“Pulse of a Perfect Heart,” multimedia. The overwhelming dominance of East Asian artists over the contemporary photography scene is made starkly obvious in the University of Illinois visual-arts program’s annual MFA show, where Korean photo-artists Sung Yeoul Lee and Jung Kyong Kim take the laurels with their grim yet playful takes on the human body. Kim’s two black-and-white vertical series, hung side by side, of small shots of hands getting entangled in bracelets and metal bandages, respectively, place the accent on fun with an underlying and undercutting message of confinement. The stresses are reversed for Lee, who shows us a torso in which a man’s bald head, seen from behind, is firmly attached to a curvaceous feminine trunk seen frontally and clothed in a sheer beige turtleneck to which suction cups, from which cut off cords and nozzles dangle, have been affixed. An x-ray-like video next to Lee’s color photographs shows us the cups blazing with infernal white light as they do their work on the ambiguous subject’s innards. (Michael Weinstein)
At I Space, 230 W. Superior, (312)587-9976, through August 16.
