New From Korea

At the San Francisco Asian Art Museum I saw installations by two Korean sculptors reinterpreting traditional ceramic forms. The first four photos are views of a single large case crammed with purple-tinted iridescent vessels, all of them rendered in soap and coated with varnish by a young woman named Meekyoung Shin.





The four photos that follow give views of Meekyoung Shin's second piece, located in the colonnade. This one is called Soap "ceramics" from the Translation Series. It pretends to be a shipment of precious vessels in the midst of uncrating at a museum such as this one.






Also in the colonnade as seen below is Yeesookyung's From the Translated Vases Series, 2011. She took broken pieces of newly-made Korean whiteware porcelain and stuck them together with a special "gilded adhesive" to create these blue-and-white statues.





Finally I walked through the vast empty room that housed the very vast card catalog when I first knew this building during its time as the San Francisco Public Library. The Asian Art Museum keeps all kinds of activities rotating through here, so it's a little unusual to find it quietly shining like this in contented vacancy.





One of those red Italian sofas is the one (in a different position) on which Mabel Watson Payne once famously posed here.



Around the doors in the catalog room are these elaborate bronze frames featuring mottoes in large raised letters, all caps:

IN BOOKS LIES THE SOUL OF THE
WHOLE PAST TIME: THE ARTICULATE
AUDIBLE VOICE OF THE PAST

Purple Heart

My father was given this medal in 1951 or 1952. His army tank got blown up in Korea and he spent many months after that in a military hospital in Kansas. I was, in fact, born in the same hospital while my father was still a soldier-patient there.



The purple heart FOR MILITARY MERIT is awarded to citizens who shed their blood fighting their country's wars. I had heard about this object all my life, but only saw it for the first time this week. My father has been dead for almost 60 years.



His mother kept the medal during her own lifetime -- and she lived to be nearly 100. She always told me I would have it someday, but at her death it passed to my father's first cousin, a local woman who helped care for my grandmother.

Earlier this week my father's cousin -- now herself quite an elderly lady -- mailed the leather case and its contents to San Francisco, where I signed for the package. Henceforth it will be my turn to keep it safe, even though its significance to me is mostly sinister.

Osang Gwon

Korean sculptor Osang Gwon takes numerous shiny snapshots of his subjects and applies the snapshots to moulds (sometimes foam, sometimes clay) to create these in-between artifacts.