April 12 -May 10, 2002

Gallery Korea is pleased to announce the first exhibition in its annual series of group exhibitions selected from slides by a jury of art professionals. This years jury was comprised of Sabine Rewald, Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum, Christopher Phillips, Chief Curator of the International Center of Photography, Hyunsoo Woo, Assistant Director of the Japan Society Gallery, David Ebony, Associate Managing Editor of Art in America, and Gerard McCarthy, Curator of Gallery Korea.

In different ways the work in Absence draws on ideas of loss and recollection; each artist has particular concerns but, all share a sense of rupture from historical traditions. Susan Loi Deseyn works with photographic images that are obscured by layers of black paint but just identifiable by the line of silhouette. Unpainted patches appear as explosions of color that confound our interpretation of the original object. Hae Sun Hwang also reconfigures an image. A pencil drawing is erased and then somewhat reconstituted with the dust produced by the eraser

Yoeuijoo Kim appropriates the banner paintings that announce the exotic stars of the sideshow tent at traveling fairs. She makes slight adjustments to the traditional format of these declamatory images to further her own identification with the human subjects on display. The small still-life paintings of Hee Jeong Jang feature the divided bodies of Barbie dolls. It is through such peculiar subject matter that this artist connects with the Western tradition of easel painting

The sculpture made by Sung Hae Chu suggests an endless pursuit of a universal space. Her process of repetitive dismantling and compounding is an attempt to create wholeness out of rupture and singularity out of plurality. The composite paintings of Joong Duck Song recollect past experience. The treasure of memory as much as memory itself is conveyed to viewers exploring the lyrical imagery in his pictures. Wayne Hodge explores the way ambient space influences the construction of immediate experience. He will wrap two columns of the gallery in silk and present two colored hoods in adjacent display cabinets. In this way sensuality is underscored as essential to the aesthetic experience.


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