Art is Where You Find It

The Lee Young Hee Museum of Korean Culture is located on the third floor of a building on 32^nd Street. For a museum that is so full of culture, the size is very small. The size of the museum is more like a gallery in a big museum. But the Lee Young Hee museum shows us that size does not matter. In that small space, visitors can see Korean traditional clothes (Han-bok) of everyone from the king to the common peasant. Designer Lee Young Hee has recreated traditional everyday wear and ceremonial wear from centuries ago. Each and every piece of clothing is carefully made and since the royal family could wear a lot of color, the clothes of the royal family are very colorful. Besides, the clothes, visitors can also see the accessories men and women used to wear. Visitors can also see olden tools that Koreans used long ago. Everything from the old coins to the glasses worn is on display. Although most of the clothes, accessories and tools are not in use today or are only worn on special occasions, everything is very beautiful to look at. The pieces are unique and not something you can see commonly. Through the museum, visitors can have a great time discovering the fashion of olden-day Korea.

What forces, external and internal, determine who we are and how we act? To what extent is a country’s collective identity reflective of its inhabitants? Catherine Opie: An American Photographer, a photographic exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, is a superb assemblage of Catherine Opie’s most compelling works that seeks to redefine the nebulous concept of the “American identity.” Opie’s photos deal with a wide array of topics, ranging from homosexuality to freeways. Her Portrait series, for example, is a brilliant portrayal of the vibrant queer subculture existing in mid 90s America. Glorifying one’s sexual orientation as a fundamental factor of identity, her portraits are not only aesthetically stunning, but provocative as well. Similarly, her Domestic series is a collection of photographs documenting the daily lives of lesbian families, providing a unique perspective of “how the other half lives.” Deviating from the human element of photography, the exhibition also features selections from her American Cities and Freeways series. The incorporation of these photos was a very wise decision by the museum’s curator, serving to juxtapose raw emotion and sexuality with landscapes that are completely void of life. In doing so, Opie ties together the elements that truly define “America” in terms of one’s sense of self and community. The exhibition is one that should not be missed.  

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What have you found of interest in the NYTimes Arts section? Add your comments to this post. I encourage you to leave multiple comments, and to comment freely on others’ ideas.

Do not neglect to comment meaningfully on the posted reviews. Those reviews that were posted first are located back a page or two so to get to them you have to click ‘previous entries’ on the bottom of the page.

What did you think of David Grann’s New Yorker article on Frederic Bourdin? While any observation is welcomed, I’m particularly interested in ideas the article might have sparked in you about the differences, or similarities, between art and life.