergirl,” and it’s the movie’s most inventive narrative element.)
It is on such a world where a drunken Kara encounters 13-year-old Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan (Eve Ridley), whose family has just been brutally slain by the ruthless Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). Understandably, Ruthye wants revenge against Krem — leader of the Brigants, a band of male pirates and traffickers — and can think of little else.
She’s offering anyone who will help a sword made by her family of skilled weapons makers. The beyond-buzzed Kara isn’t interested, but she gets involved when a scumbag type tries to take the sword. She continues to do her best to fend off Ruthye’s subsequent pleas for assistance in her quest to kill Krem, but when the baddie — in the process of stealing her floating RV of a spaceship — shoots a charging Krypto with a poison dart, Kara has designs on punishing him, too. In fact, she needs to retrieve the specific antidote Krem carries with him to save her four-legged bud.
And so the gals are off to other worlds, initially traveling via the space equivalent of a beat-up Greyhound bus, on which they run into a trio of pillaging Sklarian Raiders. The sequence in which Kara retrieves stolen possessions and extracts information from them is as zany as “Supergirl” gets.
As their trek through the stars warps on, Kara and Ruthye encounter Lobo (Jason Momoa, seemingly leaving his Aquaman character back in the defunct DC Extended Universe), a rough-and-tumble, motorcycle-riding bounty hunter. They team up — sort of, eventually — but their alliance of convenience is one of the flick’s myriad plot threads that fail to tie into a sturdy knot.
The screenplay by Nogueira — an actor who’s penned a pair of plays — attempts to explore why Kara is so jaded by taking us back to her childhood in the Kryptonian city Argo, protected by her father’s tech after the planet’s demise. Of course, that protection proved to be temporary, or she wouldn’t have eventually been sent to Earth like her cousin before her. It’s lukewarm fare, with Kara eventually learning the familiar Spider-Man lesson — with great power comes great responsibility.
Gillespie adds a few nice touches from the director’s chair throughout the movie, but they’re too little to elevate the proceedings.
Again, Alcock — whose credits also include the recent Netflix limited series “Sirens” — does what she can with the material. It’s a demanding role, as she is on screen for most of the movie, and is spirited in it.
Unfortunately, the lesser-known Ridley — making her feature debut following a few television appearances — is given even less to work with. We never learn much about the one-note Ruthye beyond that her family was killed in her presence and that she is really upset about it.
If you’re expecting the always-lively Momoa to save the day, he brings his larger-than-life presence to Lobo, but the demon-like figure isn’t very interesting. A mix between Aquaman and his Khal Drogo from “Game of Thrones,” the longtime DC Comics character isn’t anything you wouldn’t expect here.
If there’s another bright spot in the cast, it’s Schoenaerts (“Rust and Bone,” “The Old Guard”), who brings a touch of nuance to the villainous Krem. You may have expected a bigger name to play the big bad in this second DC Universe big-screen effort, but some of the acting choices the Belgian makes keep things vaguely engaging when he’s within the frame.
Sadly, vaguely engaging is the best “Supergirl” can manage.
We’ll see if Gunn can turn things around, starting with the HBO series “Lanterns” in August and the horror-tinged film “Clayface” in October, before he returns to direct Corenswet, Alcock and the rest of the “Superman” gang in “Man of Tomorrow,” arriving a little more than a year from now.
We’re hoping for super results, but, at this point, it’s tough to say we’re expecting them.
‘Supergirl’
Where: Theaters.
When: June 26.
Rated: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking.
Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2.
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