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OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW
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by Caylee Weintraub
ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE BAKER MUSEUM, holographic spiders build a careful web. They make it in a slow outward spiral. The web is crystalline, as if it is shattered glass. When the web reaches its most intricate point, a drop of pixelated water rains down and the web is washed away. The wall is blank again for a few moments before the spiders reappear and the projection begins again.
The ephemerality of this piece, featured now in the Baker Museum until early January, is one of Korean Buddhist artist Ran Hwang’s central themes. Her work is concerned with impermanence: of spider webs, plum blossoms, marriage, and sorrow. The exhibit, Becoming Again, aptly describes Hwang’s work, which engages in a perpetual cycle of becoming again and again.
In addition to the Garden of Water exhibit, the museum also features the titular piece Becoming Again. In this installation of Hwang’s exhibit, a video of a Korean marriage ceremony is projected on the wall while at the same time a phoenix shadow rises and falls from the ashes. Also contained within this multi-piece exhibit are carefully-hung Korean marriage caps which dangle in a chandelier-like formation from the ceiling and whose tassels appear throughout the construction.
Hwang’s works are an immersive experience, a “process-oriented work as a form of meditative practice.” This process-oriented work also extends to her stationary compositions: a woman composed of buttons and plum blossoms constructed of Korean paper buttons, all of which Hwang hammered into a wood-block canvas thirty times:
