Ran Hwang, Garden of Water, 2010. Beads, crystal, pins, and video on Plexiglas, 230 x 900 cm.

Ran Hwang

Seoul

Hakgojae Gallery

One of Korea’s better-known artists, Ran Hwang, who works in New York and Seoul, has built a reputation on artful arrangements of buttons—thousands of them pinned onto the wall. Her varying compositions include vases, birds, plum trees, and, in this exhibition, a spectacular installation of chandeliers complete with web-weaving spiders, Because buttons and pins inevitably have feminine, if not necessarily feminist, implications, it can be difficult to disassociate Hwang’s work from a deliberately feminine point of view. Yet she does not emphasize the…see the full review in June’s magazine.