Hang Plastic, Feel HappyHappy
Choi Jeong-Hwa/LACMA
Is that a child-sized toy car hanging on that fence?
If you've been to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in recent weeks, you've been amused, bemused, bewitched, sandwiched by hanging plastic strands of colorful wonder. That's the massive installation HappyHappy!! by Choi Jeong-Hwa, it is right next to the Broad Museum, and it has been making visitors feel happy happy. We've seen you taking pictures there. Posing. Clowning. Don't deny it.
If you haven't visited in recent weeks, you might be surprised -- or not -- to see that the whole crazy-random-plastic-becomes-eye-candy concept can be found further into Hancock Park, behind the museum. That's where fences have been erected in the grassy areas, chainlink fences, and that's where the public can hang their own no-longer-needed purple salad bowls and orange sieves and strange blue cup lids and everything else they've dug out from the pantry's bottom shelf.
The plastic additions have built up on the inside-the-park fences over the last few weeks, and everything is now looking nice and plump. Plump for plastic hanging on fences, that is.
We're all about the whimsy. We're all about the plastics in a tar pit-laden park. The contrasts. And we're all for the public getting involved in an outlandish, museum-backed art installation.
