Brehm Center

As a child, Olga Lah distinctly remembers visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and being "awe-struck" by the paintings - paintings that represented cultures and peoples from around the world. It was this early childhood experience that helped shaped the rest of her life. It enhanced her arts education by giving her a deeper appreciation for the arts beyond the pages of her art history books. Alongside her growing appreciation for art, Olga began developing her own creative gifts. This led her to eventually pursue a Bachelor of Arts in Art History Administration and Studio Art at UC Riverside.

During her undergrad studies Olga realized that she felt led to work in arts education and administration and that she felt a desire to integrate these professional aspirations with her faith and love for the Church. Soon thereafter, Olga found herself at Fuller Theological Seminary. While completing her Master of Arts in Theology Biblical Studies Emphasis at Fuller, Olga took a few courses developed by the Brehm Center due to her interest in theology, culture, and art. The courses and discussions helped keep alight her desire to live a more integrated life in which faith and creativity existed in a more symbiotic relationship.

Earlier this year, Olga was told of the opportunity to serve as a volunteer docent at LACMA, the same museum she visited many times as a child. It was an opportunity to introduce children to the wonders of art as she had been done with her as a child. "The driving force behind my volunteering as a docent is to be able to teach children about art, to plant seeds." Seeds that she hopes grow into a deeper appreciation for art and creativity.

What Olga appreciates about LACMA and museums in general is that it provides an opportunity for people from various backgrounds to engage with arts from an equally diverse set of backgrounds. People naturally bring their own presuppositions and prejudices to the museum. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for from that can come "layers of meaning and interpretation. And that is okay. It is a good thing." It sheds additional light on the diversity that makes up God's creation. As a docent, she believes she can help facilitate positive interaction between the art and the visitors to the museum.

With this same thought in mind, Olga laments the way in which some of the Church responds to and interacts with modern art. For some, "the meaning of a piece of art needs to be clear" and that closes the door to so much wonderful modern art. "As believers, we need to be comfortable to ask questions, to explore, to be comfortable with a piece in which there are no 'rules'. It challenges us to be a more observant people, to investigate something before you dismiss it. We need to be open and willing to dialogue."

"Contemporary art can be challenging since sometimes much of it is about philosophical questions rather than conventional aesthetics. Yet, there is value in the investigation and exploration of intent, to find out how there is sacred in the secular." Olga is hopeful that people of faith will desire to more deeply engage with art and their creative sides. For Olga, the ability to create, question, experience wonder, humor, joy, and even sorrow offers up a slice of divinity. Amen to that.

Your Bright Future

We had a chance to walk through LACMA's featured exhibition, YOUR BRIGHT FUTURE at the end of the day. It is an exhibition that features the work of twelve artists from South Korea born between 1957 and 1972. The artists featured in this exhibition use a variety of medium and media as their vehicle for creative expression. What was particularly intriguing was how many of the pieces alluded to questions of identity. Before coming to LACMA, I had read that of the twelve artists, only one actually still calls South Korea home while all of the rest live abroad. Three of the more interesting pieces take the notion of how various external and internal factors play key roles in shaping identity.

The first piece that we observed was Fallen Star 1/5 by Do Ho Suh. In this piece, Suh blends his own personal history with the architecture that played a role in it. The piece depicts a traditional Korean scholar's house, much like the one Suh grew up in, crashing violently into his first U.S. apartment building. Resplendent with the details that convey the lives and identities of the various people that dwell in both the U.S. apartment and scholar's house, Suh tackles identity through the concepts of place, how we define home, and the sometimes violent and ugly nature of the process of assimilation.

Another fascinating piece was A Needle Woman by Kimsooja. Using the medium of video, Kimsooja filmed herself in 6 locations around the world (Nepal, Yemen, Chad,  Israel, Brazil, and Cuba). Standing with her back to the camera and remaining completely still, Kimsooja places herself on busy pedestrian street, “like a rock in a rushing river.” (LACMA) While her stillness is fascinating, it serves to exaggerate the people that pass by her as they respond to her or ignore her. Each location tells a different tale. For example, she is largely ignored in Brazil. People are seemingly in too much a rush to interact or notice this slight Asian woman standing completely still. Yet in Yemen, she catches the attention and ire of nearly every single person of the hundreds that pass her by in the street. Could it be that her head and face are uncovered (most of the women are dressed in full-length burkas)? Could it be that as a woman, it is culturally unacceptable to stand stationary in such a place? Could it be that in combination with these other factors the fact that she is an alien, not a Yemenite, that this action is largely seen as inappropriate and arrogant? It raises many interesting questions and lets the stories play out without providing us with easy answers.

Monologue monologue by Jooyeon Park is another wonderful piece that subtly shakes up conventional notions of identity. In this piece Park recorded three Caucasian actors living in Korea and teaching English to support themselves. As the video unfolds, you quickly realize that it is hard to place their accents and it moves into becoming a game of figuring out where these men come from. In this search, one becomes painfully aware that our accents and the language we use is huge factor in people categorize and identify us. What we discover at the end of the three monologues is that the voices are being lip-synched by these actors Korean students. We have been duped in a sense, but again this piece makes us ask important questions about identity, our own prejudices, and “how language functions as a complex social cue.” (LACMA)

YOUR BRIGHT FUTURE raises interesting questions for people of faith who desire to engage culture. What is culture? What are those identity tags that we carry with us? What preconceptions do we bring to the table when we desire to engage with another culture? How can we be more observant? How do we listen better to pick up on some of the more subtle nuances of identity? How can art facilitate or stimulate us to do so? Questions for people of faith to think about as we participate and live in the here and now.

All photos from the exhibition YOUR BRIGHT FUTURE courtsey of www.lacma.org.

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