Spider

A spider lives in Itaewon. Perched atop bronze legs ten meters high, it broods -- an eight-legged crack in Seoul's smog. Its egg sack dangles, bulbous and vulnerable. The net effect is a blend of menace and some other emotion I can't put quite my finger on. Loneliness? Fear? Longing? The spider's name is Maman -- Mommy in French. Ironically, Mammon is also Latin for corrupting, debased riches. The spider is a sculpture by the artist Louise Bourgeois. It has been placed here to guard the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art. To me, the spider seems the personification of Samsung itself -- Korea's largest chaebol, a $173.4 billion conglomerate with arms in the electronics, auto, shipbuilding, construction, and insurance industries. Both seem ominous to me, despite their seeming benevolence as evidenced through all the beauty contained inside the museum.

The buildings which house the museum are an ultra modern amalgam of plate glass, steel, wood-simulacra, and granite. Jutting angles and evocative curves abound. Mood lighting and strategically-placed darkness robe the exhibits. There are three museums housed in the complex. The traditional section features collections of metalwork, pottery, paintings, and calligraphy. The modern art museum contains contemporary work by Koreans and foreigners. The final museum is a collection of installation and video pieces.

Spider or not, Samsung is, of course, hardly unique as an ultra-wealthy entity with an interest in supporting the arts. The Vatican commissioned Micaelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. The Hapsburgs paid Beethoeven's bills. Hitchcock's films are inseparable from the Hollywood studio system. Modern Western megacorporations support the arts just as much as their Korean counterparts. While there are striking examples of artists who somehow managed to produce without rich benefactors, the fact remains that much of the world's most fully realized art has been created, maintained, distributed, and exhibited through the efforts of entities like Samsung.

A jade-green vase swollen with dolphin-esque curves glimmers liquid inside one of the museum's Plexiglas cocoons. Another such vase has been painstakingly etched with the form of a dragon flying. Scale by scale and not a single flaw. The artisanship is overwhelming. A floor below, the faces of Gim Hong-Do's Immortals sigh with an emotion I can't put into words, but which lies somewhere between serenity, wry mirth, and absolute weariness of life. Their robes practically ripple off the page.

In the second gallery, Song Young Soo's sculpture, Standing Face to Face, looks like a welded copper lobster warped by black hole-grade gravity. Work like this reminds you of the confusion, despair, and struggle that fills 20th Century Korean history. Lonely Planet’s Korea guide quotes a Korean proverb as saying, "When the house is burnt, pick up the nails. Pieces like Lee Jeong-seoup's A Bull reflect such sentiment. Rendered with simple strokes in a style that reminds me of expressionism, the painting depicts a brindle bull, teeth bared and muscles bulging as it tosses its head in defiance.

Kang Ik Joong's piece, I Have to Learn English, is especially resonant for the ESL teachers living here. The piece consists of hundreds of three inch by three inch wood plaques, each with an English phrase carved into it. A monotone recording drones out the plaque phrases. "FISH FORKS," "FERTILE WAY, "HAPPY ESTHETIC," and "LAW SCHOOL," were a few of them. Some made more sense than others. The loneliness and alienation of life as a Korean who sweats blood to learn English, but can never really master the language seemed to have been etched into the wood along with the words.

How should we feel about the symbiosis of art and commerce that places like the Leeum represent? Decisions based upon emotions like love, passion, or revenge are frequently illogical, but for better and worse, they are also regarded as quintessentially human. Rationalized, profit-motivated corporate decision-making differs fundamentally from this. Although corporations need people to exist and operate, this disparity marks corporations as fundamentally extra-human. This begs the following question. If the purpose of art is to illuminate that which is human, then doesn't art's association with inhuman corporate entities undercut this aim?

My favorite pieces at the museum were those by the post-modern artists. With its hyperfast internet, Korea may be even more exposed to the reactor cores of image culture than America. How are people who live in such a context changed by it? This is the question these artists wrestle with. Kim Hong-Joo's Untitled, compares stencil-made paintings of various buildings to a birds-eye-view of a lake shaped like the artist's face. Each of these approaches to rendering reality is effective by itself, but, when juxtaposed, neither one appears very real at all. This idea leads to all sorts of interesting questions about what the relationship of media to reality actually is, and what constitutes realism. Atta Kim's 110-2: Times Square, New York, is a photograph of NYC's most famous urban canyon taken with an eight-hour exposure. This technique renders passing traffic as a ghostly flicker of passing lights. In this picture, humanity itself seems to have become fleeting and insubstantial due to the speed at which it moves. Finally, Paik Nam June's My Faust-Autobiography is a cardboard cathedral stacked to the ceiling with television monitors. Each is a riot of distorted images, SMPTE bars, static, and mind-numbingly fast editing. Antennas bristle from the building's roof. Newspapers coat its walls. Sitting on the tower’s pinnacle, a TV camera peers down, its monitor carrying the same stream of electronic consciousness as the others inside the building -- the cherry on the cake of this amphetamine-driven McLuhan thesis.

Ultimately, Samsung's relationship to art – embodied through this museum – is really a work of art itself, albeit an unintentional one. We may prefer to identify emotionally-motivated behavior as human, but coldly-rational social-engineering projects are no less typical of our species. War, commerce, and many religious activities are examples of this uglier strain of humanity. Simultaneously embodying passion and reason, empathy and barbarism, the human and the supposedly-inhuman, the paradox of Samsung's support for the arts stands as a pyramid-sized metaphor for the dualism of human nature. If one purpose of art is to offer the opportunity to think/experience/feel in a manner beyond the everyday, then this museum is a work of art.

A spider lives in Itaewon. The spider is Samsung. I love this spider's treasures, even though I fear the spider.