At a time when art critics are questioning the importance of national identities in contemporary art, Korean photographer SEUNG WOO BACK has found a physical place that embodies the blurring of cultural boundaries and provides him a venue for pondering issues of both individual and cultural identity. A component of his complex series Real World is his photographs of the Aiins World theme park in Seoul, which advertises that it can take visitors around the world in a single day and allows them to pose for snapshots at sites they may otherwise never visit. The sites, however, are reconstructed in detailed miniature versions. Back’s straightforward photographs of Aiins World resemble post card views of world-renown architectural landmarks, but they also show how the theme park has taken dramatic liberties with the buildings. Here, the World Trade Towers, the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge are now contiguous and there are Korean turtle warships, not tugboats or ferries sailing in the adjacent river. Back’s photographs heighten the park’s liberties with space and time. In clear, deep-space detail he records a “reality” that is disturbing in its compression of cultural heritage and stylistic periods. His perspectives align the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower and place Paris’s Notre Dame and Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Towers in the same skyline. Seeing the world’s tallest building in miniature is amusing, but also disconcerting. The buildings are stripped of their original cultural context and reduced to being checkmarks in tourists’ itineraries. (ANNE TUCKER)