Monday, December 14, 2009

Besides, his artistic passion were busted in other fields like movie.."

Dear Seoul Art Museum,

Holy spattered excreta on a steaming shingle! It is an Andy Warhol exhibit, a pretty big thing. You obviously spent piles of money on the staging, which was totally brilliant, and much more just to get the art over to Seoul.

Why is it, then, that you chose to do your translation into English though Babel Fish? This was the worst set of translations I have seen in my life (you may click on the graphics for bigification).
"In works, he focused on to express public emotion that shares star not on star itself."

WTF is that, some kind of splattered Zen koan?

Ahem…

The lovely fiancĂ©e and I went downtown to see the Warhol exhibit. It was great. The art was much better than I had expected, and the museum did an astounding job of laying out the rooms. Luckily, particularly for an opening weekend, the place was nearly deserted. I don’t think Warhol is the kind of artist that causes parents to grab their kids and head to a museum. Consequently there were almost no kids in attendance, and the normal push-pull-squeeze was not in effect. There was, however, one totally cute little 5-year old wandering solemnly from piece to piece, writing something down in a little notebook.



There were no signs (that I saw, anyway) saying no photography, so I took some snapshots of the absolutely terrible translations. About 2/3 of the way through the exhibit I saw the docents stopping Koreans from taking pictures of each other, so I’m assuming it actually WAS a no photo zone. Maybe the docents just didn’t want to try to explain that to the weird foreigner who wasn’t even taking pictures of the art, just the explanations postered on the walls.

This exhibit is absolutely worth checking out – it makes the Renoir exhibit that came through a few months ago look absolutely lame. At only 8-chun and with unimpeded views and paths? Get down there!

And laugh at the English translations..

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like "his peculiar thing" best.....

yer sis

Anonymous said...

Never a big AW fan, might have to go see one of his exhibits to try to understand. I found the Koreans had no problem trying to express their displeasure of me taking pictures, oh, except for the language thing and the non-receptive target. I will never forget the lady yelling at my camera.

HYS

Chris in South Korea said...

The theory behind no pictures is either so that you don't try to make your own copies of copyrighted stuff, or to insure people have to come out to see things for themselves instead of living vicariously through bloggers like us :) I dislike the rule, to say the least...

Nice post.