Chaotic Harmony is billed as the most comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Korean work ever to have taken place in the US. But in fact, it’s limited to artists south of the 38th Parallel, as co-curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, acknowledges. “Operating under a relatively new democracy in South Korea, artists experienced a burst of creative energy and freedom of expression in recent decades, and an entirely fresh perspective of modern-day Korea is presented in this show,” she says.

Tucker and her co-curator Karen Sinsheimer (from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, where the exhibition is on show from 03 July to 19 September, having previously shown in Houston) have gathered together work by 40 photographers and deliberately mixed two generations – those who began exhibiting their work in the 1980s and 1990s, and those who are only just emerging now. Interestingly, one distinct theme in the exhibition is consumerism. Sanggil Kim’s Off-line: Burberry Internet Community, 2005, for example, shows a group of web friends united by their love of the British fashion brand, while Pa-Ya’s Noblesse Children shows a hyperreal, perfected child wearing Louis Vitton accessories. Jeon Mee Yoon’s image of her daughter, Seowoo, meanwhile, shows the gender-specific colour coding that runs through her belongings. From shampoo to crayons, Seowoo loves the colour pink, and the resulting image is both funny and thought provoking.

Seowoo is taken from a wider series called The Pink and Blue Project, which investigates both boys’ and girls’ belongings. Yoon started it in 2005 when she was studying at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and it includes both Asian and non-Asian kids. “I discovered that my daughter’s case was not unusual,” she says. “In the United States, South Korea and elsewhere, most young girls love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon is widespread among children of various ethnic groups regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Perhaps it is the influence of pervasive commercial advertisements aimed at little girls and their parents, such as the universally popular Barbie and Hello Kitty merchandise that has developed into a modern trend.”

It’s something worth thinking about – does South Korean photography have a distinct aesthetic, or does it reflect the global concerns of modern industrial society? The exhibition suggests both, with some artists drawing on traditional imagery, some taking an international stance and others mixing the two together. One of Sungsoo Koo’s images, for example, shows a standard coach interior suffused with a distinctly non-Western approach to colour and pattern. It will be interesting to see what happens in future – with the internet and worldwide media campaigns, and the ubiquity of consumer products, it could be that South Korean tastes, like other Western countries’, become increasingly homogenous. At the very least, it will be interesting to see what happens with Seawoo’s generation.