VISUAL ARTS: Reviewed today are Living in a Cloud at the Royal Hibernian Academy and Contemporany Art from Korea.

Living in a Cloud, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, until January 4th (01-6612558)

Contemporary Art from Korea, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, until January 11th (01-4070779)

Living in a Cloud at the RHA marshals diverse projects by four artists. The artist-curator is Sarah Pierce and she envisages the show, plus related events including the involvement of sound/action group SounDin, and the publication of a transcript of a round-table discussion involving artists and curators, as aspects of The Metropolitan Complex, an umbrella term for an ongoing series of projects exploring "artists and their relationships to a city and its institutions."

There is an underlying ambition to open things out, to generate a flow of talk and ideas and possibilities, and to this end most of what you encounter in the gallery eschews the obvious, sometimes to the point of eccentricity. Take Nina Katchadourian's 10-minute video, Endurance, so singular in design that you wonder how she ever thought of it. Briefly, a clip from Frank Hurley's film of Shackleton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition is projected onto one of the teeth in the artist's open mouth. As the seconds slip by she struggles more and more to keep her mouth open.

There could well be a point, in this back-handed tribute to the explorers' ordeal, about the futility of the enterprise. In any case, as with Shackleton, against the odds the video does work.

Her other piece is a strange audio map of Dublin based on the locations of discarded audio tapes passed on to her by volunteers. There's the germ of a good idea here but it doesn't quite make it.

Painter Emilie Clark's exploration of the work of 19th century naturalist Mary Ward, who worked in Dublin's Natural History Museum, takes the form of a quirky personal engagement.

It's conducted largely in the form of drawings based on Ward's descriptions of the wonders revealed by the microscope and other materials. What emerges is a sense of passionate involvement with the phenomenal world, and an empathic warmth, though Clark's letters to Ward on the progress of her project come across as relatively self-indulgent.

Javier Tellez's silent film, made with patients at St James' Hospital and based on Swift's Meditation Upon a Broomstick is slow, thoughtful and poignant, as much about the difficulties of living as about the frameworks within which we think about mental illness and well-being.

Wendy Judge's Miles and Miles of Nothing but Miles and Miles is an installation that evokes the vastness of the North American landscape and the lure of destinations within it. But, Judge seems to imply, it could be that these meccas are flattened representations, and can only disappoint.

Contemporary Art from Korea, at the Chester Beatty Library, is a mixed bag. While there is considerable variety in technique and materials among the work of the ten included artists, it seems fair to say that it is for the most part a fairly conservative show. Not in the case of Oum Jeong-soon, whose composite digital prints are certainly among the best things on view. These long panoramic images are tremendously atmospheric visualisations of landscapes seen in transit.

Oum points out that the element of time is central to her work, which does brilliantly convey the experience of space in time. Lee Wal-chong's mostly painted fabric works have a beautiful, crisp, graphic quality.

They are clever, formally rich and light in mood. Koreans have long been adept at the kind of intuitive, informal painting exemplified here by Lee Jong-mok, whose evocation of layered, indeterminate spaces inhabited by both amorphous and more defined, linear forms are sensitively judged.

Kim Chong-hak's spirited Winter is an engaging depiction of birds among bare stems. The image has a quasi-photographic quality and the interesting thing about it is the way the birds can blend almost invisibly into the background. While all of the work included is never less than accomplished, those mentioned here are by far the best things in the show.