Korean artists aren't well known in the United States. But a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, hopes to change that. Your Bright Future brings 12 contemporary Korean artists together for a rare major museum show.

With the exhibit, MFAH director Peter Marzio said he hopes to encourage the consideration of contemporary Korean art — which he deems vastly under recognized — in a city with a strong Korean community.

All of the artists featured have lived in Korea, but all have also lived or studied abroad. One artist is an American now living in Seoul.

The artists work in a variety of mediums, but are all preoccupied with language, the difficulties posed by translation and the nuances of communication.

I spoke with Jooyeon Park and Minouk Lim, who each contributed video installations and both live and work in Seoul.

Park's 2006 work, called MONOLOGUE monologue, is a video of Irish English teachers in Korea speaking about themselves, dubbed over with the voices of their students. She says the dubbing was meticulous; it took about four hours to perfectly sync two minutes of footage. The students who read their teacher's transcripts were beginners. Their sometimes awkward emphasis questioned the meaning of language and the limits of translation.

It also served to inspire another, newer piece: Eclectic Rhetoric. For this piece Park filmed the interior of the historic Old Seoul train station. The streaming video is set to the contemporary urban soundtrack of the goings on outside, from protestors decrying the import of Americans to homeless singing hymns.

Lim juxtaposed the political ranting of Korean taxi drivers with footage of her daily life and a conversation between her father and daughter. The two streams are played simultaneously to imply the difficulty of seeing two perspectives at once.

Lim explores the generational gap between older Koreans, who lived through Korea's occupation by Japan and the Korean war, and younger, less nationalist generations. The conversation between her "old school" father and her daughter is especially poignant. Lim married a Frenchman, and her daughter self identifies in the video as Korean, French, and American. Her grandfather corrects her, "You should say you're half and half." Lim says her father struggles with how to label and understand his grandchild, a theme she plans to continue exploring.

Other artists with work on display include Bahc Yiso, Choi Jeong-Hwa, Gimhongsok, Jeon Joonho, Kim Beom, Kimsooja, Koo Jeong-A, Do Ho Suh, Haegue Yang, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge.

The exhibit will be on view until Feb. 14.