Upcoming:
Minhwa in New York

Date: April 30-May 5, 2024
Reception: May 5, Sunday 3-5pm

Laura Manuel Art Exhibit

Date: April 16-28, 2024

Tintinnabulation of Colorful Doubt on a Postmodern Palette

 Manuel, through her masterful manipulation of color, invites us into a realm where the boundaries between perception and emotion blur, and where the canvas becomes a locality for skeptical inquiry. The new show at the Kate Oh Gallery, visible this April on the Upper East Side of New York City, exemplifies her organic yet abstractly challenging oeuvre that carefully asks the question: what is postmodern organic art theory, really?

This is indeed a well-deserved question, for central to Manuel's oeuvre is her ingenious use of color. Each hue, each shade, is fractally imbued with significance beyond its mere visual appeal. Looking closely, though, Manuel's palette is not merely a selection of pigments; physically, as if arriving from a place beyond language, it actually constitutes a language within the matrix of a medium through which she communicates the ineffable.

And it is exactly through this careful application of colors that someone as elusive as Manuel orchestrates a symphony of physical sensations that has the capacity to evoke emotions that transcend the boundaries of the canvas.

Hence, looking at this comprehension of a canvas, we might question whether the notion of "less is more" is itself a construct rooted in subjective preferences and cultural biases. Who is to say that a minimalist approach to color is inherently superior to a more maximalist one? Is it not possible that the richness and complexity of human experience defy such simplistic dichotomies? Only through investigations of a new philosophy can we hope to ever reframe such a doubt. 

This postmodern doubt about color finds expression in another of Manuel's most striking techniques: her manipulation of non-traditional media, evoked from the physicality of the medium itself. In her hands, colors cease to be static entities confined to particular regions of the canvas. Experimenting with materials such as stone, eggshell, silk, and clay, Manuel transcends the traditional boundaries of canvas and pigment, imbuing her works with a tactile and sensory dimension. 

 Precisely through the juxtaposition of these natural elements with acrylic on canvas, Manuel creates a dialogue between the organic and the synthetic, inviting viewers to contemplate the interplay between human intervention and the raw materials of the earth. Each de facto inclusion of stone, eggshell, silk, or clay adds texture and depth to Manuel's compositions, blurring the distinction between two- and three-dimensional space. In this synthesis of materials, Manuel not only expands the aesthetic possibilities of her art but also prompts us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world.

Yet, perhaps the most profound aspect of Manuel's work lies in her ability to demonstrate how less can indeed be more. Despite the apparent simplicity of her compositions, each object offers a complex and multi-layered experience. A single hue, when placed in dialogue with its surroundings, becomes a nexus of meaning and rationality exquisitely made irrational.

It is via this economy of means that Manuel demonstrates the power of a limited palette to open up a world of boundless interpretation and feeling. By eschewing the temptation to overwhelm the senses with a riot of colors, she instead invites us to engage in a more intimate dialogue with her work, and to ponder the bigger questions of our times -- is color actually a maximalist or minimalist construct? In her space of restraint, where each color carries weight and significance, the viewer is granted the freedom to seek answers with their own interpretations and emotive stirrings.

By Art Curation International

Asia Week 2024

Kate Oh Gallery’s Asia Week exhibition evinces an expanse of artists working in novel and traditional modes. Engaging this meeting-point has, over the last decade or so, transpired as that which is distinct to Kate Oh Gallery’s curatorial ambit, each exhibition taking a distinct approach to the meeting of folk art with Modern-cum-Contemporary art (often outside of its Western relegation, speaking to the oft misunderstood tradition of Asian—and, in particular, Korean—Modernism). That is, Kate Oh Gallery illuminates the annals of Asian art history by approaching the contemporary plane obliquely, showing lines of appropriative flight that range from newfound compositions (e.g., the slight lessening of flattened perspective) to Pop Art persuasions in color and line.

On the one hand, the exhibition displays artists like Shin Mi-Kyung, whose command of the Minhwa style speaks to the long-standing tradition of Korean folk-art practice handed down from the Joseon Dynasty. It is here incarnate in its most refined, detailed form. Her piece “About Hope” is a rendition of her “About What Was Lost”, the Grand Prize Recipient from the 2017 National Folk Painting Contest. “About Hope” contains the message of hope to overcome trials and to build a new world. If the work “About What Was Lost” expressed the trials and sorrows that the people and women of the court, who had been usurped by the Japanese during the 500-year history of the Joseon Dynasty, experienced, then “About Hope” represents a time for liberation and is a work that expresses a new Korea. In the “Heavenly Train Field Map”, shown in the foreground of the painting, there is a daesu, which is a hairstyle worn by queens during their wedding ceremonies. This imagery portrays the proud and strong will of Korean ancestors who dreamt of this new hope. The work illustrates Korea through the depiction of the national seal on a red chiljang, which symbolizes the future of the nation. This work is based on the five colors of Korea and expresses the beautiful sadness that was prevalent among the royal family through the usage of a deep red wine color in tandem with gold and silver powders. The dark yet vibrant colors are utilized to convey beauty and hope in the midst of sadness. She has also submitted “Blue Dragon, 12 Months”—fitting, as 2024 is the year of the dragon. The 12 disparate works are bound such that, a fortiori, something of a narrative reveals itself—one spanning moon jars and beryl dragon tails, fogged by twirling clouds and coral erupting peonies. Without foregoing symbolism, the artist also demonstrates a veritable colorism, canvases shaking apricot backgrounds and ice-darted cloud vapor whites, threading through rain-spotted plant greens. The dragon’s tail is the binding agent as our eyes chart across the arrangement of canvases, three rows and four columns, its scale-stippled mass warping and shrouding the folds of each canvas, protruding through pockets of miasma. The lattice of canvases is a formidable achievement, one percipients might spend a good hour viewing.

 Other artists, like, Hyun Joo Cho, also use traditional motifs like the fan and lotus-riven vertical background panels. Here, however, there is a slight ‘updating’ at play—a glimpse of the contemporary, in slight but not all-commanding. “Fan 1”, for instance, is scattered with illusionistic verism in its variegated butterflies and tree-lining birds. The artist evinces the cross-roads of the show’s demonstrate ‘meeting-one’, one foot in tradition and another in neoteric composition. Her background in Minhwa, evinced by a decorated career of accolades (notably, the decorated artist has, since 2017, been awarded a handful of prizes for her folk paintings and calligraphy). It is this background in Minhwa that is still most pronounced in her work, though the layering of motifs admits of the occasional wrapping spandrel, details prodded into dimensionality; it is not full-throated chiaroscuro, but the lifting of elements before and around one another that suggests the kind of movement unique to the Modernist project’s outside import and consequent folk art export. Her other entry “Peony (Okdangbuguido)” symbolizes accumulating wealth in a home. Min Kim has submitted a piece in keeping with the zodiac, titled “Blue Dragon Wins the Powerball”. This piece delineates the rapprochement and artistic trade between Asian visual cultures. The work is visually enthralling, snowflake-blue scales lining the whiskered face of the dragon, whose lotus-clouded roseate body curls across the canvas in spandrels of winding, tortuous design. The work is a perceptual collage of elements and motifs. Compositionally, it makes use of flattening as a layering practice, various elements plotted atop one another in curling fashion. The work would be cluttered were it not for the diversity in stylistic content, which proscribes visual overload.

 Then there is Heather Lim, whose “Peony” is deeply appropriative in style but not content. This is a truly awe-inspiring work and a personal favorite. The piece contains two panels of peonies that are bisected by a vertical line that dispatches two fields of palette. The actions displayed, however, are in continuity throughout the breakages. On the left, azure peonies clang into mixed directions as trickles of deep, ink-black droplets jettison the background into a sea of shadows, the flowering buds directed by twisting jade-green vines. A cascade of animated gold-honey stars suggests the clanging-movement of the plants in growth. Upon close inspection, the viewer notices the buds have been anthropomorphized, eyelashes and puckered lips dotting the bulbs. The flattening effect in “Peony” and the cartoonish, thick outline is reminiscent of Lichtenstein’s Pop and one expects bursting letters reading to spout at any moment. But Lim’s even-handedness, a slight affect, does not admit of such pastiche. Kate Oh Trabulsi’s “In Air (Lotus)” is similarly flat and employs a dust-gray background allayed by vibrant daffodil-yellows, deep blues and ember-blood red lotus flowers. With this piece, the paneling is more traditional, speaking to Oh’s homage to the folk-art tradition—one in keeping with the decorative arts and Chaekgeori screensit. This work received the Special Recognition Award in the “Botanicals Art Exhibition” at the Light, Space, & Time online art gallery. In contiguity with Lim’s contribution, “In Air (Lotus)” shows that the use of paneling as such is being wielded not as a simply Pop Art prop or relic but handled keeping with an internal history.

 As part of the exhibition, the gallery will also be screening a documentary film, “Mama and Magga”, concerning a Buddhist monastic devotee who, after a period of 40 years, reunites with his mother. The two trek to Korean temples across the countryside by foot and a “Migosa” camper van. The elderly mother and son travel throughout the seasons, passage captured by riveting cinematography of the changing seasons. The tender film shows the monk carrying his elderly mother on his back, scaling towers and plains, while she prepares for her final passage on various sites. The film will be screened in March at the inaugural Buddhism and Social-Spiritual Liberation Conference at Harvard’s Divinity School, which will underscores the documentary’s relationship to endogenous conceptions of liberation and freedom in Buddhism. Monk Magga will also join audiences for a lecture during the course of the Asia Week exhibition at Kate Oh. The choice to pair this reverent figure, marked by his unceasing resilience and anti-Modern thrust, with the aforementioned works, is apt. It speaks to the matching of the resilience of traditions in the face of modernism, which Kate Oh continues to plough with discernible sensitivity. In doing so, the gallery and Asia week exhibition analyze a kind of dialectical history of folk art that descries modernity while being neither freighted by it nor rejecting it outright. Such is the valuable rapprochement that Kate Oh has brought to bear with this exhibition.

 by Ekin Erkan Ph.D

“Royal Celadons”

Exhibition Date: January 6 - March 14, 2024
By appointment only from February 9 - March 14
RSVP at info@kateohgallery.com or (646) 286-4575

https://www.meer.com/en/77588-kim-se-yong-celadon-conventions

Kate Oh Gallery - video credit to creativeAgroup

HeizleLand

December 19, 2023 - January 5, 2024

Artist Statement

Every person holds a spectrum of colors in their hearts. Within our hearts, countless versions of ourselves continue to grow and try to come out and show themselves.
Although we perceive ourselves as one being, there are still times when I question what my true self really looks like. Could it be because of the multiple versions of myself that are within me?

Some versions of myself are already flourishing in the outside world, and some are hidden away, curled in the corner of my heart - afraid to come out. I believe it is our duty in this life to work towards creating an environment where the aspects of ourselves that we hide away can bravely show themselves to the world. Every person is precious, so let’s endlessly encourage our expression and love each part of us.

We are more resilient than we think we are, so let’s love and nurture our beings in their entirety. I welcome those of you who have come to HeizleLand! I hope you can see and feel our beautiful selves and their infinite possibilities within my works.

- Heizle

On Heizle’s new exhibit at the Kate Oh Gallery

T. Alexander and Liu Xin

The dichotomy between the heart, symbolizing the core essence or "self," and the butterfly, embodying the various facets of the ego, have each individually resonated with various cultures throughout history. But in a vivid spectrum of colors, Heizle's introspective journey hosted by the Kate Oh Gallery on New York City's Upper East Side navigates the complex terrain of conjoined identity, prompting dazzling questions about the nature of the self and the multiplicity of egos within.

Drawing inspiration from world philosophy, Heizle grapples with the notion of facticity, recognizing that our lived experiences, choices, and the myriad egos residing within us contribute to the complexity of our being. The existential questioning of a singular, unified self gives way to an exploration of the diverse identities that shape our thoughts and actions.

What is the key to Heizle’s dreamland of luxuriant brushwork? The key lies in the artist's statement, which echoes Gilles Deleuze's ontology, suggesting that our essence may be the sum of the multitude of egos vying for expression. This multiplicity within the self raises fundamental questions about the nature of identity, consciousness, and the boundaries of the individual. It suggests that the self is not a fixed and immutable entity but a dynamic interplay of shifting personas, responding to the diverse circumstances and contexts encountered in the external world.

This exhibit is a dive into the tension between unity and diversity. While the spectrum of colors within the heart signifies the richness of individual experience, the challenge lies in reconciling these diverse egos into a coherent and harmonious sense of self. The slow process of integration becomes a crucial aspect of self-discovery and personal growth, as one endeavors to navigate the complexities of internal multiplicity.

Heizle states that her paintings evoke the feeling of "Curled in the corner of my heart - afraid to come out,". Yet she is not timid to reveal aspects of ourselves that remain concealed, restrained by a fear of vulnerability. The assertion that it is our duty in this life to foster an environment where these hidden aspects can courageously manifest in the external world underscores a commitment to authenticity and self-discovery. This duty implies a responsibility to concoct a space where the richness of our internal world can unfold without fear or inhibition, allowing for a more genuine and unfiltered expression of self.

Heizle’s chatoyant acknowledgment of this multitude of egos invites a philosophical reflection on the nature of identity. It beckons the viewer to embrace the intricate dance of internal diversity, recognizing that the self is an evolving composition, painted with the myriad hues of varied perspectives. Every body, unique in its own way, contributes to the complexity. By nurturing self-esteem, the artist recognizes their inherent worth and individuality, espousing the truth that every person has value, and through Heizle's dancing lines and uplifting hues there's a call to cultivate self-love by consistently recreating oneself. Though there are highs and lows, these experiences are crucial to the artist's evolving identity.

“Symphony of Opulence”
by Marko Stout

Dates: November 5-15, 2023

"SYMPHONY OF OPULENCE"

Welcome to the splendid world of Marko Stout's "Symphony of Opulence," where art, luxury, and contemporary society entwine in a resplendent celebration of human desire and creativity. 

 In the splendid intersection of art and luxury, we find ourselves on the cusp of an extraordinary artistic revelation—Marko Stout's "Symphony of Opulence." This exhibition, meticulously curated and set against the backdrop of contemporary society, offers a visual symphony that resounds with the harmonious fusion of opulence and creative ingenuity. Stout, a virtuoso of the modern era, artfully weaves together elements from the realms of luxury fashion, classic art, modernity, and even the provocative allure of eroticism.

 In "Symphony of Opulence," Stout has masterfully harnessed the pulsating energy of our contemporary society, transforming it into a series of resounding notes in a grand artistic composition. His pieces, like eloquent solos in this opulent orchestra, are an ode to the extravagant desires that define our modern existence. They challenge us to embrace luxury not as an aspiration, but as a language of expression—a reflection of our society's ceaseless yearning for the finest, the rarest, and the most exquisite.

Within the opulent frames of Stout's work, we encounter an eclectic fusion of influences. Elements borrowed from luxury fashion intermingle with the timeless elegance of classic art, creating a unique dialect that speaks to the contemporary soul. Bold strokes of modernity infuse each piece, providing a dynamic and ever-evolving commentary on our rapidly changing world. And in the most provocative of twists, Stout dares to explore the boundaries of eroticism, inviting us to contemplate the human form as both an artistic canvas and a symbol of desire.

Marko Stout's "Symphony of Opulence" is more than an exhibition; it's a living, breathing testament to the intersection of luxury and contemporary society. It resonates with the vibrancy of life's opulent facets, inviting us to delve deeper into the complexities of our desires and the seductive allure of artistic expression. As we immerse ourselves in this opulent symphony, we bear witness to a celebration of boundless creativity, an exploration of the profound connections between art and luxury, and a reminder that within the most extravagant moments, true inspiration thrives.

“Hoary Reverie”
by Han Kiok

Dates: October 28 - November 4, 2023
Gallery Talk with Karen Lee

”Voicing Invisible Women”

by Angels Grau

October 3 - 22, 2023

The Pure Beauty of Indivisibility 

 Angels Grau, a talented Catalan artist known for her thought-provoking and socially conscious artworks, is set to unveil her highly anticipated exhibition, "Voicing Invisible Women," at the prestigious Kate Oh Gallery on Madison Avenue. This exhibition marks a significant moment in Grau's career as she delves into the multifaceted narratives of women whose voices have been marginalized or silenced by society.

"Voicing Invisible Women" is a deeply resonant and poignant exploration of the stories, struggles, and resilience of women who have been relegated to the shadows of history and society. Through a series of visually stunning and emotionally charged artworks, Grau amplifies the voices of women whose narratives have been suppressed or overlooked. The exhibition promises to draw viewers into the lives of these often-unheard women and encourages them to reflect on the injustices they have faced.

The Kate Oh Gallery is the perfect backdrop for Grau's exhibition. The gallery's commitment to showcasing avant-garde and socially conscious art aligns seamlessly with the artist's vision. The collaboration between Angels Grau and Kate Oh Gallery is the second in less than a year and signifies the convergence of artistic excellence and a commitment to social change, offering art enthusiasts an opportunity to engage with thought-provoking art that challenges preconceptions and inspires dialogue. At all times, the gallery's walls resonate with narratives that question the status quo and offer viewers a chance to engage with incendiary-beautiful art that transcends traditional boundaries. 
Hailing from Catalonia, Grau is a prominent artist with a career spanning over decades. Her ability to evoke empathy through her craft is a testament to her talent and the power of visual storytelling. As viewers step into the Kate Oh Gallery, they will embark on a journey of enlightenment, challenging them to recognize the importance of giving voice to the silent struggles of women across the ages.

Grau's powerful and evocative art offers you a platform to hear the voices of those who have been marginalized and overlooked. Angel's work, like a strike of lightning from God, shall continue to be a beacon of hope and bring change to you, transcending boundaries and inspiring meaningful conversations about the issues that shape your worldview.

by B. Alexander, PhD

Some of her pieces are part of the personal art collections of different CEO’s of fortune 100 companies. Patrons include the Pepsico Foundation. Roseann Proseer, PepsiCo Collections Fine Art Curator has said: “We are honored at PepsiCo to have one of Angels Grau’s paintings, “Invisible Women,”  hanging in our headquarters; the work evokes feelings for all strong women that make life, family and love happen.” Angels Grau has been exhibited in Barcelona, Greenwich and at the Consulate General of Brazil in New York. 

“The Lyricism of Organic Tradition”

by Kim Gyoungmin

August 24 - September 30, 2023

“The Lyricism of Organic Tradition”

by Kwon Chigyu

August 24 - September 30, 2023

“Stone Wave”

by Jung Kwangsik
July 16 - August 19, 2023

A Music of Organicity
Review of “Stone Wave” at Kate Oh Gallery
B Alexander, PhD

Within the realm of high artistic expression, the enigmatic painter Kwangsik Jung emerges as a lyrical poet whose creative endeavors transcend the conventional boundaries of perception and reality. In a mesmerizing art show titled "Stone Wave," Jung unveils a transformative gallery of work that beckons viewers to embark upon a physical journey, echoing Marshall McLuhan's prophetic words that "the medium is the message." Through the masterful recontextualization of nature's ephemeral objects, Jung creates a visual symphony where stones metamorphose into canvases that resonate with profound tactility.

And yet, in the mind of this viewer, appeal of this show comes not only from the intellectual but even more profoundly the personal. If you embark upon a sonic exploration of Jung's works, you have signed up for a flight through the ethereal corridors of oscillations, guided by the language of music. This is what captivated my experience at the gallery. Like a skilled conductor and alchemist, Jung seamlessly intertwines the strands of hedonistic environmentalism and the philosophical concept of "yes is more" to weave a musical tapestry of unparalleled organicity.

The slogan "yes is more" was first proposed by the lauded Danish architect Bjarke Ingels only in the 21st century, and represents a welcome departure from the mantra of postmodernism. It advocates for a profound understanding of context of the environment. When applied to Kwangsik Jung's captivating art exhibition, "Stone Wave," the philosophy of "yes is more" takes on a planetary resonance. Jung's deliberate choice to focus on the "cut-outs" of nature and transfigure them into stone aligns with the minimalist and contextually sensitive approach advocated by the architectural concept. By distilling the essence of grassy meadows and coastal landscapes into stone sculptures, Jung eschews excessive detail, opting instead for a distilled representation that invites contemplation. In the absence of superfluous elements, the viewer is compelled to focus on the elemental beauty of the forms, their textures, and the interplay of light and shadow.

Moreover, "yes is more" resonates with the transformative nature of stone itself. Stone, with its enduring presence and timeless quality, exemplifies the essence of simplicity and longevity. Jung's meticulous chiseling echoes the architectural principle of purposeful intervention, where each stroke serves a deliberate function, creating a visual narrative that transcends the materiality of the medium. By embracing the inherent characteristics of material, Jung's art highlights the beauty found in the interplay of positive and negative spaces, the textures that emerge from the surfaces, and the subtle nuances of form.

Now, under detailed observation, some paintings are more elusive than others, and some are more requiring of the effort of the perceptive viewer, but in all of them the ethereal melodies crafted by Jung, akin to the delicate petals of a blossoming flower, evoke an immersive experience that resonates like emerald tendrils caressed by the gentle breeze, immersing the listener in a world of pleasure and environmental consciousness. It is a celebration of life's abundant joys, a sonorous testament to the belief that true happiness is intricately intertwined with the well-being of our planet.

The show succeeds on even a higher level: It features the celebrated pianist Marina Goryacheva in a celestial performance of Chopin. This unites the art, the space, and the ambiance into a nourishing symphonic delight. Thus, just as a seed unfurls its delicate leaves towards the saving sunlight, the music of Stone Wave unfolds, revealing the interconnectedness of all things. It serves as a clarion call, urging humanity to embrace a more profound connection with nature, to revel in the sensual pleasures offered by the world around us. It is an invitation to dance amidst the composition of existence, celebrating the intricate rhythms and harmonies that unite us all. Through this exhibition, an artist and activist beckons us to listen, to truly hear, and to partake in a song that celebrates life's abundant pleasures while caring for our intrinsic connection to the world around us.

Kimono Celebration
by Mayuko Okada

“KIMONO REBORN” by Mayuko Okada

Exhibition Dates: May 30- June 23rd, 2023

Statement

My name is Mayuko, and I am an artist who creates art pieces using antique kimonos. I am fascinated by the beautiful fabrics and patterns of kimonos, and I take pleasure in giving them new life and bringing out their beauty. My inspiration to use kimonos came from the many kimonos left behind by my great-grandmother, who was a master of Japanese tailoring, and my grandmother, who was a shopping enthusiast. My grandmother cherished kimonos and passed on their beauty to me. While some of the kimonos I inherited were too damaged to wear, I decided to turn them into art pieces. Antique kimonos have beautiful fabrics and patterns, as well as woven stories and histories. I pay respect to these materials and strive to create unique art pieces that showcase the charm of authentic kimonos to a wider audience. I am delighted that my art pieces have gained support from many people and demand for them as interior items are increasing. I hope that my work not only passes on the beauty of kimonos as cultural heritage to the future but also becomes loved by people.

Kate Oh Gallery, 31 East 72nd Street (Madison-Park) (11am-6pm)
Mague Brewer is a tactile painter who achieves the quality of tactility through color value. It is this manipulation of color value that Mague wholeheartedly lays claim to, twisting and mending it along two pursuits: one sharp and realist, the other clouded and abstract.
Gallery Talk: 12pm, 2pm & 4pm: Mague Brewer will provide a narrative of the works that she is exhibiting and how she has imbued her experiences into them. There will be an opportunity to converse with the artist and ask questions about her art process and inspiration.

Mague Brewer's Greenbergian Odyssey: A Modern Tribute to Medium and Perception

-Alexander, Ph.D.

 "Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." 

– Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting" (1961)

Now, should you find yourself at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 31E 72nd Street this week, a visit to the Kate Oh Gallery will plunge you into Mague Brewer's vivid tableau – an odyssey brimming with color and form. In an intimate exhibition space on the floor, these canvases throb with vitality, whilst their abstract contours and strokes weave a visual dialect that communicates directly with the senses, which are more than fitting for the title of this show: Tactile Effects. Hence, as one navigates through Brewer's physical creations, it shall be impossible to overlook the heartfelt invitation to touch the very medium of painting that lies at the heart of her creations.

 Clement Greenberg, a towering figure in the world of art criticism and an ardent advocate of Modernism, once opined, "the essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." Brewer's latest works subtly embody this philosophy, employing a diverse arsenal of techniques that probe the core essence of painting, while simultaneously emphasizing its intrinsic qualities—flatness, color, and the canvas's rectangular shape.

 In the exhibit, which will be on view for only a few weeks, Brewer's application of paint appears as a celebration of the materiality of her chosen medium. The symphony of color, traversing the spectrum from azure-topaz blues to cerulean greens, engenders a phenomenological experience in the viewer, inciting a depth of feeling rather than a mere visual perception. So, remember this: Instead of jarring the viewer's experience, these elements serve to enrich it. These components hum with life, their irregular shapes resonating against the canvas, coaxing the viewer into a realm of perceptual riddles.

 Greenberg asserted, rather presciently, that "the task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art." Brewer's work is a luminous testament to this principle. Her paintings, whether they skew towards the abstract or the figurative, and often pendulating between the two like a gyroscopic experiment, are wholly self-referential. They refrain from imitation or borrowing from other mediums, instead, they exalt in the inherent qualities of painting’s surface.

 Brewer's chief contribution resides in her ability to manipulate color to evoke a tactile sensation. This aspect of her work aligns seamlessly with Greenbergian principles. It ought to be pointed out that the critic once noted, "Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine oneself walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." Brewer's works ensnare the viewer, their colors and forms initiating a visual journey of exploration.

 Among the intimate works on view at the Kate Oh Gallery, the works “Dunstable” and “We All Deserve Our Own Garden,” specifically, constitute typical testaments to her growth as an artist, embodying in a lyrical way the principles of Modernism and Greenberg's theories. Indeed, her quintessential ability to manipulate color to create a sense of tactility and depth adheres to the Modernist notion that the illusion created by the artist is one that the viewer can only travel through with the eye.

 Mague Brewer's art is a vibrant homage to painting, a colorful expedition through form and hue that both challenges and enthralls the viewer. Her work stands as a quiet witness to the potency of her chosen medium, as if resulting in a nautical exploration of the inherent qualities of Modernism itself. To both the novice and the connoisseur, her artistic journey, spanning continents and decades, is an adventure. From her birthplace in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to her artistic awakening in Russia, to her stylistic evolution in London and New York, Brewer's work is imbued with a richness and complexity that invites exploration. 

“Tactile Effects” by Mague Brewer
Date: May 16 - 27, 2023

In works like The Card (El Cordon De Plata) and Whenever and Wherever, Mague Brewer is at her most effective—suggesting uneven horizontal and vertical constituents of the pictureplane that bleed and float. The act of suggestion, not pointing, is here more pronounced than those works where straightforward silhouettes come to the fore (e.g., Brewer's outlines of overlapped faces or straightforward orbular eyes with penetrating gazes). In her more abstract works, Brewer becomes something of a dramatist-cum-field-painter, the shape of doors-without-knobs and windows-without-locks-and-lifts contiguous with their monochrome foreground (e.g., a bleary azure-topaz blue or cerulean green). There are then Newman-esque "zips", painted distinctly and sometimes hunched above one another, which takes the suggestion-game to new territory; this is now the domain of perspectival evanescence: a residual plane into which a cascade of elements are ushered and absorbed like quivering magnets. These “zips” are sometimes sun-strained hay-yellow but are far more gestural than the mathematical sublime of Newman’s zips, the latter having retained a geometrical perfection that interrupts our viewing experience-intake; Brewer’s seem to throb and coax our phenomenological endeavor, rather than erupt it. They are uneven, quite unlike frame of the carved geometrical figure. All of this quivering suggests a world outside of the furniture of objects—those that can be readily placed, prodded, and arranged. Brewer’s abstractions occupy the realm of perceptual enigmas, quasi-objects intuited rather than reified in terms of a specific or generalized landscape.

With Brewer’s abstractions, we are held in abeyance such that the materiality of the linen canvas bubbles and brews. In works like Everything Is Possible, The Impossible Just Takes Longer, these figures take a step, but just a step, towards the literal-figurative: a blue-slivered shape stretches into a narrow circle while a towering onyx vertical line overcasts along stage-right. In Wherever and Whenever, the vertical towers are turned ninety degrees and primed into ten hoary-tipped lines which fade into a dot. This is an act of directing the stage into perspectival fading. One can readily see how parcels of sheen-slated white reflect like the sun flitting over glossed paper or glass; but this slating-effect occurs in horizontal and vertical stripes that also prime the viewer to the canvas at hand. The hatched lattices of the linen compliment the vertical-and-horizontal ambiguous blocks that I have so suggested as doors-without-knobs and windows-without-locks; one need not pursue the Jungian symbolism here, just the canonization of experience.

 That is Brewer's great modernist move, looking backwards at Greenbergian considerations of the canvas-as-object, of that which is intrinsic to painting as such. This is somewhat an anachronistic pursuit—especially so if we consider the putative post-historical era of art inaugurated by Dadaists like Duchamp but reaching its apotheosis with Warhol, where the Romantic-cum-post-modernist conceit of the verbal-discursive idea of art had overtaken the endeavor of perceptually discernibles. Many of Brewer’s paintings usher us back into the domain of medium-specificity, especially whence we forego the figurative. In works like We All Deserve Our Own Garden, the perspectival shifts found in the more abstract pieces are concretized into ultramarine planes mooring a flower-dotted fencepost; the fence guards that which is merely possible (and thus the evanescent is re-introduced through negativity—i.e., that which is not shown). In both the figurative and abstract works, everything so posited seems to dance in relation to one another. The dreamscape miasma feels too easy an anchor, and there is something much more formal at play here; like the Abstract Expressionists of yore, the Surrealist inclination is here rejected though parcels of Matta-esque automatism are retained. It is in Brewer's color that her illusory method reaches its great tactile effect. Instead of the graying of color that recedes into the distance—which, in his unfinished manuscript, The Artist's Reality (discovered among his papers in 1988), Rothko identified with the "illusory painters"—Brewer is a tactile painter who achieves the quality of tactility through color value. It is this manipulation of color value that Brewer wholeheartedly lays claim to, twisting and mending it along two pursuits: one sharp and realist, the other clouded and abstract.

 -By Ekin Erkan

About Show

Minhwa ainting has a history that can be traced as far back as the Josen Dynasty (1392-1910 AD). Minhwa painting reflects the daily lives, custom, styles, and spirits of poeple regardless of culture or nationality. It is unexpectedly modern in its freedom and self-conciousness. The variety of expressions in portraying thought, wishes and emotions, in Minhwa is very much in line with the agenda of contemporary art that we see today.

Minhwa works typically include Flowers and Birds symbolizing fmily harmony, Peonies for wealth and honor, Scholar’s Bookshelves and Stationery for enlightenment and wisdom, and Fruits and Vegetables for fertility and blessing. The diverse range of content in Minhwa is evident in this exhibition. 

The Korean folk painting class at Rutgers University will hold an exhibition at the KATE OH GALLERY from May 2nd-7th, 2023. This exhibit will feature work from 21 students as well as 10 famous folk painters invited by Su Young Lim, vice president of the International Exchange Team of the Korean Folk Painting Association. These artists will present alongside 4 New York local Minhwa artists: Kate Oh, Hyunjoo Cho, Min Kim, and Hyunmee Kim. With that, a total of 35 talented artists will be featured in this vibrant show.  This exhibition will serve as an opportunity to experience Korean culture and introduce Korean folk paintings to the public.

Rinaldo Skalamera

Exhibition Dates: April 16 - 30th, 2023

The Complex Blues of Rinaldo Skalamera

Croatian painter Rinaldo Skalamera’s new exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery features boats buoyed in the expanse of azure water. What one immediately notices is that these boats are devoid of boaters. At times, they float and in others are thoroughly moored to an idle dock. Yet the hands and arms that so posited them here are nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, this absence is not ghostly or harrowing but has a pleasant affect; there is a swathing placidity to the works. Skalamera paints with great detail and is a dyed-in-the-wool realist—these are pristine boats, well-attended to, cleanly coated, and waxed bright, all of which suggests the laborers and seamen. Are they simply outside the bounds of the canvas or is this a world of pure objects? This question has no answer, it rings adrift like the painted pooling ripples.

One gets the sense that if there were cracks and blemishes in the skiff boats’ carrot-brown wood, Skalamera could easily paint them. It seems, thus, to be an intentional choice to give us well-attended boats sans attendees. So strikes the curiosity of Skalamera’s unfilled nautical narratives. One can enjoy gazing out at these boats, admiring their construction, scanning the artifice of the skiff’s shoulder and forefoot, garnering their proximity to their man-made and natural surroundings. Skalamera is a truly impressive painter, a craftsman of the eye whose adroitness forms a parallel with that of the boats’ shipwrights.

This is not the realism of social realism, neither of the Soviet nor Ben Shahn stripe. Nor is Skalamera’s realism a kindred spirit to the tradition of academic painting. Although these are realist works that belie their medium-specificity, hiding brushstrokes a-wash, they are also not the photorealism of Richard Estes. Skalamera is closer to the conventions of landscape painting, especially that of Patenier and his Flemish Renaissance landscapes; but where the latter uses landscape to dwarf his figures, Skalamera is not prone to such diminishing-effects. We view the boats and neighboring landscape from a closer gaze, and, by dint of our perspective, there is an equalizing nature to his proportions.

I do not mean to suggest, however, that Skalamera is altogether alienated from the photorealist tradition—indeed, there are tinges of photorealism and photorealist motifs in his paintings. One such rapprochement between Estes and Skalamera is disclosed by the use of reflection, evinced by Estes' Telephone Booths (1967) and the reflecting gleam of the sun in Skalamera's Seashore Reflection. But, contra Estes, Skalamera has nothing to do with urbanity and its complex, wrapping structures that foreclose and reveal—there is little layered upon one-another in Skalamera’s paintings. On the contrary, Skalamera’s reflections reveal instead of hiding; in Seashore Reflection, Skalamera’s reflecting rectangular parcel of water allows us to view that which is hidden from our direct view: an hoary stone building topped with a careening tower, fitted with two blank windows. Such glances are often the sole gestures we are permitted towards any geographically specific local. But they are also sufficient. These are landscapes of Istra, Croatia, a peninsula famous for its Roman Amphitheatre and ruins, as well as Ostrogoth and Venetian relics. Having spent a great deal of time in this architecturally rich city, it is sensible that Skalamera threads, manipulates, and guides space into a series of ebbing nodes. Skalamera is not only a skilled technical painter but also an apt architect of the gaze’s movement—there is a striking sense of balance in these paintings. The works are never too spare and cold, never too huddled with a crowd of rowboats. The pictureplane’s fitting is the precise impetus to Skalamera’s quietude, where rocky crags peak and frame a lone, wafting sailboat. These are ambient painting where our perception is gingerly ushered, conducted by a season maestro whose directing arm slopes a well-practiced shape.

The theme of boats has a rich history, especially amongst post-impressionists like Cézanne and Signac's—but in both the latter’s Antibes (1917) and the former’s 1897 watercolor-and-pencil Coin Du Lac D’Annecy, the bodies of water are merely indicated—via negative space—not filled in. The sun-stroked reflections against the water are notoriously missing from such paintings. Skalamera, in addition to being stylistically disparate from the post-impressionists’ bleary looseness, fills in his brine-bitten tides with cascading, complex blues. Hills and undulating clouds sometimes roll in the background, semi-translucent, but the water is employed to shepherd us along. Even in Skalamera’s Marine Reef, where there is an infinite expanse unbrooked by clouds, hills, mountains, or a cross-water meadow, Skalamera does not etherealize our gaze with negative space. It would be easy to make the cast the sea into a monotonous deep indigo here. Instead, Skalamera liquifies it with a riding cast of torrenting blues, lapis lazuli-like in their deepest pits and grey-beryl in their more shallow sandy pockets. Skalamera’s blues trample over Hockney-like uniformity, turquoise and cerulean mending sun-stroke-bitten fractals like a washed-over, rain-trodden mirror. Skalamera undoubtedly draws from a complex art history riddled with boats, seas, and lakes, but his approach is wholly singular.

by Ekin Erkan

Callie Danae Hirsch

Exhibition: April 4th 15th, 2023

 Callie Hirsch’s Soft Submergence

The title of "Submergence", Callie Hirsch's new exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery, is a nod to the exhibition’s ecological theme. The pieces are semi-figurative, ocean washes and cascading briny alkaline glazes pooling over jetting squids, careening dotted fish, and the white, hoary spindles of shrimp. The paintings are semi-abstract and suggest labyrinthine picture-plans dotted with configurations similar to that of Roberto Matta’s psychological morphologies. In a sense, Hirsch’s pieces are morphologies as well. Dizzying repeated linealities and splatches of azure, mossy rock-bed and the orange threads of a wafting reef only become pellucid after the viewer has spent time with these paintings. These paintings do not reveal themselves immediately, they demand protracted viewing.

Pieces like Submergence II are arranged by an expanse of oceanic elements linking into another like a chain. A circumscribed center includes coral-peach orange parcels bordering white, creature-like dripping figures; fluxing motion is suggested by the unspooling circling of elements but there is no single figure we can pick out and easily name. Rather, this is a sea of suggestion—leafy beryl and aquamarine posits beside yellow, percolating oozes push and fade. Upon reflection, one finds Hirsch’s suggestions taking direction: wrapped seaweed, pushed by the tides into a whirlpool, the orange-white-black strippings taking the form of a clownfish.

Hirsch’s paintings engage with the emergence of the sea from a bleary-eyed cast of near-abstractions to a prismatic world in motion. Works like Submergence IV immediately remind me, at least stylistically speaking, of Gorky’s 1944 The Liver is the Cock's Comb, where suggestion again is the bridge between real-world elements and feverish abstractions. There is a kind of filling-in left to the duty of the viewer.

Art historians like Pepe Karmel have demonstrated that so-called “non-objective abstraction” always relies upon a figurative grounding for viewers to make sense of the works. That is, even the most aleatory abstraction that finds the artists drawing no inspiration at all from the empirical world still demands of the viewer some kind of sensory engagement with representational indices. For us to even take up the mantle of pre-conceptually receiving an artwork of darted splatches means we inferentially make sense of a rectangular element as not-circle-like, for instance; so begins the inferentially articulated process of likening a towering series of gestures into a totemic figure, for example. This need not be a conscious reflective process but it is nevertheless the supporting structure behind any kind of rudimentary understanding of the most abstract of abstractions. Nevertheless, such operations are performed along a spectrum of real-world contact and Hirsch’s devices are situated somewhere along the center. Alabaster whiskers usher us into more easily detecting crustaceans; a pool of inky vacuuming blankness pushes us towards the aforementioned jetting squid. Hirsch makes inventive and economical use of such figurative ciphers, a testament to her prudence as a nautical painter.

In her artist statement, Hirsch quotes Jane Goodall’s asservation that we ought to “develop respect for all living things…[replacing] violence and intolerance with understanding and compassion.” One might thus read these as activist paintings but they are subtle enough to advocate preservation without handwaving or performing more than they can make good on. Where art and protest overplay the individual’s responsibility, contra the structural (e.g., the responsibilities of corporations, governments, and legislative bodies), we are imputed with a kind of “weak resistance” the likes of recycling, veganism, and/or a minimalist lifestyle. These are all morally righteous choices but they are undoubtedly not enough to curb omnicide vis-à-vis environmental catastrophe. Hirsch’s work does not lay claim to a new mode of solving impending crises; rather, guided by the hand of suggestion, they present oceanic scenographies as a series of “publics.” These are soft, lurching environmental paintings perhaps best poised within a genealogy including figures like Ana Mendieta and Deborah Wasserman, both of whom engage the affective carnality of our environs. Hirsch does not show the ocean in toil or violently uncast; rather, she gives us dizzying motion, softly—but clearly—speaking to the seas and their inhabitants’ fleeting nature.

by Ekin Erkan

“Collect Brazilian Jewelry”

Brazilian Handmade Jewelry

Exhibition Date: March 16 - April 1, 2023

“New York K-Art Festival”

Exhibition Date: March 4-12, 2023

Kate Oh’s New York K-Art Festival:
A Trek Through Styles and Subjects

by Ekin Erkan

From March 4 – 12, 2023, Kate Oh Gallery will be hosting the New York K-Art Festival, with the opening reception on Saturday, March 4, from 2:00 – 5:00 PM. The show features approximately thirty small-scale works, each of which is priced very affordably. Curated in salon-style and galvanizing the participatory ethos of venerable historical salons like those held by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, the participating artists—each of which is showing one painting—work in varied styles, themes, and media. There will also be something akin to a performing arts talent show on the night of the opening, with the artists taking the role of singers, dancers, and the like, showcasing their non-painting/visual art skills.

The sheer diversity of styles is notable. But if there is a running theme, it is the influence and appropriation of traditional Korean modes like minhwa. Some artists, like Agnes Woo, give us directly representational/figurative works—Woo’s doe-eyed golden retriever almost seems to beam at us. In their jaws, however, are three tuffets (green, marron, and coral), pointers to dancheong and thus alerting us to the traditional line of influence at play. At times, like with Haengja Kim’s Morando, this genealogy of traditional influence is also rooted in the media (in this case it is hanji paper), an apt background to the unfurling lotuses fitted with bright, ravishing colors.

Surrealist reverie enters with Haeyoung Yoon’s Chak, an assembly of vases and furniture figuring as elements of the object study—that is, until we notice the peacock feathers which double as protruding, all-seeing eyes. Min Kim takes up the still life genre, showing the dexterity of a masterful artist who are able to use pocketed space to flaunt virtuosic command over their objects, arrangements, and use of perspective (to say nothing of the rich symbolism). Hee Ju Kim’s Rose and Nan Ho Lee’s Spring, with their impressionist watercolors and verdant pedals, figure in the genre painting mode as well, as does Heesook Moon’s quiet, calming Iris. Kwangsik Sohn's Goldfish, which uses hanji and oriental ink, gives us a flaxen flock of fluttering wings drifting across a placid body of water—impressionistic yet again, but in a completely distinct persuasion. Gwi Deok Lee’s Chochungdo is another example of a traditional work, each butterfly and insect circling the towering bushel rife with metaphor; notably, Chochungdo paintings conventionally feature flowers and insects, notable for their delicate touch, centered compositions, and graceful use of colors. Lee invites us to peer inside of her timeless garden.

 Despite the size constraints, a number of pieces truly stand out in how they toy with the picture-plane’s limits—one particular work of note is Eunchong Kim’s Woman clothed with stars, where the eponymous, fuchsia-haired woman’s face crowns a gargantuan, bulbous body lattice-crossed in a glistening azure dress. The armory of flowers making her bed exude an earthly serenity. Kyongmo Lee’s Aesthetics of the year tethers together a number of glossy, globular stones, ripples of hoary grey and fleshy green floating on an crinkled expanse, ever-ethereal.

The aforementioned pieces are almost entirely within the figurative purview, which altogether erupts with Kyung Hoon Min’s Here I Am, a Hans Hoffman-esque panel of cyan cracked by blushes of crimson and speckles of coal-black, whilst reams of tangerine burst. It is a welcome change in style. Kate Oh’s piece, similarly abstract, features a deep wading pool of light blue and navy swellings, ripples and darts of grassy lush green and salmon topping it; one can easily lose themselves in these textures. So, too, is Mi Ju’s contribution, which is an altogether playful, kaleidoscopic abstraction fitted with greenery and puzzle-like pieces set together; the work confounds our perception as what appears to be minute eyeballs dart and drift, an orange rocky mound growing, swelling and swirling into a multitude of parcels. Such bits rotate and slip in Sungwon Yun’s Time in between, graphite and pen charting bubble-like holes—a sulfurous river, crashing and pulling. Though perhaps there is no cleft so unexpected and conclusive as Open Door by In Young Park, a brilliant shimmering panel—rectangular and warped—giving us a kind of autonomy that plays on the Donald Judd classics.

The visual cue most often returned to is the floral—specifically, the iris, the crowning jewel of Micha Yu’s Iris II, with four flaming cardinal flowers still in the air, petals a-roar. The same floral theme is in Mija Lim’s Hope, where the flush roseate background flower is, upon inspection, revealed to, itself, be made up of a teeming waft of flowers. Sungsook Hong’s Wild Midwest relocates the untouched stretch of nature into a snow-bed, hills folded between careening winds.

Following the history of great 20th century artists who have keenly drawn us towards the sensitivity of the canvas and its material linealities, Mi Kyoung Yun’s Queen of Hearts tenderly applies light acrylic on her canvas, the flower-tufts of hair turning and spooling into bundles. We can see the canvas’ own ripples, an effect of the airy, ginger use of paint. Sooyeong Chang’s Three Princesses, a masterful terra cotta, gives us the triad formation of Cranach’s The Judgment of Paris and Three Graces, appropriating the mythic. The sole work of photography, SuJung Jo’s Daydream, guides the aesthetics of banality into a cold, almost harrowing act of voyeurism, recalling the quiet observing eye of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. There are mixed-media works and fashion items in the show as well, such as Heemin Moon’s red & black dogs, both whimsical, functional items.

There is, indeed, truly something for every stripe of collector in this exhibition. The drifts and ruptures in style guarantee this, as do the sensitive price points. Kate Oh has produced a genuine curatorial tour-de-force.

About the Critic:
Ekin Erkan, PhD is a researcher in art history, where his primary areas of study are contemporary installation art, photography, and American & European modern art. He works as an art critic for several publications and as an art history researcher. He has been published in both academic and popular venues, with over 50 peer-reviewed articles, and has spoken at dozens of academic conferences.

“Flow”

by Insoo Chun

Exhibition Dates: February 19 - March 3, 2023

Letters of Intimate Import
Review of Insoo Chun's lacquer paintings

by B. Alexander, PhD

The bright red is festive yet not obstructive; a yellow is like a harvest that brims with autumn wind, filled to the outer edges of the canvas; the black is reticent, reserved as if taken out of a letter full of history, speaking of dreams and insouciant depth. These are the fitting descriptions of the colors found in Insoo Chun's lacquer paintings. In fact, to the trained eye, the colors are all like dreams which have both occurred a long time ago and are yet to come; they speak with gentle whisper and without fanfare. Yet, in all the abstract depth of the turbid canvases, these colors tell a story of unusual provenance.

Insoo Chun has been working with lacquer for years, but more precisely, she uses a very particular type of lacquer, namely, a kind of natural lacquer called Ott in Korean. This type of lacquer has a rich history, and in Korea, many objects are traditionally produced with this type of material – anything from chopsticks to beds to household furniture. Hence, while the paintings appear abstract, they deal with a concrete material which is unique and not seen outside of Korea.

This history gives intellectual anchor to the compositions and the techniques with which Insoo Chun avails herself. In her paintings, which exhibit the mature techniques of Western abstraction, the materiality of the paint itself is the cultural signpost which cannot be reduced to anything Western. Hence, in the postcolonial sense, her work re-appropriates the cultural heritage of her native country from the philosophical and cultural spheres of the colonizing civilization.

It should be noted that painting with lacquer is a very difficult skill to acquire. Due to the unusual physical properties, this requires skill and patience, for the medium’s sensitivity to temperature and humidity creates a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, resulting in a time frame of a month or longer for the completion of a single painting. In addition, the physicality of the material behaves unlike any other paint commonly used in Western painting, as it oozes and flows with great viscosity. The time it takes to dry makes it even more challenging, but, in the hands of the learned artist, is transformed at once into an aesthetic tool to rebel against the dominant traditions of Western painting.

The fluidity of lacquer is inherent in the ambient aesthetics of Insoo Chun's lacquer compositions, which gently and incipiently create an atmosphere of dusky consciousness, where things slip in and out of being like dreams. This is evident in the remarkable “Flow” series, in which every piece brims with abstract organic forms that dance and swirl, without ever losing their coherence.

The artist has said this of her dream-like searching: “Lines diverge or converge. Two-dimensional shapes are made, and the flow of lines and faces creates a subtle harmony. Accumulating layers over thousands of years, each line eloquently speaks of the history of nature. The dark night sky is embroidered with countless stars. Roughly or delicately depicted air and wind, the energy from the sky and the earth, the water flow, and the convergence by time are embodied in the movement of several masses.”

With every challenging dream, the depth of our being is exposed, and reality is transformed. Afterward, the dreamer does not so much awake from the old dream but wakes into a new reality. Insoo Chun's paintings provide us with a window into this transformation by gently reminding us of the depth of the viewer's own personal histories, like intimate letters with deep import.    

About the Critic:
Benji Su Alexander, PhD is an art historian and curator. They have contributed essays and/or curatorial advice for Jenny Holzer, Frieze New York, The Armory Show, and Skira Editore. They hold a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a published poet.  

“Lucky Charm” (Dancheong)

by Kate Oh Trabulsi

Exhibition Dates: Jan 21 - 31, 2023

Kate Oh’s Lucky Charm Exhibition

By Ekin Erkhan, PhD.

Kate Oh’s "Lucky Charm" exhibition features a prismatic array of dancheong works. “Dancheong” refers to a traditional Korean decorative kind of coloring usually constructed on wooden buildings and structures, such as royal palaces and temples, for ornamental purposes. While dancheong rose in popularity in Korea, China, and Japan, alike, in tandem with Buddhism and Confucianism growing widespread, Korean dancheong has qualities that are unique to it alone. Notably, Korean dancheong is extremely delicate, sundry, bright and elaborate, unlike the Chinese style, which features bolder lines and simpler color schemes. Additionally, Korean dancheong is painted onto the eaves of temple roofs, a ready example being the Naesosa Temple, populating them with fascinating, and at times otherworldly, patterns of animals (e.g., dragons, lions, cranes), flora, fauna, and geometric designs.

Like her Minhwa work, Oh’s approach to dancheong is one of recasting, revising and further developing the practice. Deracinated from temple eaves, the works are contracted (but not wilted) relics that serve as charms, so to speak. The emotive palette of Oh’s dancheong pieces, updated though they are, reflect traditional themes of longevity, health, prosperity, and familial love. This thematic core is precisely why Oh’s work is, more so than a “making-contemporary”, a continuation, remaining true to the beating core of the customary dancheong practice.

For western audiences unfamiliar with the tradition, the most readily available stylistic reference point may be the "hard-edge" style of abstraction that emerged in America during the 1960s, a branch of minimalism that was a stark reaction to the loose, gestural abstract painting that had followed from abstract expressionism. But where minimalism was so drastically reductive that it appeared nihilistic, Oh’s dancheong are, as per the aforementioned themes, quite the opposite. They are steeped in meaning. There is, however, one parcel of notable overlap between Oh’s dancheong and American minimalism, which is an interest in empiricism anchored in the visual cue. Yet, contra homegrown American empiricism and its bulging cement boxes and architectural lattices, Oh’s is a natural—but not at all natural-ist, for it is galvanized by an interpretative spirit—empiricism. This means that it looks as nature. It is not object-hood that floats to the shore but bleeding-yet-crisp, hued-yet-flattened, floral patterns with distinctive, almost-carved formative features that Oh gives us, ranging from yeonhwa (lotus flower), moran (peony), nokhwa and soekohwa patterns that feature as unspooling, unravelling, central motifs. At times, these patterns suggest that they are floating atop a wading pool unblanched by human steps.

There is a remarkable precision and control to Oh's circular, winding works. In one particular personal favorite, a peach-salmon ringlet circumscribes cyan cresting waves, soon overtaken by pointed apricot peaks. Eight azure-cum-cerulean shields emerge, once again overtaken, this time by an almost-biomorphic ovular series of forms. Any one of these isolated bands could be its own painting but, layered as they are, we are privy to a cascade of whirling intricacies. Oh is also careful not recite this act of repetition: in another piece, seven lamp-like spheres are buoyed in Stygian darkness, the direction of the enclosure-formations now reversed. Directionality switches and so do the angles. In a monochromatic square piece that almost resembles a cut-out, Oh flouts orthodoxy, at moments reminding us that empiricist painting, even when it transmogrifies what it represents, is a kindred cousin to lithography and even the early daguerreotype—all of which, in their baptisms, turned not to manmade arcades, towers, or palazzos but the untouched crevices of nature. When dancheong then, having bathed in nature,  pivoted to garnish temples and palaces, embellishing and bedecking their edges, it was nature that was returned to man. Oh, too, gives us an act of turning, albeit one that is not a re-turn, but a dialectical movement: retaining and at once overcoming the traditional, to give us splashing motley kaleidoscopic works that are both technically impressive and wondrous beacons. 

About the critic:

Ekin Erkan, PhD is a researcher in art history, where his primary areas of study are contemporary installation art, photography, and American & European modern art. He also works and writes in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and philosophy of art, wherein he takes up a historical vantage, keeping close at hand historical problems and textualism. He works as an art critic for several publications and as an art history researcher. He has been published in both academic and popular venues, with over 50 peer-reviewed articles, and has spoken at dozens of academic conferences.

“Emptying and Filling”

by Kwan-Jin Oh

Exhibition Date: January 3-20, 2023

The Poetics of Reality and the Question of Ontological Idealism

            Stylistically, Kwan Jin Oh is a fascinating case in dualistic layering. On the surface, the artist's compositions are staunchly realist, and engage in many of the tropes of even hyper-realist traits, such as obsessively clean depictions of the pictorial plane, and the elongation of the objective viewpoint from which a certain rhythmic breath can be derived. The subject matter, often floral vases, lies calm and meditatively in view, like a yoga practitioner or a Buddhist monk, forever unwaveringly noncommittal in their engagement with the external world, and in this way, may perhaps achieve a transcendent reality beyond the reach of mere mortals. Thus, the viewer is well-served to feel drawn to Kwan Jin's porcelain vases, the beautiful twigs, the dainty flowers and poetic leaves, you are entitled to fully comprehend them as they are: ontological markers of a world as is.

            Yet, if one looks careful enough at such a compositions brimming with coolness and steely resoluteness, you will be tempted to discover the intellectual depth underneath the technically perfect representations that leads you to an astonishing conclusion. The realism is only skin deep. The objects are all cleverly idealized; the flowers are all executed with flattened perspectives, neither truly realist nor actually representational. Every one of the gorgeous details that draw in the viewer's attention are achieved thanks to the peculiarity of the perspectives of the artist: which makes you question, is this the appearance of things of the world, or the appearance of things of the painting?

            Even if we may never be able to answer this dualistic inquiry, it is of great importance to the meaning of these meditative paintings, because it is fundamentally of ontological import, for they open wide am existential rift: a realist existence does not imply the ideal existence. In particular, the semblance of realism can only achieve so much, if even if it perfect, since this perfection only reaches to the level of the pictorial composition, but can never reach to the grounds of existence. Hence, to circumvent this limitation of realism, the artist reaches to a deeper layer of being, namely, that of the idealized world.  

            For Kwan Jin, this ideal world is one of wonder and of desultory freedom, one where all the fleeting impressions of the worldly existence, and their ultimate emptiness, amalgamate in the elemental layer of transcendent insight. The art critic Ekin Erkan explains this insight thusly: 

            “Oh’s mending of realism and the impressionistic—of natural semblance and the constructed stage—parallels a coordination of life and its still, petrified opposite. Notably, the opposite of life is not presented in these paintings as death, but instead as an empty lifelessness that contains life. On the one hand, the jars quite literally contain life, which is displayed with petal-rowed branches and flowers that unfurl and reach out from the cold, crisp jars. On the other hand, the jars also contain a mode of seeing—the jars center the painting’s composition and, consequently, direct our visual field.” This containment is the ultimate meaning of dualistic ontology: if life contains art, and art contains life, then the two containers must be equal.

by B. S. Alexander, PhD

UES Minhwa (Korean Folk Traditions) Exhibition

Exhibition Date: Dec 20-30th,2022
Reception: Dec 23rd, 3-6PM

A Dovetailing of the Traditional and the Contemporary

Rutgers' "Korean Folk Art Traditions" exhibition (Dec. 20 - 30, 2022), spearheaded by Kate Oh Trabulsi and featuring myriad artists (i.e., Seongmin Ahn, Hyunjoo Cho, Min Kim, Sangchul Shin, Meekyung Shin, Jaime K. An-Wong, Aryaan Bari, Heather E. Barr, Mallory C. Collins, Kirra Curtin, Zhishan Dong, Karen M. Falcones, Noel Jackson, Andrew Kang, Mary J. Kim, Geneva Lawson, Elaine Lin, Raphael Tamayo, Ziyang Wang, and Richard Wong) is a tour-de-force through manifold modes of, as the eponymous title suggests, Korean folk art. However, this is not merely an exercise in historical reflection, as each artist engages with contemporary themes, ranging from post-modern identity to semiology, and techniques. The “traditional” facets of Korean folk art serve as anchors, not barriers. 

Kate Oh Trabulsi is, herself, renowned for her art practice, which draws on motifs, media, and composition anchored in traditional Minhwa painting, often spurring these into a subtly contemporary mode. Historically, Munjado paintings were popular throughout the Joseon Period (1392–1910) ) and were characterized by combining these characters with symbolic images that promote Confucian values. There are specifically eight Confucian values that Munjado paintings draw upon: filial piety, sibling affection, allegiance to the King, trust between friends, propriety, loyalty, integrity, and a sense of shame. Certain animals play a symbolic role in Munjado paintings—for instance, the Confucian value of “filial piety” is often graphically indexed via the allegorical use of carp and bamboo shoots. As viewers of the exhibition will note, the animal motif is serviced throughout these artworks, always rooted in a historical tradition that belies mere decoration.

Oh Trabulsi and her compatriots are similarly informed by another critical Korean folk art tradition—Minhwa. Oh Trabulsi has, for much of her artistic career, vividly engaged with Minhwa painting. A genre of Korean folk art from the late Joseon era (viz., the 17th-19th centuries), Minhwa paintings draw on Korean mythology and theology, often licensing ornamentation while, like Munjado, making inventive use of symbols. Minhwa paintings’ symbolic elements speak to emotional states of being, including love, delight, glee, fervor, and anger. With its roots in the Joseon Dynasty, the Minhwa style is often regarded as a populist style of Korean painting. This is due to historical circumstances: between the 19th and 20th centuries, Minhwa rose in popularity under a growing merchant and civilian middle class. Until the middle period of the Joseon Dynasty, Minhwa artworks had been relegated to the domain of court specialists, with Minhwa adorning sumptuous palace walls and ceilings. With the aforementioned socioeconomic shift, anonymous artists from the lower socioeconomic classes began working in the Minhwa tradition. Concurrently, Minhwa saw a thematic shift from decorative embellishment to those steeped in the common people’s desires for prosperity—not simply material prosperity, but emotional satisfaction. Hence, Minhwa painting began to take on a new face, with everyday surroundings and customs taking center-stage. 

The artists comprising this exhibition include six professional artists, two of whom are based in South Korea and four of whom are based in New York. The fifteen Rutgers students presenting their work were under Oh Trabulsi’s erudition during the course of the past semester, and have thus developed a similar penchant for stitching the traditional and the contemporary. A number of these artists go further than Oh Trabulsi in their admixture of contemporary media and Korean themes. Notably, Meekyung Shin was recently awarded the grand prize at the Joseon Folk Painting Contest, and exhibits a collaborative intermedia piece. Shin Sangchul’s work appropriates and combines dismantled Hangul consonants and vowels, working in a tradition of pictographic and ideographic art (i.e., the “verbal visual”) that, for Western audiences, is often (incorrectly) regarded as inaugurated by Dadaist artists or twentieth century artists such as Robert Indiana and Chryssa. 

In fact, the “verbal visual” is perhaps the unifying theme amongst the myriad works in this exhibition. The aforementioned two putative pioneers, Chryssa and Indiana, only speak to the “verbal visual” within the Anglo-American sphere, with subsequent Western artists like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince taking up the mantle. Yet this exhibition reveals that it is a mistake to see pictography and ideography as a resolutely Western phenomena. Instead, its roots are illuminated by recourse to calligraphy, such as Seoye. During the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties, utilitarian ware were often inscribed with Seoye brushstrokes, with padlocks, incense burners, porcelain, lacquer, and branding iron adorned in script that served both aesthetic and semiological purposes. One particularly unique work in this exhibition reads “YOU ARE DELUSIONAL”, turning to Latin script while gracing each letter with tangerine and blush-coral blossoms, a dovetailing of two received traditions often distinctly conceived. Another piece reads "LEAGUE OF LEGENDS", a play on the popular video game series that is composed in identical fashion to the actual lettering of the series itself; again, however, the letters are coated and buoyed by traditional motifs, including a wide-mouthed serpentine dragon unspooling a goblet of fire veering through the "S" letter, flaxen fish arching and spiraling down the tail of a river that is the letter "G". 

Although not every piece draws on the history of semiology and written language as such, even the prismatic portrait of a soft-eyed figure, whose eyes and face refract variegated letters, makes use of this dovetailing technique. One notable exception is a particularly intriguing work that features three sprawling, out-pouched floral arrangements, crowned by a soft malachite that is almost wave-like, the middle peach-skin burgeoning, and the lower a golden lemon that bounces light. The backdrop is a pure vermillion and out of the middle flower structure peers a curious, beady-eyed figure, almost reminiscent of the howling figure from Edvard Munch's The Scream (1983). Each artist progresses the amalgamation of the traditional and the contemporary that Oh Trabulsi is duly acclaimed for.

by Ekin Erkan

“Populist Animals”

by Heemin Moon

Exhibition Date: Dec 6-18th, 2022
Reception: Dec 6th, 6-8PM

A Crossbreed of Playfulness

Heemin Moon's animal sculptures are boldly whimsical, accidental, flamboyantly bizarre but also serenely heartwarming. From afar they look like Cubist musings tautly constructed like sonnets, dainty and complex, but up close, at a familiar distance that the viewer may find resurgent, they become at once sweet-hearted creatures perhaps dragged out of a chocolate factory or a fantastical dream.

Welcome to the animal show with a twist: Dogs, reindeer, cats, and a myriad of familiar creatures grace the lawn and the road, ready to be touched and caressed, yet they appear vastly reshaped, and in a subtle sense, even eerily mutated. Therefore, these protean sculptures, which are a clever crossbreed between stylistically serious renderings of abstracted, digitized forms and conceptually fanciful, almost over-the-top cute interpretations of homey animals, give a little taste of both worlds: they will make the serious connoisseur and the pleasure-seeker amateur both have something to like.

Yet what intrigues me in the present show at the Kate Oh Gallery is the title: Populist Animals. When one reflects at the meaning of the word populist – a word that has stark connotations in the America of 2022 – one cannot help but rethink its political dimension. But politics aside, Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a person who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Its roots are traceable to the Latin word populus – people.

Applied to the world of art, we arrive indeed at a quite refreshing and welcoming perspective: it suggests that the artwork here is not some high-brow ivory tower type of discourse, comprehensible solely by the educated elite, no, it is art that speaks to ordinary folks. In other words, these sculptures aim to make themselves accessible to the average Joe.

This endeavor of popular appeal indeed gives Moon an advantage often disregarded by artists whose work, be it in the conceptual school or otherwise, is only appealing to one's intellect. But accessibility, for Moon who calls himself a 3-dimensional art on his website, is no mere fluffy pandering but serves to arrive at something deeper.

The artist insists, “I pursue to design with common and easy subjects that quickly bring communication and relationships among people. The desire for my creation is derived from my surroundings since I am interested in investigating the essence of the creatures around me - which are complicated, delicate, and sometimes absurd.” Consequently, the artist makes it clear that it's not so much the appeal itself that he's interested in pursuing, but the essence that the accessibility of his art allows him to unearth. This is what drives his art like a chainsaw, cutting through any extraneous fluff to get down to the essence.

But what, then, is the truth essence of these whimsical crossbreeds? I suggest it lies in the fresh meaning that these cubist, pixelated, and digital-appearing reinterpretations offer. By re-rendering familiar household animals in a crassly denatured form, the artist challenges the viewer to look at these friendly and intimate creatures through the distorted lens of a digital- pop culture. Gone are the flatness of the old pop, in comes the volume, the body, the fullness of 3D print-making.

B.S. Alexander, PhD

“INFINITELY REPELLING ORBS”

by Marko Stout

Opening: Dec 1st, 2022

Review at Meer

Mark Stout and the Hyperreal

Marko Stout’s exhibition, “Infinite Orbs”, opening at Kate Oh Gallery on December 1, 2022, is in many ways a continuation of themes implored by the Hypnotiq exhibition just a few months earlier. But where Hypnotiq art practice engages glistening three-dimensional objects, many of which bear witness to and participate in transhumanist themes and commercial culture, Stout’s is a portraiture practice. If this is pop art, it is explicitly the portraiture side of pop art. Indeed, Stout’s work could readily don the pages of Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, bringing him closer to artistic contemporaries like Hassan Hajjaj than to Warhol. Pop art, however, does not seem to capture the entirety of Stout’s work.

This is because there is a marked sense of the fantastical and ethereal, proffered in perpetuity to the hyperreal, that delineates Stout’s work. This airy film is not to be found in Warhol, Hynotic, or Hajjaj. And this resonance is best found amongst the eponymous “orbs” scattered throughout Stout’s portraits, many of which are flaxen and refract light, neatly posited before the model’s clean, shapely face. These models, generally captured from the collar up, are also often dotted in piercings and small, dainty demarcations—tar-like dots creeping a serpentine arrow down the shoulders. In one particularly interesting piece, a golden heart floats before the model’s upper chest. Sumptuous gold also papers over the background, twinkles of guild striking and lucent. These are not lamps guiding our view from adumbrated corners but all-pervading scintillation, striking the balance of the entire portrait agleam. If there is really an anchor to pop art proper that is to be found here, it is with the commercial aesthetics of burnished, lustrous women whose glossed and polished hair is pulled back in the mode of a runway model. Stout pairs representational realism, which characterizes his portraiture, with the otherworldy irradiance of relucent, polychrome orbs, hearts, and background palettes.

More than anything, it is the term “hyperreal” that crowns Stout’s work. It is also this “hyperreality” that makes them incredibly timely considering our epoch’s ambient narcissism, where tik-tok self-celebritization and the notion of the idol has become so diffuse that it serves as an asymptotic beacon for grand swathes of the populous, young and old. Only the effortful hermetic can evade its talons. “Hyperreality,” as popularized by Baudrillard, is a theoretical device that captures the fragmented and fractured nature of postmodernity, although, as argued by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, it also was characteristic of the baroque period. Arguably, “hyperreality” also pervaded the work of art deco artists like Tamara de Lempicka, Aubrey Beardsley, Gerda Wegener, and Alphonse Mucha, all artists of decorative, sensual celebration. Such sensual celebration undoubtedly is of a piece with Stout’s works. What binds these variegated pieces together is an acute awareness and participation in the artificial, socially constructed nature of reality (i.e., its “hyperreality”) and a sensitivity to the precarity of the human condition. But ever so often, the former subsumes the latter, with precarity lending a hand to exuberant conviviality. Whether Stout’s works critique capitalism is, as was the case with Hynotiq’s sculptures, an empty question—after all, in the era of the “death of the author” and the “birth of the reader” (or, in the case of the visual arts, the perceiver), the critique of a work of art is decisively rooted in interpretive interpolation. We bear meaning by way of cognitive contemplation, such that the author’s intentions are of a lesser importance than our reception. In turn, how we receive and interpret art is just as central, if not more important, than the meaning of an artwork that the artist meant to impart.

At this point, Baudrillard’s analyses of the role of consumption and the masses bear repeating, such that we might pin down the “hyperreal”. As Buci-Glucksmann notes, in the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983), Baudrillard argues that capitalism is impervious to political change and philosophical critique, as:

…the mass acts as a black hole which absorbs and destroys all the attacks directed at it. The creation of the mass by modern technologies of communication means that modern society is a kaleidoscope of whirling symbols and values, a simulated world of signs which are divorced from, and no longer connected with, any sense of social reality. (1994: 25)

These whirling symbols and values are made literal in Stout’s iridescent hovering orbs. In Baudrillard’s America (1988), he goes on to suggest that the United States, as “the leading edge of hyperreality, transforms the social universe into a system of simulated cultures” (Buci-Glucksmann 1994: 25). Baudrillard well presaged the contemporaneous moment, where celebrities readily run for political office (e.g., Trump, Dr. Oz, Hershel Walker) or politicans mold themselves into celebrities vis-à-vis popular talk-show appearances, MET Gala “controversies”, and the like. For Baudrillard, our political reality can no longer be distinguished from reality television, with the masses consuming news reports of political “violence, street warfare and gangsterism in the same way as they consume fictions and fantasies about simulated violence” (ibid.). Stout’s work may not directly make such pointed references to our media landscape and the characters that populate it, but it is still steeped in the aesthetics of hyperreality. This is most pronounced in symbols like the flaxen heart and bouncing ethereal orbs, which underscore the new media technological apparatuses that supply commercial culture. With the advent of smart phone applications that enhance and edit at a thumb’s flicker, selfies are rapidly enhancing and transfigured beyond the fixture of ordinary earthly objects. Where Lempicka, Mucha, Wegener, and Beardsley remained affixed to illustration and painting to engage such transfiguration, Stout’s aesthetics of hyperreality brings us into more direct contact with it.

 by Ekin Erkan, PhD

“Let There Be Light”

by Chris Gocong and Rod Lathim

Exhibition Dates: Nov. 3-25 2022

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.com/2022/10/26/on-culture-around-the-world-with-santa-barbara-artists/%3Famp%3D1

The talented artist Anely Girondin who exhibited at Kate Oh Gallery from
August 28 - September 4, 2022
was featured on NY Daily News.

Read more on her work and this article here.

“Dusted Photographs”

by Peter Ha (Jaeyell)

Exhibition Dates: Oct. 20-30, 2022

“Despite his noteworthy finesse, the Korean artist Park Doo has refrained from using academic language as a means to help viewers understand how they might look at his paintings. Instead he prefers a more ambiguous poetic language that raises questions more than readymade answers.

Given the artist’s originality, both as a painter and a theorist, Park decided early in his career that he would show his paintings primarily outside his homeland. In doing so, he foresaw distinct advantages. To exhibit in Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, and New York would most likely attract greater attention among his colleagues than showing his work repeatedly in Seoul and Busan, particularly before his reputation as a painter had become established…”

“…Still, these paintings can be studied, the way any other painting or print or drawing can be studied.  In doing so, one may get a sense of assuredness, of anxiety, of pleasure, of remorse, of overwhelming delight. But this takes time and full focus and deep concentration. It takes knowledge as if entering into the sensibility of the beginning. Where do these strokes of color begin? And what have they become?

For Park Doo, painting is a perpetual discovery. The strokes can be seen less as a composition than as an ensemble found together as one through the patience of engagement within the aesthetic moment – the moment the painting begins.” - By: Robert C. Morgan

To read the full excerpt by Robert C. Morgan, see document here.

“…In a way, these works are an exercise in color theory, illuminating the mutual dependence of elements within a palette of dialectical conformity. Negative space also is critical in these works: the whiteness is as all-consuming as the smeared beams and dashes that spiral, button, dance, and slash shades through the light. At times, the streaks seem to even spell out letters or suggest faces, even if this is nothing but poetic pareidolia at work. In other moments, the works recall bands of light being run through the air, speedily tracking—stilted, stunted shimmers glowing in sunlight. These dances are controlled, donning Park in equal part a painter as a choreographer.” - By: Ekin Erkan

To read the full excerpt by Ekin Erkan, see document here.

"Serendipity”,
showcasing dramatic abstract works by artists

Angels Grau and Alberto Murillo

Exhibition Dates: October 2-8, 2022

Angels Grau and Feminized Anonymity

Like Alberto Murillo, Angels Grau has a background in interior design but, contra Murillo, takes a much more painterly approach to her depicted subjects. Nowhere is this clearer than her "Invisible Women" series, which features faceless portraits of feminine-coded figures. The faces are deracinated of any recognizable indices: there are no ears, eyes, teeth, lips, or other such anchors to tether us to the world of known or knowable faces. Instead, the series repeats several motifs: bobbed hair, a rectangular-cum-ovular facial shape, the outline of a neck, and the collarbone-crowned beginning of a shirt that, we must assume, continues off-canvas. The color schemes change in each portrait: sometimes the hair is a dark aquamarine, at other times a bronze-dashed copper-red, sometimes a verdant hazed green, or even a pasty warped white. The backgrounds also continually change, ranging from smoke-stricken flaxen gold to apricot-carrot or Stygian pooling black. At times, Grau’s portraits don gold or floral earrings—a brief window into their world of fashion and culture. A few such portraits also sport gargantuan hoop earrings and sizable afros (which come in light blue, purple, and brown), indicating that these are women of color. Some of the faces are more two-dimensional and painted evenly while other portraits allow for the brush strokes to make themselves more apparent, the uneven gesture spurring our gaze.

The act of mechanical repetition finds Grau taking on an almost automatized art practice while simultaneously imbuing it with the subjectivity that solely the human hand can only proffer. That is, these works simply could not have been made without the haptic touch of the artist's brush—these strokes are far from the crisp, almost digitally outlined images that Murillo gives us. Indeed, it is the textural, crumbling surface and not the smooth-sloped plane which dominates these works.

How ought we interpret these portraits? The artist statement tells us that, “[a]fter visiting Manolo Valdés’ studio, I felt the need to paint women like me. We are here and we exist. We are those Meninas. We are those women.” Grau is here speaking to works like Valdés Menina azul (2019), a sculptural appropriation of the Spanish Baroque master, Velázquez's, own Meninas (i.e., girls who served in royal court). The anonymity that Grau thus works with is one that not only gazes upon the sea of contemporaneous feminized faces but the history of eluded women’s’ bodies. But rather than paint the anonymous subjects past and present with full figurative complexity, Grau has chosen to repeat this historical anonymity by making anonymity literal, stripping all that would have made them recognizable. Such is a confrontational act where that which is being confronted is the allocentric worldview that has spurned the annals of patriarchal history.

There is, furthermore, a very marked sense in which Valdés formally informs Grau's own art practice. Valdés' paintings use the paintbrush to make apparent luminosity and lighting while weaving in symbology and collage, often with political messages undergirding these works. We see such political underpinnings in Grau’s own paintings. There is also a shared interest in femininity. Paintings like Valdés Azules (2021) and Retrato (2018) take the feminized portrait as a central locus; however, Valdés, wielding a penchant for analytic Cubist-crazed faces, retained the aforementioned humanist indices: not only do eyes, eyebrows, and lips transpire in Valdés’ paintings, but they are often doubled and re-doubled, such that we find boldly outlined faces that seem to have been warped and flattened from various angles. Grau, on the other hand, gives us an inescapable anonymity. Yet, despite the adversarial  nature of Grau’s portraits, this is not anonymity as such. Vis-à-vis embellishments like hairstyle and jewelry, we can often ascertain the race of Grau’s subject(s). Hence, these female-bodied figures could not be just anyone, but instead can be identified as part of a rather sizable populous that has been historically oppressed. The universality here professed is not a romanticized image of “color-/race-blind” viewership but that which dialectically presents the historical subject as both subjectively bound but anonymously treated. In turn, Grau gives us a genuinely political art practice.

By Ekin Erkan

An Artist Who Paints From the Heart: Yang SiYoung

Exhibition Dates: September 26 - October 1, 2022

An Artist who Paints from the Heart

by Robert C. Morgan

Yang Si-Yeong is considered a profound artistic phenomenon in the Republic of Korea. His youthful manner of work, his performative ethos, and his superlative honesty give his followers a clear understanding of his persuasive temperament. Yang is a deeply creative and symbolic force  who orchestrates a distinct and miraculous presence. Many viewers have alluded to Yang’s beguiling mind as a fundamental source of love. He engages in an endearing life-style that alludes to heightened expressions of pleasure often in relation to the animals he embraces and to the natural world he adores.

 Born in 1999, Yang was diagnosed with autism at the age of five. Despite  the developmental disabilities that followed, there was evidence to suggest that Yang was drawing and painting in top form well before learning to speak. Now in his early twenties, the artist has been honored with participation in numerous high-end exhibitions both in his own country as well as internationally. These include the Seoul Museum of Art, the Art Students League in New Yok City, and the BIAF international art fair where he was chosen as a delegate from South Korea. In the meantime, Yang has received considerable attention from the media as an artist who represents his generation’s neo-pop, pictorial playfulness in contrast to the qualitative standards of the abstract painters that preceded him.

In addition, much has been said by Korean critics, specifically Jang Jun – Seok, regarding Yang’s interest in the “multidimensionality of life as a matter of innocence.“  Undoubtedly this concept borrows more from the so-called virtual realm than it does from tactility, which of course would be expected from Yang’s generation. The curious affect here is interesting. Yang has been slated as an artist who performs “heartism,” which is defined as “a frankly expressed heart of love without pretense.” The mixture between the virtual domain and the domain of love opens a premise somewhat puzzling to discern. Given the artist’s arbitrary, omnipresent role of touch, we might ask: What exactly does this mean? For Yang, It would appear that touch would extend beyond the purely physical into the realm of feeling, wherein one is most likely to discover love.

Words cannot fully account as one looks closely at the exuberant color in these charming works by Yang Si-Yeong. Titled New York Sisters #1 and #2, viewers will notice four anonymous women poised in each of the two paintings. According to the artist. their images were initially discovered on subway billboards. When it came to painting them, Yang’s choice of material was mixed media that undoubtedly transformed their appearances. Even so, what mattered to Yang was the intrigue of form and color painted in a style suggesting a child-like realism that favored a sense of interior feeling. Perhaps this was how he felt the sisters should appear, rather than according to their actual demeaner. As a result, a kind of delight is given to these women, a delight that does not easily disappear.

There are many paintings in this series, all painted in a similar style, and all of them women seen from the perspective of the artist’s romantic consciousness.  As a result, the paintings ultimately reveal a similar appearance in which the informal use of line, color, and shape would seem to be the issue. Most of the paintings measure 48 x 60 inches and are on canvas. A few smaller ones measure 28 x 35 inches. Here I would include Yang’s brilliant Thinking Woman (2022) whose intimate contemplation fills the entire pictorial space.

In terms of the larger medium-sized canvases (48 x 60”), I am particularly moved by Queen, Blue Eyed Woman, Wedding, and Fresh. Each of these paintings has it own character, its own presence, and its own narrative. Each of them were painted in the year 2022. Yet, at the same time, the artist took the subject matter in each painting to a new level. While they are stylistically similar, including the mixed-media materials, the manner of address in each painting is different. 

Each painting tells its own story. For example, in Blue Eyed Woman, the protagonist wears a large necklace that brings attention to her eyes. In Queen, the painting is covered with rhythmic polka-dots throughout the surface, whether on the gown or the space around her. In Wedding, the women show a clear sense of intimacy with one another. Finally, the painting titled Fresh is possibly the most curious. According to the artist, “The models who were on the fancy billboards of every Manhattan street were fantastic.” It is interesting that the artist’s source materials come from photographic lay-outs, rather than real people he has seen and spoken with. 

The paintings of Yang-Si Yeong are filled with mysteries that focus on everyday life that he has chosen to paint in highly articulate ways. At the same time, there is an aura of sophistication in terms of his painterly technique. He has nurtured a style of his own that resonates with happiness and delight and that moves audiences to see and think differently about how we, as human beings. come to know one another better through art.

“Expressionist Scenes of Harrow”
by Nancy Prager

A collection of 'configurations' suggesting and mirroring haunting messages.

Exhibition Dates: September 6 - September 23, 2022

Artist Statement

“I define my body of work as ‘configurations’ suggesting and mirroring haunting messages… Beautiful colors and forms have a more sinister duality as the story of lust and violence permeates the artistic dialogue

This work renders the body as entangled masses of expressionistic forms radiating outward and contracting inward in a perpetual state of disintegration, merging figure and space in varying degrees of legibility.

Color defines my shapes and space , evolving a lyrical style, in which suggestions of the human form appeared to pulsate with organic life. Throughout my work are forms both defined and liberated, with sensual anatomical suggestions. Figurative elements seem to taunt and loom in my art but are either suppressed or diffused images of a complex often dichotomist imagery”

“The Movements of Our Roots”
by Anely Girondin

Exhibition Dates: August 28 - September 4

“Matrixes Small Works”

Exhibit Date: August 9 - 27th, 2022

Matrixes, related to the Latin word for "mother," originally meant "pregnant animal" or "breeding female" and was later generalized to mean "womb."  Matrixes include any nurturing or supportive setting or substance usually within the fields of math and the sciences. 

The idea for Matrixes Small Works derives from ideas conceived of by Elizabeth Riley and Christina Massey.  An inaugural show was in 2018 and curated by Riley at the Abrazo Interno Gallery at The Clemente, NYC.

Riley stated: This "female collaborative group ... has undertaken an experimental exhibition employing an open approach, rather than an umbrella approach. The artists ... have traveled on overlapping paths in New York City’s art communities, and in their art practices. While their artwork demonstrates a variety of strategies and materials, and they are from diverse backgrounds, they appreciate their commonalities in a hectic world and divisive cultural moment, and pass around hats as to the curatorial/organizational roles each engages. 

Matrixes Small Works celebrates the diversity and overlapping paths of these artists. The Kate Oh Gallery provides the environment to allow these creative connections to evolve and flourish.  

This show brings together female artists who nurture each other and connect through the lens of their personal circumstances.  These artists employ their perceptions, intuition and creative powers to bring into existence new and honest work. 

Curator: Jaynie Crimmins

“HYPNOTIQ”

Artist Statement

“I have been designing and creating sculptures using epoxy, uv resin, wood, glass, metal, other mixed media while incorporating various paint techniques. Collaborated with world renowned celebrity DJs such as Steve Aoki and Boris Brejcha (Music industry) Metazoo, Pokémon (gaming Industry), Arzu / Slayer Lashes (Fashion,Beauty and Cosmetics) along with many other industries and consumers. 

My work represents the integration of computer science and my passion for art. I grew up observing my mom combing colors and designing hair to perfection. I was intrigued by my fathers IT consulting business. Where I learned how to code. I was also influenced by my Uncle who built modern living decor and furniture. Where I would help him during my summer vacations. That’s where I realized I had an ability to connect my analytic left brain, and creative right brain. I am a self taught artist with lots of passion for my creations. 

You’ll notice the abstract paint splash’s, drips, dirty pour and other paint techniques in my work which resembles the horrifying war, bombings, explosives, constant sense of danger and instability which I witnessed and lived through as a child. I use neon fluorescent, glow in the dark, bright and vibrant colors. The colors are an expression of happiness. As I traveled to countries around the world I observed many use vibrant colors and use of lighting to bring joy and happiness and help cure the trama and depression from the wars and traumas which they went through. 

I use variety of 3D applications and different platforms to design and sculpt my art pieces. Once the design is completed, depending on the project needs, I use variety of mix media such as Epoxy, Resin, UV resin, Wood, Metal, Crystals and other materials .”

The HYPNOTIQ Transformation of Trauma

Review by B. Su Alexander, Ph.D

            At first glance, the oeuvre of Iranian-born artist Arian Lori-Amini (HYPNOTIQ) represents a controlled firework of beauteous incongruity. Polished surfaces of UV resin, epoxy, glass and wood, are dramatically polished, splattered with explosive paint shimmering in neon light. They exhale an atmosphere of pop and mesmerizing ecstasy, while the colors are almost psychedelic in frenzy and density, intensified by swirls and drips with the energy of Jackson Pollock. At the same time, these shiny surfaces are often married to veritably macabre forms: skulls, lone limbs, headless torsos, and flesh carrying marks suggestive of mutilation, vividly conveying a sobering sense of reality and deep trauma. Even Storm Trooper helmets from Star Wars make an occasional if grotesquely humorous appearance as if staked over pairs fixated legs. The viewer finds a provocative combination that has boldly laid its claim as the marriage of despair and glitter under the umbrella of a hypnotic aesthetic.

            To understand the significance of this aesthetic, the viewer may wish to consider the unique background of the artist. While growing up in Tehran in the late 1970s, Arian Lori-Amini had first-hand experience of the Iranian Revolution, an event that left an indelible scar on his view of life. He recounts that even looking at the drip-like embellishment on a monument located on Azadi Square in Tehran, he sees signs that remind him of explosions and debris. While the untrained eye merely perceives, in the artist's bright color swirls, symptoms of postmodern celebratory excess, the darker reality remains that these tokens are subtle transformations of bloodshed, instability, and a desolate longing for peace and justice. The latter, recognizes the informed viewer, constitutes the deeper meaning of the hypnotic surfaces of his sculptures. 

            One would be amiss, however, to only consider the traumatic side of this artist's early life, for it is complemented by another, equally powerful aspect of his adult experience. After immigrating to America and finally settling into the tech-hub of Seattle, he came under the grip of science, technology, and computers, to which he'd already been exposed thanks to his father's work in IT. Not only did he become versed in all forms of digital technology, he leaned on his scientific knowledge to embark on a fruitful, trans-disciplinary career in design. In time, it grew into collaborations with prominent figures from the gaming, music, and fashion industries, spawning joint work with Steve Aoki, Boris Brejcha, Metazoo, Pokémon, among others. When the viewer marvels at the suggestive forms of the polished sculptures, recognizing echoes of objects of high fashion and beauty industry, they should similarly realize that these are not echoes as such but tokens of an authentically lived experience in pop-cultural milieu, amplified by the high-tech means of production that created these sculptures. They are part and parcel of the artist's story: a life spent in science and design, yet fresh with the marks of trauma on the surface.  

            As an artist, Arian Lori-Amini has come a long way from the epoch-defining instability of his childhood to the psychedelic post-modernity of Western capitalism. Yet, throughout this journey, the artist has stayed authentic to one goal: his search for beauty. As he has traveled across the globe, he came to appreciate that those same vivid color splashes, which had brought him to the fears of his childhood, can also light people with joy and transform histories of conflict and destruction. The longing for beauty, indeed, may be the only antidote that unites cultures. If, across our current world, we feel besieged by dangerous signs of instability and a sore lack of social justice, then perhaps this artist's work can remind us not to lose hope, as we are not alone in this struggle. Justice and beauty are merely two sides of the same coin, two faces of the same incongruity, which are universally carried by all cultures and races. It is therefore fitting that the artist can state confidently on his bio: “These colors are an expression of happiness.”

About the Critic:

B. Su Alexander is an art historian and curator. He has contributed essays and/or curatorial advice for Jenny Holzer, Frieze New York, The Armory Show, and Skira Editore. He holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a published poet. 

“The Pursuit of Happiness”

by Kim Gyoungmin

“My work can be understood in the category of the commonplace. The themes of my works comprise content that contemporaries sympathize with. There are the stories we might have experienced once in a lifetime as well as things we may do and feel in ordinary life. In my work, disconnection between art and ordinary life virtually does not exist. Because subjects and situations in my work are what we do as habits and unconscious actions, when viewers appreciate my work, the use of certain discourses or theories is meaningless. What is required in appreciating my art work is not a certain theory or reflective, artistic attitude but an attitude that does not filter reflection or prejudice. My work should be seen as casually as possible. However this does not mean contemplation, but that they should just be perceived instinctively. Therefore my works don’t require deep thought and reflection but a sharing of the artist’s point of view of the subjects that present the works and ordinary spoken stories. My works don’t intend or force social change but they lead to some changes in consequence. This may be possible from merely getting rid of certain prejudices, distorted gazes, or ideological perspectives.”

“The Lost Flame, Regained”

by Choo Kyung

Exhibition Date: May 31- June 12, 2022

Opening Reception: May 31st, 6 - 9 PM

Artist Choo Kyung draws from the so-called “medium specificity” lauded by Clement Greenberg—i.e., that which speaks to "the unique and proper area of competence of each art” that coincides with all that is “unique in the nature of its medium”—while taking us beyond how this concept was motivated by 20th century art history. Like the modernist action painters who Greenberg extolled—splatter painter Jackson Pollock being the artist par excellence—Kyung’s use of brushstrokes and spray paint serve as indices for the artist’s movements. That is, rather than have her art practice service static imitation, pictography, or representational realism, Kyung, like the aforementioned modernist bulwarks, services abstraction to capture movement. Nevertheless, discerning her art practice from these abstract expressionist peers, Kyung also utilizes experimental methods—like using a blowtorch upon the canvas to produce an ashen, charcoal surface reminiscent of fire-cloaked mountain crags—to tether her canvases to real life.

Excerpt from his critical essay on Choo Kyung by Dr. Ekin Erkan

“ Cancer Fundraiser Show”

“Cancer Fundraiser Show” by Richard Volpe, Eliza Bender, and Alyssa Giammona.

Exhibition Date May 19 - 29, 2022

Closing Reception : Thursday May 26, 6 - 8 PM

Kate Oh Gallery is participating in the Madison Avenue Spring Gallery Walk on Saturday, May 14th, 2022. We cordially invite you to join us at the artist talk at 2 PM.

You can RSVP here: https://madisonavenuebid.org/springgallerywalk/

In this Gallery Walk, artist Bong Jung Kim's solo exhibition, Convalescence, will be on view. We invite you to his world of art and creativity merged with salutary perspectives.

"Convalescence”

"Convalescence"

by Bong Jung Kim, curated by Iris Inhee Moon

Exhibition Date: May 9 - 18, 2022

Opening Reception: May 15, 3 - 6 PM

Kate Oh Gallery invites you to a Bong Jung Kim’s world of oriental philosophy merged with western aesthetics. Kim’s art explores a philosophical relationship and quest to the subject matter of love, desire, and longing, bridging the gesture and expression of his body and soul.

“TO BECOME LIFE": Two-Person Show

TO BECOME LIFE

By Miroslav Duzinkevich & Irina Rodnikoff

Exhibition Date: April 21 – May 8, 2022

Opening Reception: April 21, 6 - 9 PM

Arts and culture illuminate the better parts of humanity and do not exist on an unrelated platform from political, social, or moral issues. In light of the horrific situation in Ukraine, the whole world immediately reacted by publicly condemning the current aggression. We are Ukrainian-born artists standing together in solidarity with the people of Ukraine against the tyranny of invasion. To express our support to the people of Ukraine, we will donate all the profit from our sales to nonprofit organizations in Ukraine. We stand united with our Ukrainian and international artists and colleagues who share our shock, outrage, and profound sorrow. 
Without physically manifesting artistic ideas or concepts, art would not exist. Our work embodies an unrelenting search for the most influential interpretations of ideas about the world we experience. We do not limit ourselves to one medium, style, or concept – rather, we explore all forms of expression. The world holds much darkness within itself; we believe it is our mission to propagate light so that the world might become a brighter place for us all.

“Love Walk in New York”

“Love Walk in New York”

Exhibition Date: April 10 - 20, 2022

Opening Reception: Tuesday, April 12, 6 - 9 PM

"Compared to a human's life, a dog's life may seem a short while. But in their own ways, animals also experience life, death, joy, anger, sadness and love--I hope to capture this in my paintings..." -Excerpt from Su Young Lim’s artist statement

Su Young Lim uses the motif of the dog beyond the traditional portrait of animals. Lim, first and foremost, reminds us that visual art can be genuinely fun. Indeed, her ever-whimsical scenes are highly inviting and most enjoyable to get lost in. However, it is also worth underscoring that while she contributes to explore the boisterous and the convivial, she further experiments with anthropomorphizing non-human figuration. 

By Art Critic Ekin Erkin

Collaborating artist and family member, Young Kyoon Kim’s terracotta sculptures will also be on view. Kim will be donating partial profits made from his sculptures to animal shelters in NYC.

Rainbow Group Show

Rainbow Group Show at Kate Oh Gallery

March 13 – 30, 2022

Opening Reception: March 15, 6 – 9 PM

Participating Artists:

Pema Rinzin, Lori LaMont, Evie Zimmer, Kate Oh, Irina Rodnikoff, Kenji Hirata, Katy Fischer, Laetitia Guyon, Shamona Stokes, David Ellis, Deirdre Swords, Florencia Sanchez, Kunsang Kyirong, Pema Dolkar, Rebecca Donner Winsor

Curator’s Statement

I have picked The Rainbow subject for this show in response to these difficult times. I have asked each artist to choose their own vision of rainbow colors as an expression of their joy. Just as the rainbow unifies many joyous colors, this group show brings together a color full celebration. In Tibetan culture the rainbow expresses Enlightened Beings (Buddhas, Gurus and Teachers). Also, as in many other cultures, it is auspicious, a sign of luck and rebirth. Cultures around the world have found similar meaning in the incredible reflection of sunlight shining through the moist atmosphere after a rainfall. This is The Seventh group show I have curated in New York City since I arrived in 2005.  As part of the Tibetan diaspora I have used my position as a curator to provide opportunities to other Tibetan and artists of all nationalities so that they can become more integrated into the American art world and to give Americans a deeper appreciation of contemporary Tibetan artists. I want to thank every artist for their participation in this exhibition, especially those participating from France, Canada, Mexico, Japan and around the USA. This is a very special group show and I wish you all success and an enlightened time together.  Thank you, Kate Oh Gallery, for opening your doors to this show. 

This show is curated by Mr. Pema Rinzin, contemporary Tibetan artist and founder of the New York Tibetan Art Studio.

"The Korean Archetype”

"The Korean Archetype" by Miky (Yoohyun) Kim at Kate Oh Gallery

Exhibition Date: March 1 -11, 2022

     Korea’s national founding myth is an unusual one. A bear and a tiger want to become human. They ask deity what they can do to become human. The son of god tell them to go into a dark cave for 100 days eating only mugwort and garlic. The impatient tiger runs out the cave before it becomes human. On the other hand, the patient bear perseveres and turns into “Woongnyeo,” or the “Bear Woman.” She then marries the son of god and gives birth to “Dangun”, the first Korean man. Instead of the somewhat traditional and typical omnipotent gods or conquering heroes in myths, Korea’s features a “Bear Woman” who epitomizes self-sacrifice and forbearance.Perhaps due to the widely-known myth of “Bear Woman”, empathy is deeply rooted in Korean culture. Through countless foreign invasions, colonization, abject poverty, the people survived by sharing and caring. The ability to empathize with one another, to find joy in tough times, and to find meaning and beauty in simple things is a beautiful quality that is archetypical of the country.

Artist Miky Kim molds countless tile-roofs, metaphorically alluding to Korea’s traditional tile-roof houses that represent Korean women who led lives of obedience, forbearance and self-sacrifice under those very roofs. Through her practice, Kim pays homage to the Korean women who endured suffocating social customs, physical and emotional agony, all the while praying for the wellbeing of her family and loved ones. Another common motif Kim uses is Korean rice cakes that symbolize love, care, devotion and prayer of the women who prepared them. Rice cakes are prepared for special occasions such as the Lunar New Year, Lunar Thanksgiving, and birthday celebrations. They are decorated using wooden molds of various themes and shapes. The rice cakes are inscribed with characters such as “su” (壽) denoting longevity and other traditional symbols that wish for good fortune. They also symbolize a woman’s prayer for the health of her family by marking their birthdays. As the world suffers through an unprecedented pandemic, we are forced to maintain distance from one another. We could learn from our “Bear Woman”, Woongnyeo, who persevered alone in a dark cave and evolves into a being of self-sacrifice, forbearance and empathy.

https://aeqai.com/main/2022/02/kate-oh-gallery-the-korean-archetype/

Kwan Jin Oh's "Emptying and Filling", on view at Kate Oh Gallery from January 1 -  30, 2022, teeters on intermedia, balancing formal prowess with poetic lyricism. This is evident in how Jin Oh’s paintings, each of which display ceramic moon jars, cleverly play with dimensionality and photorealism, albeit without allowing for any one facet to overdetermine the works. In this way, the paintings each use painterly impressionism to underscore a poetic sensibility while also proffering object studies in the form of moon jars. Furthermore, the paintings employ an intermedial technique, as Oh adopts a method traditionally circumscribed to pottery—called the “inlaid technique”—by utilizing a sharp knife to create bold lines and carve slits out of the canvas. This produces a photorealist effect, the ceramic jars given such pronounced dimensionality that they appear to swell from the canvas. However, this realism is framed by Oh’s more painterly sensibilities, as evinced by the flowers and fauna that peer out of the jars or around their necks.

Oh’s moon jars are captured via different perspectives and in different environs. One of Oh’s paintings centers an aged, cerulean and ivory white jar, displayed before a Stygian, clouded silvery dusk. The realism of the jar and its faded traditional design, which features a washed out, beryl dragon curling around the ash-white porcelain, is in stark contrast with the painterly background and the blonde, tawny-splotched sun that hangs in perfect orbital form above the jar. Another of Oh’s paintings features a light teal jar on a white canvas; out of the jar's mouth unspools a single black branch that curls around the center of the jar, violet petals occasionally adorning it. The branch resembles a crimped, wispy arm, mauve flower petals lining its forearm. Despite the stillness of the environment here, these petals suggest life, interrupting the cold palette in all its quietude.

The motif of a crooked arm-like branch exiting the mouth of the moon jar appears often throughout these works. The branches are at times displayed with the same realism as the jars, and Oh makes repeated use of the blush plum-pink petals that dot them. However, sometimes the branches are more impressionistic—dotted, smoke-like raven brushes at ends with the crisp mouth of the jars. Often, the circular background figure of a sun or moon illuminates the stage, the natural and the constructed set into unity. At times, a light blue or flush pink background will spotlight the jars, reminiscent of a coral sunset ocean floor. Such paintings utilize a “doubling” effect where the moon jar and the celestial moon or sun co-refer to one another, both semantically and representationally. Other paintings also feature a black wooden desk with a golden centerpiece upon which the jars rest. In one painting, a serpentine branch swoops below the desk, reaching through the jar and seemingly becomes one with the charcoal-black altar below. The branches are almost anthropomorphized with their spindly and sinuous reach, suggesting a life of their own.

Oh is especially sensitive to how his color palettes are composed. For instance, one of the paintings features a bright crimson desk, upon which a light bluish-alabaster jar rests. A blanched moon hangs beside this jar, a few inches of empty space separating the moon from it. In this painting, the mirrored moon and jar are connected by a fishing rod-like branch with roseate petals. Both the moon and the petals are reminiscent of the jar and the desk, respectively, as the palettes of the latter present muted hues of the former.

 Oh’s mending of realism and the impressionistic—of natural semblance and the constructed stage—parallels a coordination of life and its still, petrified opposite. Notably, the opposite of life is not presented in these paintings as death, but instead as an empty lifelessness that contains life. This theme is underscored by the jars themselves, which are but literal vehicles of containment. On the one hand, the jars quite literally contain life, which is displayed with petal-rowed branches and flowers that unfurl and reach out from the cold, crisp jars. On the other hand, the jars also contain a mode of seeing—the jars center the painting’s composition and, consequently, direct our visual field. Further engaging this theme of containment, Oh’s paintings each also feature a line drawing of a moon jar on the back of the canvas; this is, of course, not public-facing and thus also contained. Oh’s works hence propound an aesthetics of containment while simultaneously illuminating how any act of containment is also an act of framing and interpreting.

Review written by Art Critic Ekin Erkan (PhD in Philosopy)

“Pop Art Figures: Present and Past”

"Pop Art Figures: present and past” Wall Street International Magazine Review Article

Bong Jung Kim, Poppy Series

Pop art has been traditionally understood as an art movement that burgeoned in 1950s Britain and America alike, with diverting thematic concerns but common aesthetic choices. This commonality included, above all else, a “return” to representational art following the first half of 21st century Modernism, which had stoked abstraction as its primary motif. Littering early pop art were hard-nosed, tough edges—often comic-book like, à la Roy Lichtenstein—and low-brow subjects, such as pin-up girls and advertising products, knitted together in a collage-cum-latticework. Relatedly, one critical unifying concept behind the diverging strands of pop art was perceptual stimulation, as evinced by one of the early tenets of the pop art movement, Richard Hamilton of the Independent Group, whose Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), juxtaposed funfair, domestic trimming of everyday life and interior furnishings (e.g., pot plants, coffee tables, and lamps) alongside commercial iconography (e.g., a crowned Ford motorcar, a gargantuan lollipop). Despite subsequent decades of pop art and postmodern, pop art-inspired works have deviated the representational grounding that colored the movement’s early beginnings, this engagement with perceptual stimulation has remained interwoven within pop art’s—and post-pop art’s—central plexus.

Indeed, any attempt to concisely reduce the variegated thematic and theoretical strands behind pop art—which could just as easily be pluralized into pop arts—will undoubtedly face great challenges. Perceptual stimulation is one notable exception, and the participatory stance that pop art works take upon their represented (and sometimes compositional) material is another. Susan Sontag's prescient 1966 essay, “Against Interpretation,” gets to the heart of the latter. As Sontag underscores, alongside the ingenuousness, arbitrariness, gaiety, and looseness of pop art is its exhilarating freedom from moralism. This freedom signals a sentiment that marked many 1960s counter-culture movements, whose ethos, nevertheless, unwittingly participated in the spirit of capitalism. Capturing this disposition, the pop art of the 1960s unwittingly raised a mirror to 60s counterculture movements like the New Left and the hippie movement, illuminating the self-inventing subject whose embracing the aesthetics of Eastern spiritualism and “free love” dovetailed with the narcissist, entrepreneurial commercial advertiser. This intimate reflection would find itself lucidly articulated when many self-pronounced radicals, who had marched alongside the Black Panthers in their youth, matured into the Reagan-voting block who identified with the “novel” conservatism of William F. Buckley. Hence, one genuine virtue of the pop-art movement was its doing away with the “approving or disapproving” critical stance that Modernism proffered. In doing so, one could say that the pop art movement ushered in a post-critical stance, one inherently removed from politics. Alternatively, however, one might take this post-critical stance as one steeped in self-awareness and irony, thus understanding pop art as motivating a genuinely political move in its solemn posture and interest in allocating commercial indices for the sake of perceptual over-stimulation. According to such approaches, by participating in its object of appraisal, pop art demonstrates how the very possibility of critique has become impotent under the machinations of contemporary market capitalism.

The works that are grouped together in Pop Art Figures: Present and Past all illuminate these threads, and in doing so cull and bridge the mixed figures of pop art since the 1950s. Many of these works seem, at first glance, disparate from the aesthetics of pop art, proper. For instance, Jonathan Horowitz' Tennyson, Jasper & Bob (2013) flattens direct textual references to artists past with an impressionistic sketch-like drawing style, clarifying its historical ties to the pop art movement without embracing pop art’s aesthetic penchant wholesale. Other artists, such as Damien Hirst—arguably Andy Warhol’s greatest living heir—are more directly in tune with the commercial spirit of pop art. Like his pop art forebearers, Hirst is no stranger to participating in the commercial culture his works depict. Hirst's screen print, Domine, Ne In Furore (2009), references the Old Testament and finds concentric butterfly wings replicating Buddhist mandalas and stained-glass church windows. Hirst's works do not necessarily criticize the church or spirtuality, they merely take an aesthetic vehicle (the church window) and turn it into an adornment. Sean Scully’s translucent aquatint, Cut Ground Red (2011), is composed of his universally recognizable vertical and horizontal stripes—this time in flaxen, crimson, and charcoal black. Cut Ground Red is in continuity with Scully’s early work from the 1970s and, as a self-referential piece, speaks to the “brand identity” of the contemporary artist. Similarly, Takashi Murakami, Jellyfish Eyes (2001) is unmistakably a Murakami, cartoonish eyelashes and anime eyes cheekily winking and staring back at the viewer.

Pop artist James Rosenquist's 2nd State (1978) marries the sketchiness of Abstract Expressionism with the commercial indices of pop art, featuring a pair of clearly penned sunglasses peeking through faint, foregrounded auburn-orange figures. Warhol’s Flowers (1964) and Robert Rauschenberg’s American Indian (2000) are perhaps the most direct references to the golden era of pop art. Flowers is most interesting due to its source and the “pop art-perfect” story behind the piece—it is, in some sense, a reproduction of a reproduction, as Warhol’s screen print reproduces the rose-pink hibiscus pullout photographs taken by Modern Photography magazine editor Patricia Caulfield. Warhol had copied the flowers after Metropolitan Museum of Art assistant curator Henry Geldzahler showed them to Warhol. JFK had been assassinated a few months prior to Warhol's work on the hibiscus series, and Warhol himself linked the flower prints to Jackie Kennedy, herself a recurrent motif looming throughout much of Warhol's work. American Indian similarly recalls American media culture, including the uncompromisingly American cinema of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Clint Eastwood, as well as the omnipresent mythos of the “American Indian,” something of a jingoist concoction and hangover that, like most American myths, continues to loom in today’s sociopolitical background. Like the trailing American fiction it speaks to and is framed by, the Native American face in Rauschenberg’s print hangs behind an American automobile, fading into the wall-façade.

Notably, Warhol’s hibiscus flowers have often been confused for poppies. Bong Jung Kim’s Poppy series takes up the poppy as a painterly subject, but, rather than veridically reproducing the poppies by way of screen print, as Warhol did with his flowers, Kim utilizes the gestural, drip-like composition of Abstract Expressionism. The splattered center speaks to Kim’s interest in symbolism, with symbolism remaining something that pop art, from its early beginnings in advertizing, has preoccupied itself with. However, Kim’s symbolism is edge-on and abstract, the bleeding poppies speaking to the addiction and isolation diffuse and commonplace in contemporary life. Kiki Smith’s oeuvre—given its critical preoccupation with AIDS, race, and abortion—is much more politically poised than many of the aforementioned pop artists. Nevertheless, Smith’s Untitled (1997) also speaks to a certain remove from critique, the camera eye straying towards the banal, as it dangles beside a riverbed and a flock of geese.

Michael Halsband’s photographic contribution, Nob and Non (1980), returns to the human subject, but obfuscates any immediate signs that would signal race or gender with a sun hat—dark lacquer-polished nails embrace a stranger’s hand, the photo’s composition reminiscent of commercial fashion photography. Elaine de Kooning's Taurus VII (1973) is much more figurative and directly recalls Abstract Expressionism, thereby placing Pop Art both in relationship with Abstract Expressionism and juxtaposing these two invariably connected, and at times dissenting, Anglo-American movements. One of the ambitions behind Pop Art Figures: Present and Past is to enunciate reactions to pop art, including both conciliatory reactions and those more reproachful. Carol Hunt’s Morning Music (2007) in many ways continues the alternate American artistic practice of abstraction that Elaine do Kooning’s lithograph articulates while April Gornik’s Mirror Forest (2001) speaks to the time-honored tradition of American landscape painting that has always remained fiercely steadfast and independent from Modernist and Postmodernist whimsies. Zvonimir Mihanović’s contribution similarly speaks to a widespread historical interest in realism, and thus departs from pop art—the small fishing boat is stripped of any brand name, still and swaying in a placid turquoise ocean. Korean-American artist Kate Oh’s contribution, Nocturne, uses ground pigment ink and Hanji paper on a wooden panel to display a monochromatic, shadow-cloaked flock. Such works have been intentionally chosen to speak to those alternate traditions that both frame and move beyond the history of pop art—for, in order to effectively speak to any tradition, one must also locate it alongside that which rejects and responds to it.

Thus, Pop Art Figures: Present and Past takes the present mode of spectatorship as one that must be equally critical of pop art and treat pop art analytically, appreciating how its history is one inseparable from both American art history and our contemporary cultural milieu. This exhibition sees the pop art movement as effectively at the center of a contemporary technique of post-critical authorship that signals the genuine death of the artist and the birth of the viewer. However, in many ways pop art  as such has been overcome—and where it still remains stylistically steadfast, it is in conversation with alternate art movements and approaches. Thus, these distinct facets of the pop art story are here comprehensively pictured here, such that the viewer can, themselves, take up a critical posture.

Review written by Art Critic Ekin Erkan (PhD in Philosophy)

Encore Show: “Flower Dance”

"Flower Dance” Wall Street International Magazine Review Article

"Flower Dance” Ekin Erkan Review

Review: “Atemporality” in the Paintings of Bum Hun Lee

            Our present age is a most puzzling chapter in the history of art. On one hand, driven by technological advance, artistic styles have become more and more synchronized all over the world, to the extent that, for instance, a new aesthetic fad in America will quickly find a foothold and be copied across the globe. On the other hand, however, artistic advancement has entered the eerie stage of arrested development. Styles old and new march side by side; no one is dominant, and none of them completely goes out of fashion. There no longer exists a sense of direction; it is as if the arrow of time itself has been frozen into the now. This is especially true in the field of painting. In a recent large-scale exhibit dedicated to contemporary paintings aptly titled “Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” (2015) MoMA's curator Laura Hoptman describes the phenomenon in rather sobering terms: “A-temporality, or timelessness, manifests itself in painting as an ahistorical free-for-all, where contemporaneity as an indicator of new form is nowhere to be found, and all eras coexist. This profligate mixing of past styles and genres can be identified as a kind of hallmark for our moment in painting, with artists achieving it by reanimating historical styles or recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or radically paring their language down to the most archetypal forms.” Not surprisingly, this form of timely timelessness presents significant aesthetic challenges and opportunities in a globalized art world. Bum Hun Lee's paintings in his solo show Flower Dance, viewable at Kate Oh Gallery in New York, are a pristine case study of how atemporality has reached across cultures, delineating in one intimate Upper East Side setting the uniqueness of our present.

            At first sight, Mr. Lee's work brims with the heritage of traditional Korean painting. Their subject matter – flower and people – and their masterfully controlled brushstrokes bear witness to this tradition with unequivocal refinement; even the philosophical backbone of these works, which Korean critics have described as “seeing things from other things' perspective (以物觀物),” is a key concept in Asian art theory. But one would be amiss to remain at this level of description. Indeed, to any student familiar with art history, associations will at once spring up that reveal Mr. Lee's deep grasp of the fundamentals of Western art, for in the thickets of the broad brushstrokes lurk the insinuating echos of abstraction. The stems and boughs from which flowers blossom are rendered with reductive clarity; in the series “Human in the City,” people are pared down to shadows and contours; and in the titular series “Flower Dance,” sprightly buds explode to blanket huge surfaces with color fields of sheer pink. All these call to mind the uncompromising elements of abstract expressionism. Although Mr. Lee would not be the first person to marry traditional Asian aesthetics with Western abstraction, he does dare to up the ante by stamping onto them the seals of pop art: In the series “Plum Blossom Human,” for instance, leaden flowers marked by thick paint overlay dainty brushstrokes, as if to re-brand tradition with heavy-duty industrial labels. These flower-stickers unmistakably pay homage to Andy Warhol's 1964 “Flowers.” 

            As a result, on Mr. Lee's mixed-media canvases reminiscent of both ink paintings and mass media print, the ghostly styles of times past, hailing from incongruous traditions and epochs, are deftly re-sampled, remixed, and finally reanimated with vigor, melancholy, and joy. Perhaps, they give us proof that even in the eerie age of atemporality, where no style is truly new, and no style truly dies, things are far from doom and gloom. Reflecting upon “Flower Dance,” critic Jeong Su Park cautioned, “Do not see flowers just as they are. See me from the flowers' perspective. It is a way to understand your inner self extended from an understanding of each other, beyond different perspectives.” With Kate Oh Gallery's Flower Dance, a reinterpretation of the meaning of “seeing things from other things' perspective” may be in order. For in this show, the perspective is no longer Korean, Asian, or Western, but one which in fact seeks to remix the disparate perspectives of art history, so as to fashion the distinct perspective of Bum Hun Lee.

 Review written by Benji Su

Benji Su Alexander has contributed essays and/or curatorial advice for Jenny Holzer Studio, Pearl Lam Galleries, TKG Foundation, and Skira Editore. With a unique background in both arts and sciences, he holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and is a published poet.

Rosalyn Engelman

 “Rosalyn Engelman is a consummate painter…the painter’s painter…”

Charlotte Kotik

Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum-

Award winning Artist, Rosalyn Engelman: Solo Exhibition Date: October 1 – 30

 Rosalyn A. Engelman is a consummate painter, or as one critic put it, ‘the painter’s painter’, whose oeuvre also features sculpture and mixed-media works. Her paintings and installation art access her personal history, memory and passionate concern for the universal human condition, expressing the full range of experience—from joyful aspiration to a powerful call to action. We welcome you to her world of vibrating colors and expressionistic brushwork. Inspired by her studies of Japanese art, one series of abstract paintings almost seems to dance in subtle calligraphic marks. Another series exhibited here renders Platonic forms in exuberant jewel-tone hues, and yet another uses monochromatic fields of black and white to imply a rich urban sensibility.

 Engelman’s work has been presented internationally at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants at the Grand Palais in Paris, and the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea di Firenze—where she was awarded the Lorenzo di Medici il Magnifico Gold Medal – and her work was selected by the World Court at The Hague for a frontispiece for their Volumes of Jurisprudence. A wall of eighteen of her paintings was featured at Art Basel in Miami Beach, and she has exhibited at museum and gallery shows here in New York and across the United States, among other locales and honors garnered. Rosalyn’s works are held in prestigious personal collections in the U.S, Canada, England, and Germany as well as the permanent collections of museums, corporate and non-profit organizations; she has also fulfilled significant commissions such as the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Brandes House in Washington State. She received her B.A. in Fine Arts and a M.S. from the University of Rochester, where she studied Art History. Engelman has exhibited in over 25 solo shows and over 30 group shows, and is thrilled to be joining with Kate Oh here at the gallery in a personal artistic renaissance after retrenchment from the studio during the pandemic.

 “Rosalyn Engelman: The Color of Memory,” an award-winning documentary by Paul Lewis/Subterracon Films, is a conversation and studio walkabout with this remarkable artist. Filmed on location in the artist’s Manhattan studio in the early 2000s, Rosalyn, who overcame paralysis and blindness from Guillain-Barré Syndrome contracted decades prior, delivers a memorable and uplifting portrait of a life lived for art and love. The film will be shown at the opening reception.

 Artist Statement

“My work is concerned with color, process, time and emotion. It reacts to inner and external stimuli as well as memory. Painting for me is a magical experience—sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating and always a magnificent obsession. Wherever I am, awake or dreaming, I think about my work. The formal considerations of the creative process as well as how the process can reveal the paint itself. Matisse wrote in 1912 that “the problem [is] to dominate reality and by extracting substance to reveal not the thing, but the essence of the thing”. To reveal the Essence—with a capital E—is a major concern of my work. For me my work is a gateway to the unknown. It is not an easy road. It is about my Essence, the core of my being revealed. The summation of my soul, perhaps dangerously revealed, to be viewed, to reach out and meet your own…”

Pietro Antonio Narducci (1915-1999)

Narducci (1915-1999) Untitled, #340- from the Early Abstract Expressionist Series, 1955 107 x 74”, Oil on canvas signes verso.

Kate Oh Gallery and Curator Inhee Iris Moon is proud to present “Narducci” by the late Master Pietro Antonio Narducci (1915-1999) who was one of the most significant artist pioneers of the last half of the twentieth century. It is an honor to be the first gallery in New York to showcase a survey (minuscule in scale but substantial in essence) of his work in many decades. We are pleased to have re-discovered this artist who had been obscured for nearly 70 years due to a convergence of several tragedies he experienced in the mid 1950’s including a private art dealer to whom he had entrusted nearly two hundred paintings suddenly disappearing, never to be seen again, and the loss of his loved ones. It is also necessary to understand that there was a vital refusal to be a part of the business end of the art world. He avowed to focus on the personal search or journey of the art making practice. Narducci chose independence and the purity of work, values that he ardently embraced all of his life, until his death in 1999. 

 This exhibition premiers 24 paintings and works-on-paper from the 50s, 60s and 80s in diverse styles. The 5 grand scale abstract paintings from the 50s and 60's executed on canvas with oil refer to the transformational shift in his practice from the classical to modern. After graduating from the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in Greenwich Village in 1936 and the Beaux-Art Institute of Design in 1938 studying with Thomas Benton, Isamu Noguchi, Joseph Stella, Onorio Ruotola, and Antonio Piccirilli, Narducci had embraced many different types of American modern art on top of what he already had versed from the European modern artists such as Severini, Kandinsky, Picasso and Chagall. He steered away from figurative paintings in classical style that resonated with the paintings of Da Vinci and Modigliani all together by the end of the 30s and began to experiment with abstraction like his European modernist counterparts. One can see in these vibrant energetic paintings full of colors, rhythms and texture that  Narducci wanted to express the primitive and the essential elements and feelings in liberating ways. 

 Also exhibited are the 18 abstract works-on-paper from the 80s and 1 semi-figurative work from the same era which are countless studies for his epic scale acrylic canvases, a series of "Transcendental Aesthetics" or "Quintessential Aesthetics". As the artist's eldest daughter explained, "He choose ‘quintessential’ because it was a term used to refer to the fifth and highest element in the universe. He felt his work was reaching for that purity of being totally intuitive — and a way of participating in the experience of capturing Nature in the act of creating herself."  We also know that he always painted to classical music with his favorite composer being Igor Stravinsky, the most important composer of the 20th century, for breaking all the rubrics of classical music and creating ultramodern music. Narducci's love and admiration for Stravinsky’s music which is often both polytonal and poly-rhythmic influenced him immensely and are reflected in the 16 works on paper. Some of them are provocative and some are calming; some appear mysteriously earthy and some appear as celestial and airy. The rhythmic strokes sometimes evoke primal urges and sometimes cosmic bursts and energy. The works made with pastels are softer and dreamy versions of utopia or dreams in organic geometry and aerodynamic movements; and the ones incorporating sand allude to the ritualistic process of mediumistic practices. All very powerful and stunning in their own ways, Narducci produced works full of gestures of no order but of gut feelings that it is safely believed to state that he delved into the realm of the unconscious and traveled back to the realm of consciousness in total control while executing his transcendental paintings. “Abstract Expressionism was a step in the right direction!” Narducci said referring to the movement. He believed that there were more spiritual elements both savage and sacred in essence that he could explore and add to the genre. We hope you will come and experience the brilliance of Narducci with us.

-Inhee Iris Moon, Curator

Kate Oh Gallery and Curator Pema Rinzin are pleased to present Towards the Light, a group show at Kate Oh Gallery’s new location on the ground floor space in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

 As Kate Oh Gallery celebrates the new possibilities found in showing and sharing art in a larger location, this exhibition celebrates new beginnings, an unfurling of hope after a time of great loss.

It is not content, material, or process that connects the work of the nineteen artists in “Towards the Light”. It is the visual translation of the artists’ experience of a new emotional, physical, and spiritual climate. Women take center stage in the show representing their personal visions of the question of this moment: how do we move forward? 

 The artist Swoon makes images that both depict and elevate the figures whose voices and power have been unheeded for far too long. The natural world and its animal inhabitants, both wild and domesticated, confront the viewer in Kristine Versis’ mystical prints, and in Susan McDonnell’s luminous oil paintings, and Amy Ross’ watercolors. Ekin Balcioglu’s works hover between portraiture and iconography, depicting women of the past, or perhaps the future. Pamela Knoll’s realist portraits of women directing their unflinching gaze convey a similar female power, as do Rebecca Donner Winsor’s. Karen Margolis’ maps of the workings of the mind are a reminder of the astonishing beauty of the systems we are guided by— a place the work of Irina Rodnikoff, and Laetitia Guyon inhabit. Kate Oh’s delicate paintings are a reminder of the dreamlike ether of memory and time. Jose Mertz’s creatures move with a crackling energy, while Kevin Connolly Gillespie plays with color and composition in his vivid wild animal portraits. Sculptor Shamona Stokes’ figures are a tactile and joyful

representation of a personal spirit world— a reminder of the connection to the inner and spiritual self that has been so neglected in this time. Emily Auchincloss’ and Jessica Cannon’s paintings depict imagined landscapes and night skies of unknown depth— they reference tantric maps, or a topography of the self.

Three artists in the show—Kunsang Kyirong, Kunkyi Tsotsong, and Pema Rinzin— are of Tibetan heritage. Kyirong (winner of Best Animation at Vancouver Short Film Festival 2021), makes animated films that depict and uphold the memory of a Tibetan childhood, as do Kunkyi’s idiosyncratic and searching drawings. Rinzin’s paintings dazzle with graceful brushwork and floating worlds of abstract color made from traditional ground mineral pigments. Each honor their heritage in their own way: representing not just the past of Tibetan art and beliefs, but the future- and the ways Tibetan and Western cultures can learn from one another.

Pema Rinzin

NY Tibetan Contemporary Artist

Founder of NY Tibetan Art Studio

“Stone Wave”

Kate Oh Gallery is proud to present “Stone Wave” by Kwang-sik Jung.

Exhibition Dates: August 3 - 24th, 2021.

“Stone Wave" is the canvas of nature, the artist can grind and paint on it to convey creative desires. Through this, nature's top to bottom structure can be revealed in a macroscopic, equal, and pure way. Expressed in a bird's eye view, the works feature an encompassing, long-distance vista that reveals finer details only upon closer inspection. Quite like the aesthetic effects of pitch, and the strength of sounds, the artist's work has the aesthetic characteristics of concentration and dispersion, as well as condensation and diffusion. They represent a coexistence of small landscapes that unfold in fine cracks that attract and invite us to experience the texture of the material through touch, and of large landscapes painted through an aerial perspective. These landscapes represent no particular region and are born from the artist's desire to manifest creative visions through the canvas. The pieces are all-over-reliefs which depict a natural environment as it is, full of texture and matiere, with the use of materials and stylistic fine cracks conveying an almost physical feeling as the works pop out from the canvas and towards the viewer.

Kwang-sik Jung studied Stage Design in Italy. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions around the world. Works by the artist are included in private and public collections worldwide.

“REQUIEM”

Kate Oh Gallery is proud to announce “Requiem”, a series of works by Aesther Chang. After such positive reception, the exhibition has been extended to run from July 5th through 31st.

Requiem is a series that captures observations on the impermanence of life and explores the intrinsic relationship between the human spirit and art material. Like a flower past its bloom, the constant evolving sky, the specter of a lover, beauty in life is fleeting and imperfect. Yet acceptance of this natural cycle of growth, decay, and death invites a more realistic appreciation for deeper beauty.

Each painting in this series is a landscape conjured from memories, longings, and hauntings of past presences. What Chang seeks through the process is harmony: oneness between self and matter. Made over long stretches of time with layers of natural pigments and free improvisation, these paintings call for a turn toward meditation. Chang’s works directly invite the viewer to realize a deeper dimension within one’s very own being - a transcendental realm beyond the body and mind. To unlock this realm, one must go inward.  

Chang's works often pair earthy umbers with ultramarine blues- colors that symbolize birth, decay, revival, and transcendence. These colors investigate the fundamental elements of life. The warm hues remind us that we return to earth as dust, whereas the blue hues symbolize the air and water elements within us and their revitalizing power to transcend us from the physical realm into the spiritual realm. The paint does not merely sit on the canvas, rather it lives within it. What is imparted onto the canvas is the spirit of the artist.

Aesther Chang was born in Boston and is a graduate of The Maryland Institute College of Art. She currently lives and works in New York City. From 2016 to 2020, the artist has widely exhibited works around the world. She is known for her nuanced and subtle abstract paintings. Her works experiment with textures and colors, and the play between linear and ethereal elements.

“Flower Dance”

“Flower Dance" Wall Street International Magazine Review Article

Bum Hun Lee’s artwork consists of a series of compositions of philosophical concepts and the artistic landscape.  His Flower Dance series depicts the freedom you see in the azalea branches. These artificially drawn flowers are to be understood as an actual scene in nature. It is to be interpreted on how people should live their lives. 

The “Flower Dance” series deals with two ideas, one being human desire and the other is the entire life of humans. Relationships we experience shape and form how we live. Humans are not alone and we cannot be alone, we need connections and people around us. Having this harmonious cooperation with other people leads to living harmoniously with nature. This understanding of these relationships helped to create Bum Hun Lee’s Flower Dance series. 

Bum Hun Lee makes the royal azaleas dance on the canvas, symbolizing the interaction of the people who transformed into flowers in the process of pursuing the principles of the world. With Bum Hun Lee’s understanding of life’s value, he draws flowers that represent people. The heart shape lines encompassing the compositions represent not only the trace of the dance of the flowers but the intellectual journey that people’s minds go on when understanding the principles of the world as well. As Bum Hun Lee visualizes people within the flowers he draws he creates this relationship and harmony between nature and society. The scarlet petals and green leaves depict an intense awareness of people’s minds to assimilate to nature. Flower Dance is a series of compositions that marries the parts of the world Bum Hun Lee recognizes and the principles of the world that he understands. 

Bum Hun Lee is a painter based in Seoul and is currently the 28th Chairman of the Federation of Artistic & Cultural Organizations of Korea and was a Chairman of the 24th Korean Fine Arts Association Board. He is the recipient of the Proud Hong-ik In Award in 2020, the Grand Prize winner of the World Culture and Arts Exchange Awards in 2018, and the Grand Award winner for the 4th Korea Creation Culture Arts Awards in 2016.  

 “Healing in City”

First Exhibition in our New Location

"Healing in City" Wall Street International Review Article

Kate Oh Gallery is proud to announce an exhibition at its new location on 31 E 72nd St., on the corner of 72nd and Madison Avenue. The new show will feature the work of artist Chloe Hyobin Kwon in collaboration with architectural engineer Simon Shim, May 24 - June 5, 2021.

Hyobin Kwon is a New York-based artist who specializes in Asian calligraphy and brush paintings. She was the first foreigner to obtain a Doctorate in bird and flower brush painting in China. In her recent practice, she paints scenes of nature, combining traditional techniques with mixed media.

Simon Shim is a structural engineer based in New York with 20 years of experience across a variety of building types, including residential and commercial projects.

Please click the link for the feature article in Wall Street International Magazine
https://wsimag.com/art/66001-healing-in-city

“America The Beautiful”

"America The Beautiful” Wall Street international review article

Park Joon's exhibition at the Kate Oh Gallery consists of a series of monochrome photographs and a video presentation from his journeys to the Death Valley. As an experienced sojourner who intentionally seeks out the desert for peace, personal renewal and to pursue a closer relationship with the spirit, the nature and the truth, Park combines the gestalt experiences of desert and darkroom to bring forth his intimate photo-works. Park's primary artistic medium, black and white photography, seems to be an apt choice for expressing his philosophy and responses to the notion of physical desert and spiritual desertification. Although color photography has its achievements, monochrome promised insights and visions of reality purified for Park; it allowed him freedom from the contradictory richness of full color, and a means towards emphasis and control.

Park's photographs show many facets of desert with emphasis on the dynamic interplay of its parts and wholes. His complete and awe inspiring desert scapes and the intimate partial scapes (including cracks, furrows and miraculous animal foot prints on the desert surface) create synergistic effect to convey beautifully the physical realities of the place. Park renders astonishingly the characteristics of the desert and the mood of the dweller by treating carefully the balance of figure and ground, light and dark, yin and yang. The process of re-formulating and re-presenting perceived desert forms and experienced conditions Park emphasizes on three notions which are eliminations of the insignificant, idea of implicitness and active complicity of the viewer.

Park's criticism of some aspect of contemporary culture is reflected in his photos as he ponders upon the notions of implicitness/ explicitness, intrinsicness/ extrinsicness and essential/superfluous in them. For him desert crossing is an intrinsic activity which enables him to strip away the comforts of superfluous, extravagant, vulgar life and the discomforts of its insipid, meaningless consequences. The lack of moisture, hot temperature, high winds, extreme aridity and horrendous level of solarity of the Death Valley inversely serve him to foster positive attitude toward life and spiritual growth. The experience of nothingness in the desert penetrate sojourner's life resulting in a radically different perspective on how one relates to others and environment. Park says, the sense of gratefulness and hope flourish in the life of hardship and ordinary events such as a lone flower blooming in a dry sandy stream, a bird on the wing, or stars streaming across a dark desert sky can be appreciated as miracle.

In the Present Tense

by James Sondow and Iliya Mirochnik

The Birth of Oopsy and Oopsy

by Erica Kim

“The birth of Oopsy & Oopsy” will showcase original works and bags designed by Erica Kim, the founder of luxury brand Oopsy Oopsy. Erica’s work aims to deliver a sense of long-lasting joy, harmony, and stability in the world.

In today’s modern and fast-paced society, Erica finds that the secret to a successful business lies in unceasing passion, diligence, and humanistic goals, which in turn make a positive impact on people's lives in their own unique ways. The philosophy of the brand, commented by the artist, is to convey the sense of nostalgia and enthusiastic spirituality through graphic elements that combine reality and fantasy. Through collaborative work with talented craftsmen, the artist wishes to promote her brand as a mass luxury brand that touches on youthful hearts of all ages around the world.

Erica Kim was born in Seoul, Korea in the autumn of 1975. She studied in the United States when she was a child and later pursued her dreams as an art student in New York. As one of the granddaughters of Shi Choon (Si Chun) Park, an influential composer in Korea, the artist had the privilege of growing up around art. Park’s music helped foster and establish Korea’s national identity, as well as encouraged citizens to endure the Korean War in the 1950s, one of Korea’s most painful eras. His artistic influence and grandfatherly love directly and personally contributed to widening Erica’s own artistic vision. Under the loving guidance of Erica’s grandfather and family, Erica’s passion for the arts flourished greatly. 

Elementals

by Ayhan Yavuz

Exuberant, celebratory, and a tad bit queer—these descriptors well index Ayhan Yavuz’s (also known as Tresoea) Kate Oh Gallery show, “Elementals.” Yavuz is a Turkish artist now based in America’s west coast (Washington, specifically) who has a background as a spiritualist and wholistic healer. These influences radiate in his works, which often times consist of various experimental approaches to portraiture and festivity. In Aries (2015), for instance, a decadent be-crowned woman's flaxen hair sumptuously falls before her shoulders like a ball gown woven from crisp fall leaves, her ivory skin gently covered by a lace frock. Leaves and natural motifs are a common stylistic penchant for Yavuz, whose meditative works foreground various divas who melt into geometric patterns. There is no classical demarcation between foreground and background in Yavuz’ works; in Fall (2015), branches and other arboreal figures weave in and out of a woman's butterfly-bisected eyes as a tiger seamlessly envelopes her face. In Siren (2018), Yavuz inverts the motif of the siren from Greek mythology—whereas, in Homer’s epics the siren is a most dangerous seductive creatures who lures nearby sailors with enchanting music, such that their ships collide with the rocky bay. Yavuz’ sirens profligate with crimson and orange roses outpouching their feminine silhouette—Yavuz retains the touch of suffuse seduction but does away with dread, stoking a realm of incantations and animal magnetism.