Tag: anthropology

Adolescent Wonderland by Naomi Hobson (Horniman Museum)

14.06.2024

https://www.horniman.ac.uk/event/adolescent-wonderland

Honestly, going to Adolescent Wonderland in the Horniman museum was one of the most wonderful experiences that I have ever had in museums and art galleries. Everything that I find in museums was there: inspiration, community, culture, knowledge, stimulation, enjoyment. A new world to discover.

My love of the museum came to me late in life. We did not go as children. Our culture was Hindi movies and songs and family visits. And the other preoccupation which took up all the time was reading. It was only when I was a mature student that I would go into the free museums around London and be surrounded by learning, culture and knowledge that I grew to love them. Other cultures. Other worlds apart from my own. Travel back into time and prehistory. The concrete things of the cultures and worlds that I had read about in books: the picture and reality to the stories.

What we got with the visit to Adolescent Wonderland was the artist herself, Naomi, accompanied by her husband. And they gave us a personal tour of the artworks. It was an enthralling expedition into the life of her community.

In the photographs, Naomi had worked with the young people of the First Nations to present them as the future and to tell their own stories. She wanted to do something different from the anthropological studies of the people through a white lens where they were presented as being part of prehistory rather than the present and the future. This was photography that was documenting the reality of the community and its young people rather than a series of stereotypes.

Someone with a camera. An artist. That was trying to change the world. For her community. To give them recognition. To allow them to express themselves. To give them a voice and an identity. Someone that was trying to change the world for the community.

Here are some of my favourite photographs from the collection with some personal comments:

‘The Good Sister’

Two kids, sitting on a bicycle. The older girl is snapping herself and her sibling with a smartphone. Behind her, her little sister stands on the bike in a rabbit mask with a cape. She is holding her fingers in the ‘V’ sign for victory.

This image is definitely cute and charming. But it is also more than that. Because this moment from the life, this casual happening in the day, becomes elevated into the mission of the photography exhibit. It is the good sister that is Naomi photographing herself and the younger generation so that they have recognition in this world. So they form part of modernity.

It is not the surroundings that are important. They are in black and white – because they show the emergence of the people from the past. And just like all the kids nowadays, these kids have their bicycles, their fancy dress and their smartphones. They are part of the digital community wherever they are. They are a part of modernity – no different from anyone else.

The sense of connection that is in this photograph is what is its biggest appeal. That sisterly love. That work on the project of photography to represent the self – not the isolated self of the Western world. The sense of self that is the community sense of self. For us and by us.

And, then there is the ‘V’ sign for Victory – this is a fight for representation. The dream of triumph for the community.

‘Daley’s Bike’

This photograph of Kayla posing next to a bike she borrowed is a stunning photograph from her furry pink coat to the beauty of design in the bicycle, to the gorgeous striped trousers that Kayla is wearing. She stands nonchalantly, looking away.

What I liked about this photograph was that it is real diversity and inclusion. The Western fashion world and the Western Media pretend that they are diverse and inclusive. They are not. This is someone that is real posing confidently like a fashion model. And she is real. She is not photoshopped. She hasn’t had someone telling her what to wear or do. She is real. And that is what is beautiful about this photograph. It is her vision of who she is through her clothes. It is her taste. It is her pose. It is how she wants to look. She is not copying anyone. It is a photograph of authenticity and diversity. The beauty of diversity. A taste of what that could look like without the endless, tireless peddling of the same within Western ‘culture’ and ‘taste’.

The colours in the striped trousers match the colours of the wheels of the bike: the body is movement, revolution.

‘OMG’

A young woman is struggling under the weight of a massive pink flamingo float which she is taking to Coen river barefoot. Her eyes are closed. The head of the flamingo is facing her and is above her head. She is draped in a towel.

The body of the woman and the massive pink float make a new body. It is almost a merging of the human with not only the animal in the bird representation, but also plastic, the wonder substance of modernity. Perhaps it is a merging of the human body with the system of the sign, the stuff of representation. And representation is heavy.

The woman is struggling under the heaviness of representation and the modern symbolic system, but she still carries on barefoot. It is a striking image of resilience, the strength of the people and its young. Their adaptability and appropriation of the world outside and their use of it in their own communities even given the iniquities of history and what that symbolic system did to them and the people.

‘Mr Cat Lover’

A man stands in a window frame with a cat. He is at the open window to the right. On his left is a closed window with a reflection of the outside world.

Naomi explained what she wanted to do with this photograph. She wanted to show that these are ordinary people like everywhere else in the world. People with affections and love for the animals. Nice people. People with humanity and emotions.

But I believe there is something else here. With the closed, reflected window to the left, we get an implicit comparison with what is happening with the cat in the open window. The closed window mirrors a humanless world with an empty car outside. The external world. It is inside the open window that there is life and the love of life, humans and humanity.

The essence of the image is when the figure with the cat comes out of the open window into the humanless world to make connections with the viewer in that world. The viewer that he has never had intercourse with. The unknown world of other people. Because, in a sense, they who are unknown are not there. Because to be human is to communicate somehow, anyhow. To communicate love above all. And so, he comes into the window and he moves towards us that do not know him to form a knowledge of knowing between us. A beautiful photograph of a beautiful thought.

Hallyu the Korean Wave Review – Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition

Hallyu the Korean Wave Review – Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition

01.04.2023

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave

At home, they sit in a neglected and increasingly dusty pile – with my other language learning books picked up mainly from charity shops – or the internet when the owners lost their interest in learning them (14 languages in total and building). Untouched, they are marked out for future study when my life is not just about work and academia, carefully compiled: a set of Korean language books. I picked them up in a free hotel book sharing point in a country where they have many Korean workers (it is not Korea, my friends).

Although I never got onto the Korea loving bandwagon with ‘Gangham Style’ or ‘Squid Games’, and I didn’t watch the film that won the Oscars (‘Parasite’), I have taught several Korean people when I used to volunteer to teach English to refugees and migrants over five years. I watch some K-Pop, although it is just one band called (G)-IDLE as I like watching the young women dance and perform and I enjoy the cinematography of the music videos. So it was with this light acquaintance in need of improvement and because I wanted to see the Friday Late at the V & A that I meandered my way at the end of the night into the ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ exhibit.

The exhibit is exciting, eclectic and vibrant and speaks to the young. Inundated with interest, the walls showcase Korean film, music, beauty and fashion. All of the senses are awakened and rejuvenated by an immersion into a colourful Korean cultural life.

When you go in, you are confronted with several screens showing ‘Gangham Style’ and its parodies. Of course, this song is synonymous with K-Pop and is probably one of the only contemporary songs that everyone in cities around the world probably knows. We get to see the audacious pink suit that Psy wore for the music video. But the surprising thing to learn is that the song and the suit mock South Korea’s ‘hyper-consumerism and material pursuit’, using the district of Gangham as an example. The suit is a sneer at what the elites wear in that area and the iconic dance moves are snipes at posers and wannabes that emulate that kind of lifestyle.

If Korean culture is currently chic, then the next section of the exhibit makes us reflect on the historical miracle of how a colonised, war-torn country which was ravaged by the Cold War and also ‘one of the most violent conflicts in modern history’ in the Korean War of 1950 has followed a ‘remarkable trajectory’ to become a ‘leading cultural powerhouse by the early 2000s’. The formula seems to be ‘governmental control, daring strategies and IT innovation’, alongside quick hands and quick minds.

I will write about the parts that excited me the most in what followed on the journey through the massive space that the exhibition enfolded. A long term fan of athletics and gymnastics, I was entranced by the Volunteer guide uniform for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. The clothing draws inspiration from the national costume which is called hanbok. The outfit is beautiful, graceful, an accomplishment of functional style inter-weaved with the Olympic spirit and colours. It is the perfect metaphor of endurance, of a people that have kept their traditions while becoming truly international, even though enmity and colonisation attempted to destroy their way of life. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of the affinities of Korea’s history with India’s. In fact, there was even a Hindi film poster which showed a pirated (‘adapted’) Korean film, which influenced my finding of affinities with my motherland even more.

It was also a surreal experience to see the wig worn by Choi Min-sik in ‘Oldboy’. This is probably the most memorable Korean film I have watched. When I was immersed in this filmic universe, I just assumed that the wig was the actor’s real hair. In the exhibit, removed from the face, the wig was patently, even insolently artificial. Yet it still teemed with an energy, almost like that of life. The make up and hair director of the film, Song Jong-hee intended to infuse the wig with wildness to convey the ‘feral emotions’ and the effect of the years of incarceration on the protagonist of the film. To me, raised in Hinduism and Sikhism, where hair is sacred and the god Shiva is known for the strength of his hair, the hairstyle raised the resonance of India, religion, power, feelings hard to express or even describe.

A particularly interesting section of the exhibition was the exploration of beauty standards in Korean culture, since the nation is a ‘global trendsetter’ in this area. The historical background until the 1910s (perhaps longer?) is seven hundred years of maintaining beauty as a ‘moral obligation’ as attractiveness symbolises not only social status, but also virtue.

Where did I spend the most time in the exhibition? I sat before a big screen watching a compilation of snippets from K-Pop videos, admiring the crystal sharpness of today’s video cameras, the lightning flashes of Korean dance moves and the stunning physical beauty of the people. It was intoxicating. Yet, as I watched, the critical part of my mind kept on turning over the question of whether what I was watching was something authentic and organic, something different, or just indoctrination and influence from the Western world, a parroting of the Western music video. I am still not sure.

Surely, ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ is one of the most memorable exhibitions that I have been to. I was also pleased to see that the exhibition seems to have been put together from Korean descent people, which seems to give it the authenticity that is lacking from Orientalising Western depictions of Asian people such as Indians. I learned a general history of modern Korea, was amused, inspired to learn more, ever more determined to one day make a serious foray into the language. I felt the unity of Asian culture as a man of Indian descent, almost a sense of belonging. Out of the three exhibitions I went to in the V & A that day, the exhibition was my personal favourite. I never felt even  a moment of boredom in it and my attention was focused entirely on the exhibits.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/hallyu-the-korean-wave