FLUID
January 17 -February 15 2002
Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022)
MATTHEW CHASE DANIEL
GRACE JUNGWOOK RIM
DONG HYUP KIM STEFANO
PASQUINI
JOON WON OH JUNG OK KIM
The expansive reach of this exhibition encompasses various media including painting, photography, collage and ceramics. In addition, there is a mixture of styles from Eastern and Western traditions.
Dong Hyup Kim has worked within the Korean tradition of ink painting for most of his long career. Recently, he has extended his approach to this tradition by incorporating vivid colors to create subtle images that appear to emerge in an amorphous space. Jung Ok Kim who is a National Treasure in Korea makes ceramic pots in the tradition of Punch’ong ware that was first developed in the 15th Century. A large bottle in the shape of a rice bale has a floral image painted with iron pigment displays the relaxed harmony that has long been treasured in Korean ceramics. The small bowls that are decorated with a swipe of white slip painted with a coarse brush reveal the simple aesthetics that were such an important contribution to the austerity of the Japanese tea ceremony.
Ink and clay and paint have fluid qualities that respond to the artist’s manipulation. This plasticity is evident in the paintings of Joon Won Oh whose abstractions have a dense textured surface. Grace Junwook Rim combines flat expanses of paint with passages of small circles that stream in lines across the surface of the canvas. In her paintings a sense of a landscape is evoked as a site of convergence between external impression and internal sensation.
Stefano Pasquini photographs what might be called mundane aspects of the world. These uneventful images are enlarged and printed on to aluminum sheets and encourage a celebration of the overlooked and the everyday. There is a convergence of the historical and the contemporary everyday in the collages of Matthew Chase Daniel. He incorporates imagery from 19th Century Japanese wood-block prints within scenes made from magazine clippings. The photographic backgrounds of seascapes or banal images of highways replace the Asian landscape, yet the images are embellished with frames of dried organic material such as fish or seaweed. This convergence of old and new, East and West indicates the flexibility of contemporary aesthetic practice: where the past flows into the present and the border between East and West becomes historical and mutable.
For further information please contact Gerard McCarthy 212-759-9550