When the museum is an aesthetic technology

(Desire and Anesthesia, Kyungah Ham, Art Sonje Centre, Seoul, 22 August - 25 October 2009)

Artists who deal with the museum as a medium and a subject matter for their art are anything but a rare breed. This art practice can be traced back to the 1960s when what comes to be called 'institutional critique' emerged. In the early days of institutional critique, the artworks of the kind were marked by a temporary act of artists intervening into the collection, architecture and behind-the-scene routine of museums, often employing the trope of parody. Their purpose was to put the museum in the condition of an object of critique, to disclose what was normally hidden to the public view but embedded in the workings of the museum.

What artist Kyungah Ham wishes to manifest in her solo show Desire and Anesthesia is related to the idea of institutional critique. From a critical stance, she performs in her own way what huge Euro-American museums did. Over the last decade or so, she has stolen arguably petty things such as cups, dishes, knives and spoons from restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, airplanes, etc. in different places around the world. More precisely speaking, she stole a thing from one place and swapped it out for a similar thing from another. For instance, she secretly took away a cappuccino cup from the Starbucks Coffee in Korea, brought it to London and stealthily swapped it for a likewise coffee cup from Caffè Nero in London; she swapped a disposable plastic cup from in-flight conveniences of Air France for a gilt-lined ceramic cup from a Korean restaurant. These things that she has stolen or 'collected' are now exhibited in the form of a museum display. Inside a reflective spotlit glass case, the mock-museum display follows a typological method that places the same type of objects together. The aesthetic effect that the whole installation named Museum Display produces is so striking that the identity of these objects seems transformed from artefacts to artworks, and the history of a series of theft seems sanitised.

MUSEUM DISPLAY (PHOTO: WEEKLY HANKOOK)

MUSEUM DISPLAY (PHOTO: ARTIST)

The stolen collection is also featured in Ham's photographic works. In Switched Stolen Objects the photographs she took of each moment of her swapping acts are accompanied by text raising a question about the renowned museums, mentioning the Elgin marbles from Greek Parthenon kept in the British Museum in London, the Buddhist manuscript Jikji from the-14th-cenury Korea (the world's oldest print produced by movable metal-types) kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, for example. Steal Life Series consists of photographs in which Ham's objects are staged on a table like the-17th-century Dutch still lives, alluding to the period ethos in search of material abundance through colonial trades.

STEAL LIFE SERIES (PHOTO: ARTIST)

According to the artist's statement, the exhibition's title Desire and Anesthesia implies that the desire for power and wealth often deadens our guilty consciousness when we commit certain wrongful doings. When it comes to the museum, the title indicates the extent to which we are made to be indifferent to historical violence and plunder that the desire of those museums has caused because those behaviours are veiled under the pretense of art and culture. So, is Ham's art stimulating enough to get us awakened out of our insensibility to injustice?

The once avant-garde projects of institutional critique are now being picked up by many museums themselves in pursuit of self-reflection and reformation. It is not too much to say that to embrace the artist’s work that is critical of the museum has blossomed into a full-blown museological practice. This surely does not mean that the mega-museums have taken sufficient measures to perfectly straighten out the aftermath of their histories entangled in colonialism; there still remain the vested interests of the museums which cannot be legitimised. At least apparently the museums try to profess readiness to open themselves up to critical voices and to find a way to engage with the communities concerned. Along the changing attitude of the museums, the nature of artists' critique of museums has also shifted from merely revealing the problems of museums didactically to revealing that diverse perspectives are intrinsically intertwined in the museum undertakings.

In this respect, Ham's works are perhaps too straightforward to be of critical force. We all know that the possession of the Parthenon marbles and Korean manuscripts by the European museums is problematic. Her works of art seem to not really provoke issues regarding the premises and practices of the museums in an insightful way. What is rather brought into relief in Ham's art is her own act of stealing 'non-precious' things in the license of art that is intended to be controversial but ends up being a gentle parody of the museum. Furthermore, in the white-cube space that is nothing to do with what her critique turns towards, her art is in peril of being shown to appropriate the visual aesthetics of museum displays. While the artist's intention to criticise the big museums' misdoings runs out of steam in the gallery space, what nonetheless intrigues me in her works, particularly Museum Display, is that she demonstrates the museum as a kind of technology. Ham's consistent gathering seemingly trivial things and displaying them in an incommensurably aesthetic manner poses a question as to which is worth a place in the museum and what counts as knowledge in there. She performs the mechanism of museums that transforms something into what deserves the viewer's attention. This is effectively embodied in her material collection of everyday objects exhibited in the specific spatial composition, which makes her art operative as a commentary upon the museum.