Laura Manuel

Exhibition Date: April 16-28, 2024

Asia Week 2024
Date: March 16-March 31, 2024

Kate Oh 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

The Resurrection of Holographic Isomorphism

 How does an ancient artform from the East survive in the contemporary jungle of Western abstraction? In the fluid and yet secure vases of Kim Se-Yong, the Kate Oh Gallery has outdone itself with exquisite resurrection of ancient artistic principles. The abstract here is not mere embellishments but portals to ontological truths of bygone eras. The quasi-holographic fragments, seen as isomorphic by Western observers, are, in essence, vessels of resurrection that infuse the celadon with the distillation of the formless.

Kim Se-Yong, a virtuoso whose creations find refuge in the sanctums of Queen Elizabeth of England, the Dalai Lama's Palace in India, and the Blue House in Seoul, is not just a potter; he is a steward of the oppressed tradition that unfolded during the Goryeo era (AD 918-1392). The celadon ceramics, once lost to the ravages of time, are resurrected through his caring hands.

Kim Se-Yong has manifestly drawn inspiration from the ancient Goryeo kingdom's legacy. In his upcoming exhibition at the Kate Oh Gallery, the vessels and vases go beyond mere artifacts; they embody a unique interplay of holographic energies.

For the Western viewer, it is paramount to keep in mind that celadon, far more than a visually appealing ceramic art form, contains a depth of cultural and metaphysical significance. Functioning as a keeper of historical consciousness, celadon becomes a tangible conduit linking contemporary observers to the customs, rituals, and everyday existence of ancient civilizations. The delicate beauty of celadon, enriched with intricate designs, trumps mere aesthetics; it beckons viewers to engage in reflective musings about the extended mereological tapestry of humanity's artistic legacy. 

As the celadon pieces rise in Kate Oh's posh Upper East Side gallery, the artist taps into the collective unconscious, channeling the spirits of the Goryeo royal family. His vessels become the vessels of historical memory, not merely relics of a past but conduits through which the irretrievable and the possible converge. This temporal convergence, reminiscent of Buddhist notions of impermanence, invites contemplation on the ephemeral nature of all phenomena.

In Kate Oh's show, Kim Se-Yong reaches utmost technical dexterity, overtaking the material confines of comparable Western counterparts. The intricate floral designs, reminiscent of Goryeo celadon's soft tinges and carved intricacies, become a meditation on the interconnectedness of all things. The negative pockets of space, carefully sculpted, echo the Buddhist concept of Sunyata – the emptiness that gives birth to form.

In his unwavering commitment to time-honored conventions and symbology, Kim Se-Yong becomes the postmodern guardian of an ancient order. His pieces become artifacts of isomorphic symbiosis, inviting us to dance within timeless rhythms and contemplate their holographic naturalism in the silent whispers of celadon.

Kate Oh Gallery “Holiday Collection 2023” - video credit to creativeAgroup

Solo Exhibition by Hezile

December 19, 2023 - January 5, 2024

Haizleland
by Ekin Erkan

Heizle’s work engages in a good deal of “worldmaking”, such that the project is appropriately called “Haizleand”. In this “land”, one far from the annals of the everyday, prismatic skeins and trickles of aquamarine, cyan, and pink float into droplet-rivulets that pour down an oceanic arcade. These are alien oceans, beyond the picturesque. The ocean and her tides all look a bit abstract at first glance—that is until one notices that her skeins furl into the shape of seashells, pooling into a cascade of finely pronounced rigged semicircles. In the bottom right of one such canvas, tortuous black tentacles reach, lapping up the miasma of prismatic rills and runnels. The work, then, is not truly abstraction—or at least not “non-objective” abstraction—as this “land”, where one floats on violaceous waves, is populated by amoebic seaforms and the winding rolls of their roll and lull.

Trekking the earth, we come upon further expanses in this land that flutter with the light beat of butterfly wings. These butterflies and their kindred fauna are posited over a similar palette to the “oceanworld”: blush fuchsia, roseate pink, thin daffodil yellows. This parcel of land is equally serene and fitted with the decorative, ethereality sundered and dissolved into a candy-sweet artifact. The canvas feels bisected, one half devoted to a background threading smudges of plum-purple smearing and the other half, the foreground, writhing with insects drafted in outline. The butterfly is a recurrent motif for the artist, present in each of the pieces. In one of the most interesting works, the background is overtaken by overcast, nebulous branches darted with white stipples; the air feels icy and shrill, as if we are bearing witness to a winter eve kissed by snowfall. The centerpiece here is a silver butterfly preserved in a heart-like frosted sack. This suspended glowing sack, evocative of a heaving slug gasping for oxygen, finds its organic tunnels burrowed by the dun of shadowy branches. In yet another work that references the previous gambit of motifs, the heart is turned into an ornamental crux, a crown jewel. The interior frame features undulating butterflies, now dotting each corner, the palette-turquoise riven with a glowing peach-pink orb. It is the palette and the cast of motifs that carry us from work to work, a fabric stitching each element to a contained set.

Much glows in Haizleand. The glow is an inescapable rhythm, a drumbeat that matches those refracted rainbow rays of slick summer oil oft pooling on the sidewalk and revealing kaleidoscopic brilliance when prodded by the sun. Plumes of yellow-gold and green-blue cast the sky, trapped globule marking their descent. The artist has clearly taken to the organic, as their use of the heart strays from that cartoonish motif of the crimson, balloon-lipped heart of cartoons and popular imagery. In Haizleand, the heart always retains its four chambers, artia and ventricles. But it also floats, sundered from the human body. In one work, it floats above outcast hands folded above a stilted ocean, purple seaspray and foam trapped in a frame. There is an interesting overtaking of the fantastic by realism and veracity throughout Heizle’s works, each romantic element lapsing over the last into a mauve-wine promenade that soaks and strikes like a runnel of red-blue wine.

“Symphony of Opulence”
by Marko Stout

Dates: November 5-15, 2023

“Hoary Reverie”
by Han Kiok

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

“Voicing Invisible Women”
by Angels Grau

Dates: October 3-22, 2023

“Voicing Invisible Women”

Angels Grau has a background in interior design but 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. 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.

Review by Ekin Erkan, PhD

“The Lyricism of Organic Tradition”

by Kim Gyoungmin and Kwon Chigyu
August 24 - September 30, 2023
RSVP: info@kateohgallery.com | (646) 286-4575

The Lyricism of Organic Tradition

The upcoming exhibition at the Kate Oh Gallery introduces two exceptional sculptors whose presence demands the attention of New York's art enthusiasts. While divergent in style, their works coalesce with a profound lyricism and pastoral identity that mirrors the vast depths of the ocean.

Kwon Chigyu's art resonates with an inherent biological resonance, akin to the intricate interplay between nature and technology in a genetic crossbreeding experiment. These sculptures transcend mere mimicry of the natural world, forging a dialogue between plant life and artificial elements. This fusion serves as a poignant reminder of our symbiotic existence within our environment—much like the intertwining flora in a dense forest, creating a unified tapestry. Chigyu's sculptures, akin to organisms adapting to their habitats, encapsulate the very essence of resilience and evolution.

Inspired by the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium, Chigyu's sculptures mirror nature's transformative leaps. This artistry captures the abrupt shifts and gradual changes that mirror the experiences of species during periods of stability and transformation. In these sculptures, Chigyu's hands become the agents of natural selection, molding materials to embody the enduring vitality of life's perseverance. This process encapsulates the nuanced yet potent forces propelling the intricate dance of adaptation within nature.

 Chigyu's sculptures, akin to alchemical manifestations, appear to emerge from the very womb of nature herself. His artistry lies not in mere mimicry, but in a nuanced fusion of organic principles and synthetic ingenuity. One is irresistibly drawn to his intricate designs, where tendrils of plant life intertwine with polymers, seamlessly marrying the corporeal and the manufactured. This interplay evokes a literary allegory of our own existence, a narrative thread woven into the fabric of time, reminding us of our symbiotic relationship with the earth.

In stark contrast, the co-artist of this exhibit, Kim Gyoungmin, presents a whimsical collection of sculptures that evoke a populist approach to the concept of mimicry. Like organisms evolving into ontological survival, Gyoungmin's sculptures blur the line between organic and fabricated, akin to the deceptive camouflage of a chameleon. This artistic mimicry challenges viewers to discern authenticity from engineered creation, unveiling the intricate interplay between imitation and innovation. This intriguing juxtaposition aligns with the captivating mimicry observed in the natural world.

While Chigyu delves into the profound interaction between nature and human intervention, Gyoungmin navigates a distinct realm rooted in the ordinary and the everyday. Embracing Heidegger's concept of "ready-to-hand," Gyoungmin's sculptures merge seamlessly with familiar objects and experiences, elevating the mundane to the extraordinary. This contrast enriches the sculpture realm, highlighting the diverse facets of existence that artists can explore. Hence, we see the delicate garden gnomes transformed into vivid artists and actors on a stage of whimsicality that fuses Western pop culture and Eastern sensuality.

And much like Heidegger's emphasis on being-in-the-world, Gyoungmin's art engages with the viewer's inherent connection to depicted objects. The whimsical and pop elements mirror shared human experiences, evoking nostalgia and recognition.

Hence, in the colorful tapestry of contemporary art, two distinct voices harmonize, weaving unique narratives into the fabric of human experience. Kwon Chigyu and Kim Gyoungmin epitomize the boundless potential of artistic expression, their sculptures serving as portals into contrasting yet harmonious realms. As the viewer explores the Kate Oh Gallery's space in New York's Upper East Side, you embark on a journey through the spectrum of human emotions and thoughts, an experience destined to resonate deeply within.

by B. Alexander, PhD 

“Stone Wave”

“Stone Wave” by Jung Kwangsik
July 16 - August 19, 2023

Jung Kwansik’s “Stone Waves”
by Ekin Erkan

 “Another tactic may be the questioning of notions of reality, rather than the questioning of a structure imposed upon reality because of economic requirements. It seems that art is in a position to do this, and it may be that in this role it achieves its continuing and sometimes revolutionary relevance. A tentative category, more heuristic than proscriptive, such as ‘false objects’ or ‘trompe l’oeil sculpture’” may be of help here. It also affords an opportunity to point out some artworks of more than ordinary interest.”[1]

Jung’s “Stone Wave” series at Kate Oh focuses on directed textures, the artist conducting vertical linealities into peaks. Sometimes the maestro asks verdant bushels to rise, teeming them into a bundle of foreshortened canopies. At other moments, Jung swoops cragged mossy swooping towards the upper-right pictureplane, hoary cobwebs of buildings peeking through—bringing us back into the empirical world. Yet whichever direction Jung pulleys, it is the title’s eponymous stone pushed into a rising tide that indicates what, exactly, Jung is concerned with here.

Jung’s works are in some sense an invocation of what Perreault dubbed “false objects”. Jung’s making-false is achieved by way of transubstantiating static object that sit idly by—these peaky works are implicated in buoying and sway, fixed though they are. Triangulation, famously utilized by Lygia Clark’s “bichos” and more recently incorporated by the mononym architect-cum-anarchitect, Buford, is Jung’s motif par excellence. Jung engages in the “trompe l’oeil” mode but in a way that is not heavy-handed or in the vein of a traditional still life or landscape painting, for the “trick” comes in the sharp shape of an alp. The peak of the triangle is where every one of Jung’s landscapes turns and returns. Though Juan Fernández's (1629–1657) curtained grapes, chambered and hanging like bats, suggested directionality a la weight, the pre-modern illusionistic still life genre was still caught in the bind of what Noel Carroll, vide Arthur Danto, terms the "verisimilitude" orientational narrative of art history. This narrative was about veridicality and the artist’s directive was to aim towards it, intimating the perceptual world of objects so keenly that we percipients might find ourselves reaching out to pluck the on-canvas grapes or smell the on-canvas roses. Any possibility of a true rupture was impossible, inherently at odds with the two-dimensionality of the canvas. After all, the canvas, strictly speaking, was and is—as the reflexive interrogation spurred by Greenbergian modernists (most notably, Morris Louis) illuminated—anchored to flatness and its edges. It was nimble tact that the Renaissance-influenced nature morte artists of yore wielded—the same finesse that the photorealists continue to prod and prangle over, having never headed the death knell of the verisimilitude orientational narrative that photography and cinema rang.

Luckily, Jung does not bumble in circles like these nostalgia-drunk trompe l’oeil pre-modernists. Jung does rake light and cleave off the background plane but Jung’s work is decidedly engaged in how we receive its medium qua what is represented: neither the former nor the latter is that compromised. We are made to interpolate the representeds through the medium, the two manacled in a moor. Arguably, Jung’s pluralist pursuit might even be countenanced as post-modernist given the (allayed) humor that comes with using jagged rocky edges to plump waves. A helpful forebearer to Jung’s studies of concentration and cresting rivulets is Marjorie Strider’s asparagus still life, Green Vertical (1964), an appropriation of Manet’s A Bundle of Asparagus (1880). With Strider, trompe l’oel is engaged cheekily, an erect asparagus spear rushing from the canvas, transmogrifying the strict delineation between sculpture and painting—a transmogrification that critics of Strider’s day extolled and that Jung also prods without resorting to derivation. In addition to her still lifes and “Girlies”, Strider was renowned for her experiments in positive space—indeed, alongside her “Streetworks” performances (which, inaugurated in 1969, included the likes of John Perreault, Scott Burton, Hannah Weiner, Bernadette Mayer, and Eduardo Costa, all of whom toyed with “positing” actions in neutral space), Strider’s polyurethane foam eruptions ran contra the negated sundering voids proffered by the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark. Strider mended what Sid Sachs deems "super realist" objects—everyday objects used by everyday people—with a kind of eroticism. Jung veers not towards the erotic but, instead, the soft and manifold. The clearest compatriot to Strider’s Green Vertical (1964) are Jung’s #4 and #5, a lapsing and multiplication of the asparagus-cum-arborescent form. Jung multiplies her still life objects of empirical conquest and then multiplies the results once-over. What we end up with is a kind of still life practice worlds away from the “New Romanticism” of the last fifty years. It is a result that, instead, angles and twists perceptual tokens into arced alien fissures.

[1] John Perreault, “False Objects: Duplicates, Replicas and Types”, ArtForum, vol XVI, n. 6, New York NY (US), February 1978.

“KIMONO REBORN” by Mayuko Okada

Exhibition Dates: May 30 - June 23rd, 2023

“ Tactile Effects” by Mague Brewer

Exhibition Date: May 16-27, 2023

Minhwa New York

Exhibition Dates: May 2 - 7, 2023

Rinaldo Skalamera

Exhibition Dates: April 16 - 30th, 2023

Callie Hirsch

Exhibition: April 4th-15th, 2023

“Collect Brazilian Jewelry”

Exhibition Date: March 16 - April 1, 2023

The full colors of fauna, flora and nature are the sources of inspiration for this Brazilian art exhibition in NYC.

Collect Brazilian Jewelry, curated by Dorine Botana, holds yet another exhibition in New York with a focus on valuing authorial jewelry and fine arts. The event takes place from March 16 to April 1, at Kate Oh Gallery, in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Designer Mírian Machion is one of the artists who will bring her magnificent creations that are full of colors and Brazilian stones. As an unconditional admirer of fauna and flora, Machion transmits these designs through this new collection, Floresta Fanti, emulating the natural beauties of Rio Grande do Sul. The butterflies and dragonflies in these pieces give them movement as they “fly” over the gems.
Dorine Botana also finds her inspiration in nature, and in her current collection, Botana talks about the creation process: “My inspiration always comes from nature, this time I will launch a collection called Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)”. Botana also highlighted the importance of the special selection of artists participating in the event, where everyone is in tune, with creative and high-quality pieces.
Cristie Boff, born in Porto Alegre and currently residing in Florence, Italy, will brighten up the event with her art and painting. The plastic artist graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and is dedicated to contemporary painting through research into classical techniques. Boff uses rabbit glue as the structure and base of all her canvases, creating nuances and textures that are simultaneously complex and delicate.
Gloria Corbetta, who returns to NY for another exhibition, defines her jewelry as “personal sculptures”. They are small enough to be used as an ornament. They reflect the soul, style and technique of the artist who created them.
Paula Schnapp declares: "My jewelry business stems from my love for gems, rough or polished, small or large, from anywhere, they tell me what they want to be".
In addition to authorial jewelry, the exhibition will feature paintings by the artist Cristie Boff and photographic images by Marisa Abel that were taken on her recent trips to capture the beauties around the world with her lenses.

Featured Artists:

Jewelry: Ana Gradin | Cláudia Araújo | Dina Noebauer | Dorine Botana | Fernanda Delpizzo | Glenio de Castro | Gloria Corbetta | Katia Senna | Miriam Member | Miriam Korlkovas | Mirian Machion |Norma Stiefelmann | Paula Schnapp | Sandra M Frias | Sandra Guarnieri | Soy Cho | Telma Aguiar

Paintings: Cristie Boff

Photography: Marisa Abel

Curator: Dorine Botana

Executive production and press relations: Marisa Abel/Isarte Communication
Information: +1 (347) 982-5070

“New York K-Art Festival”
Small Works Group Exhibition

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 Date: February 19 - March 3, 2023
Reception: February 19, 3-5 PM

The Conduction of Eyesight: Insoo Chun’s Stygian Waves

by Ekin Erkan 

Insoo Chun's work is exemplary of a contemporaneous approach to Ottchil painting, a traditional technique that utilizes natural lacquer and mother-of pearls as its base material. At first glance, viewers may conflate this with the likes of Dansaekhwa, a minimalist and monochrome style of Korean painting that, following its inauguration in the 1970s, has proffered a practice constituted by the meager use of mark, line, and the flattened pictureplane, with textured Stygian and grey-blustered canvases taking the center. However, although Chun’s work admittedly turns backwards in history—towards an admittedly minimalist purview—this is a much more sensitive, detailed minimalism, one that meets its past without remaining beholden to the strictures of orthodoxy. A review of Ottchil is an important preliminary, Ottchil being a natural, traditional material used not only in Korea but also in Japan and China, which offers unique colors and surface finishes. Ottchil artworks were originally made of wood, metal, and hemp, featuring embellishments ranging from Ottchil powder and mother-of-pearl to Korean paper (hanji) and hemp cloth.

Undertaking Ottchil requires a great degree of restraint and patience, as the natural lacquer used is both extremely labor intensive and duly sensitive to temperature and humidity. Such is the cost of returning to a historical painting practice, one at ends with contemporary digital printing techniques and rote machinations that have become common practice for the “just-in time”, Amazon artists of today. Chun’s is a humanist, ambient painting to its core. Not merely the mode of painting but the material is imbricated in labor intensity: this lacquer is a natural varnish made from the sap of lacquer trees (Toxicodendron vernicifluum), native to Asia. The production of lacquerware, a notoriously prolonged and labor-intensive process, has been dubbed an “art of time”, requiring, at minimum, three to four months to complete a single work of lacquerware, which begins with the collection and refinement of the sap.

Such prudent patience, inherent to both the material and mode of Chun’s work, is evident upon viewing the paintings. The works, aptly titled “Flow” (and numbered accordingly) are vast and sprawling—measuring at 140 by 160 centimeters, these are swathes of serpentine, weaving glistening strokes, the heaving wave-crescents here an index of the artist's applicatory movements. In Flow #1, there is are three planes, each creeping beyond the shadows, tucked and enveloped into the most ebony jet of charcoal sable, speckled with gleaming gold flakes (i.e., the mother-of-pearl). One might be reminded of the stars, the abyss of dotted light opposed to the infinitude that is darkness. This is not the darkness of anxiety, of being swallowed up whole. This is a melody, a meditative becoming. My eyes scan across the canvas, following rivulets and ribbons of raven threads. My eyes are gently guided and prodded in the painting's own direction, its internal movement is quiet but any effort to upend it is sure to be stymied. Thus, my eyes are, like maestro's conducting a great philharmonic orchestra, gestured by the artist. With this painting, that direction is upwards, the wave-like crests pooling into a central figure that is crowned by a cloud-like tuft of onyx.

Flow #10 is more brilliant yet, this time a scarfing cast of bright, flaxen dust dividing two wave-like raven waves that twain, destined never to meet. The uproar, if not ocean waves, might reverberate of animated gusts of coal-blithed bloating wind, blazing and breezing only to outburst and surge into gilded atoms. Flow #11 is perhaps the most subdued of the works, as the zenith point is decentered, shifted leftward. This is precisely why Flow #11 best speaks to the mode of conduction that Chun has mastered—the commandeering of how we view these paintings, our eye guided and piloted to the left side, where the peaking act occurs.

Are these figurative works, in some sense? And, if so (a significant “if”, given the quandary of how we might event settle this inquiry), how valuable is this line of questioning? This question has long bedeviled art historians’ examinations of so-called “non-objective” abstract art, though as Robert Slifkin remarks (in reference to debates regarding Abstract Expressionist artworks), "…Action Paintings were first and foremost works of the imagination: fictive, artificial, dramatic, theatrical, and consequently, fundamentally figurative." Slifkin sees the “fundamentally figurative” facet of action paintings as something that Greenbergian self-reflexive medium-specificity and formal autonomy simply cannot account for. For, without this “fundamentally figurative” relationship between abstraction and its representational anchor of meaning unearthed, we are left spinning in the void and deprived of a dialectical conception.

As Alfred Barr famously delineates, there exists a historical tension between abstraction as a verb and abstraction as a noun, where the latter picks out non-objective art (e.g., Malevich) or concrete art that appears to have no relationship to the empirical world (e.g., Theo von Doesberg). But according to art historians like Pepe Karmel, the latter is simply never the case—abstract art always contains an allusion to the empirical world of experience. Consequently, we might take Chun’s Stygian, ink-pooled determinate negation of representation as an Aufheben, or dialectical negation.[1] Consequently, as Karmel argues in his Introduction to Abstract Art: A Global History: 

[T]here is no either/or relationship between abstraction and figuration. Figurative imagery often gains expressiveness by becoming more abstract and abstract imagery derives meaning and power from its figurative associations.

What Karmel highlights is not merely a historical operation where abstraction increasingly negates mimetic operations, however—although as Karmel eruditely demonstrates vis-à-vis case examples like Theo van Doesburg’s Composition VIII (The Cow) (c. 1918) and Malevich’s trajectory from 1915 to 1925, the history of early abstract art is one inextricably tied to the abstract-ing of figurative references. Indeed, representational anchors might even serve as pentimenti, invisible to the naked eye of the abstract art viewer but guiding the artist’s process of abstract-ing. More importantly, however, the dialectical operation in question is, in keeping with Hegel’s phenomenological account of perceptual consciousness, also a psychological, experiential, and embodied operation, bringing the abstract artists’ praxis into the terrain of the viewer’s embodied experience. This is why it is valuable to highlight the expressive power through which the meaning of Chun’s abstract artworks are relayed to its viewers. As Karmel notes, “real-world experience is requires to trigger the making of abstract painting” and “reality provides a necessary stimulus” for both viewer and artist.

This need not be a conscious transaction wherein viewers of abstract works like Chun’s Flow #1 consciously relate it to the rising wave of an ocean crossed by star-slipped fields—the figurative stimulus embedded in the meaning of an abstract artwork can be and often is non-conceptual, non-discursive historical content that unconsciously informs the affective and somatic particularity of the abstract work at hand. I may have seen oceans and starry nights in the past and, upon seeing Flow #1, make an aesthetic judgment about the artwork that relates to these past perceptual experiences without being conscious that I am doing so. As far as the abstract artist is concerned, even if there does not exist an empirical, real-world anchor from which the artist inaugurates their abstraction process, there subsists a visual theme or archetype which combines abstract forms with meanings, where these meanings are generated by associations with the real world. That is, even in the case of so-called “non-objective” artists (and Chun may very well be countenanced as one), who begin with abstract rather than figurative models, the abstract works’ aboutness is ultimately not fully non-objective/abstracted from empirical reality, chiefly due to the aforementioned associative apparatus—consciously or not, referential meaning invariably seeps, matching the rising tides of Chun’s unbreaking Stygian waves. Such is the case due to the perceptual necessity of interpretation or recognition. When this is a conscious operation—such as when I make an aesthetic judgment likening Flow #1 to a figurative, star-crossed ocean—this is an operation of reflective aesthetic judgment that assigns conceptual categories to particular aesthetic elements. This takes place after the work is somatically and “automatically” perceptually received. This is why it is a reflective aesthetic judgment, which seeks to find more general concepts (e.g., “ocean”, “stars”, “night sky”, etc.) under which a set of given particulars (e.g., the deep, dark strokes that rise and the speckled gold flakes) can be reflected.

Critically, the referential apparatus that elicits meaning is not licensed just in the “automatic” and immediate affective experience; meaning arrives thereafter, always too late. Karmel recalls Greenberg’s position from “Modernist Painting” (1960) that genuine art subsists only in a kind of experience that is in keeping with “Kantian immanent experience”. The immanence of materials in Chun’s work is only heightened by the poise and magnitude of size, prodding her into a veritable tradition that Western viewers unfamiliar with Ottchil might liken to Newman and Gottlieb.

Citing Greenberg’s “The Crisis of Easel Painting” (1948) Karmel, in his tome, Abstract Art: A Global History, underscores the New York School’s—and especially Gottlieb, Lewis, and Pollock’s—intentional appropriation of Native American “totemic imagery” that extended “embryonic imagery into an all-over web”, or what Greenberg called the “decentralized”, “polyphonic” painting “that relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves” anticipated by Mondrian, Picasso, Braque, Klee and Italian Futurism but only arrived at by Pollock (amongst others). This “all-over” abstract image, composed of non-discursive elements, is thus demonstrably dependent on historically preceding modes and techniques of figuration, which are dialectically negated. But none of this need be clear to us when we are conducted by Chun’s waves and its pooling, heightening tensing—appreciation of the work is, like its material, is immanent.

 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.

“Lucky Charm” (Dancheong)

By Kate Oh Trabulsi

Exhibition Date: January 21 - 31, 2023
By Appointment only

The Transcendent Wisdom of Worldly Art
Review of Kate Oh Solo Show Lucky Charm

By B. Su Alexander, PhD

“On a journey of ten thousand miles, one is well-serviced to travel with a wise teacher.”
– Lao Tzu

 The unique art of Korean-born artist Kate Oh is imaginative and disciplined, her learned style is like a middle-aged teacher with a world of academic experience, who also knows the need to learn new things, and how to approach intelligently those things she has yet to learn; her professional style attempts to combine elements of a meditative civilization, the culture of her home country, steeped in essence and existence of the transcendent, to marry it with the appeal and commercial power of popular Western culture.

The fascinating theme of her solo show is Lucky Charm, which features Dan-Cheong, an ancient art form inspired by the architectural elements and design patterns in the Korean cultural sphere, but has rarely been seen outside of Korea. However, inside the country it is ubiquitous: roofs of traditional Korean homes, palaces, temples. Here the craft of decoration is transformed as individual works of art displaying themes of longevity, health, wealth, and familial love. Ms Oh does the world a great service by providing an exhilarating window in which this unknown chapter finds its audience in the West and found an excellent way of marketing it to an audience with a theory in which the simple is turned into a valued complex, and the most decorative and artisan element is dressed up with transcendental import.

The theory of her particular and consummate brand of pop art is both playful and intellectually challenging and intriguing, for at first sight this art appears so simple and basic like childish exercises, with great innocence, but make no mistake – under the crafty dress-up of a master teacher the most child-like pattern becomes a sophisticated theoretical construct worthy of Lao Tzu, a synthesis of the profound and the flashy, the old and new, while one obtains the strong sense of direction which awes the viewers with a clean slate upon which to train and build their own dreams of longevity, wealth, and love. As with the teachings of Lao Tzu, which her art shares many parallels, her exhibit is a progress, not a destination, which will make even an expert want to become a child again and play with elementary things anew, under the wise guidance of a teacher, on an extended journey of discovery.

Take the painting “Blue White Modern Photocentric Art” as a fine example of her craft: On a dark background, simple yet devoid of simplicity, there rises abstract and polychromatic flowers into view, quietly as if with longing, with an energy and force like a silent bomb of explosive beauty and intellectual scream, to blast the viewer with a flash of love. The plethora of the details of the flower are variegated and intricate, like a box of pearls that have been collected by a sophisticated rich connoisseur and kept for a lifetime of investment.

It is no secret that Kate Oh has a highly successful career as a teacher. She has been instructing students at Rutgers University in the culture of her native country, introduced and trained them on a variety of artistic styles from Minhwa to traditional Hanja characters, and at her own beautifully-appointed gallery space on Madison Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan's Upper East Side, within a stone's throw from boogie jewelry stores, she has exhibited her students' works on several occasions to great effect and excelling review. This current show displays the artist as a master of superb intellect, a theorist of wealth and love, whose art, even if it cannot make one wealthy and loved, will always make one feel it can do miraculous things, and to become a witness and co-explorer in her singular field of work.

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.  

“Emptying and Filling”

by Kwan-Jin Oh

Exhibition Date: January 3-20, 2023

Betwixt Abstraction and Representation: Kwan Jin Oh’s “Emptying and Filling”

The “moon jar” is a distinctive type of porcelain vessel from the late Joseon period (1392– 1897). The moon jar (viz., dalhangari) is so called due of its form, which was traditionally made by adjoining two hemispherical halves. The joined halves often come to evoke full moons themselves, beaming and blossoming into a mereological whole more sumptuous than their disparate pieces. Kwan Jin Oh's "Emptying and Filling", brimming with paintings of moon jars, is unique for myriad reasons, not least of all the jars’ speckled, toothed chips of paint. This is a notable painterly technique worthy of some analysis à la art history. Consider the extant 16th century Cranach workshop renderings of the Judgment of Paris, each of which similarly contain such ripples of dappled paint squares—these have been earned over time, with art restorers choosing to allow the works to age, chronicling their years. When we look at such works, we are immediately, affectively, and resolutely aware of their status as aged vehicles. But Oh’s paintings, themselves, are new, the earliest painting in this series from 2017. This being a painterly penchant to impute the adorned vessels with a kind of wisdom beyond the medium’s intrinsic nature, Oh has chosen to remind us that the moon jars are relics. The ceramic jars are alighted with life: they appear to swell and heave in these paintings.

The vessels are truly expertly painted, the blush-auburn handles adumbrated against a flat, light-teal foreground. Oh also employs myriad techniques in his works, bringing representational figuration into conversation with abstraction. An impressionistically painted series of bright, pink buds swoop in serpentine fashion, a charcoal-dotted branch disappearing against a bright white orb to the upper right of the canvas. The moon metaphor is here doubled, but stylistically the artist has chosen to give us dimensionality on the one hand and flatness on the other. Oh’s use of flatness against veridical dimensionality truly distinguishes him from contemporaries who so often veer from poetic whimsy and indulgence.

The moon jars threaten to jump out of the canvas, almost photo-realistically painted. There is no question that Oh has proven himself as a talented artist, beyond capable of producing verisimilitude. Hence why going beyond mere studies of jars and artifacts into poetry is the next challenge, and one that the artist meets with fortitude. In one of my very favorite works, two azure birds are perched on the base of the ceramic piece, a twig branching out, their beaks folding into one another. The birds appear to be at play. This could almost be a study of birds copied from nature, as the details of every element are incisively captured. But then the birds are refracted onto the cracked moon’s sun-lit body, prodding us out of the world of figuration and into the media-at-hand: the world of the vessel. For it is, indeed, the vessel that is the central motif in Oh’s works, and these vessels are where the aforementioned cracks and teethed tatters ripple. This repeated choice to return to the being of the vessel means that Oh is not feigning aged paintings beyond their years, imitating the wilting of 16th century Cranachs, but examining how artifacts’ being aged anchors their historical sonority. Just as figuration and abstraction are dovetailed, antiquities and contemporary motifs are brought into a mutual relation.

In his recent excellent New York Review of Books review, "Between Abstraction and Representation", Jed Perl, by my lights one of the numbered genuinely brilliant living art critics, notes that artists like Julie Mehretu have recently attempted to bring elements of abstraction into play with figurative elements, albeit without committing to either mode with vigor. Often, any meaning such “abstract-cum-figurative” works impute requires exegetical intervention—perhaps a title which tells us that Mehretu's squares are stand-ins for "squares where political confrontations have taken place, including Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Red Square in Moscow, Plaza de la Revolución in Havana, and Meskel Square in Addis Ababa, where she [Mehretu] was born and spent her earliest years." Mehretu tell us that her paintings are architectural surveys that pluck from both the great masters of figuration and the twentieth century bulwarks of abstraction but, like Perl, I find myself lost in navigating their meaning. Granted, painting need not always articulate meaning as such—sometimes, the success of a painting subsists on a somatic, affective, phenomenological register. But worse yet, I find myself unaffected by Mehretu’s works, which I find close cousins of what Walter Robinson famously called “zombie formalist” painting—i.e., abstract paintings churned out alongside a coeval over-eager art market. Robinson describes “zombie formalist” paintings as follows:

“Formalism” because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting (yes, I admit it, I’m hung up on painting), and “Zombie” because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s “black paintings,” among other things.

However, I disagree that it is Greenbergian medium-specificity that is revived, for Greenberg—contra the (mis)readings unspooled by the likes of Krauss, Fried, and Fer, amongst others—is genuinely a theorist of the affective, as evinced by Greenberg’s notion of “at-onceness”, outlined in “The Case for Abstract Art” (1959). Greenberg here writes:

 When a picture presents us with an illusion of real space, there is all the more inducement for the eye to do […] wandering […] the whole of a picture should be taken in at a glance; its unity should be immediately evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imagination, should reside in its unity. And this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time. No expectancy is involved in the true and pertinent experience of a painting; a picture […] does not "come out" the way a story, or a poem, or a piece of music does. It's all there at once, like a sudden revelation. This "at-onceness" an abstract picture usually drives home to us with greater singleness and clarity than a representational painting does. And to apprehend this "at-onceness" demands a freedom of mind and untrammeled of eye that constitute "at-onceness" in their own right. Those who have grown capable of experiencing this know what I mean. You are summoned and gathered into one point in the continuum of duration. The picture does this to you, willy-nilly, regardless of whatever else is on your mind; a mere glance at it creates the attitude required for its appreciation, like a stimulus that elicits an automatic response. You become all attention, which means that you become for the moment selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention. The "at-onceness" which a picture or a piece of sculpture enforces on you is not, however, single or isolated. It can be repeated in a succession of instants, in each one remaining an "at-onceness"—an instant all by itself. For the cultivated eye the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word.

 Although Greenberg strikes an arbitrary distinction between abstract artworks and figurative artworks in this essay, abstract representations are here taken to stand in an intentional relationship to our automatic emotional responses, where the latter are embodied appraisals initiated prior to subsequent cognitive monitoring. Insofar as Greenberg is uniquely concerned with the abstract artwork, the evoked emotions are in continuity with the properties of the medium’s formal content. Greenberg distinguishes abstract painting and its reified representational substratum on the basis of abstract painting driving home its “at-onceness”—i.e., the stimulus-response that elicits an “automatic”, all-encompassing, selfless sense of identification with the object of our attention. Nevertheless, suspicious readers may take this somatic description to be something of an outlier in Greenberg’s thinking. However, in his 1960s notes from “How Art is Acquired”, Greenberg reinforces this point by underscoring the “surrendering” of “attention” that accompanies our apprehension of “authentic art”. (This reading of Greenbergian affectivity is brilliantly captured in Daniel Neofetou’s recent book, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (2021), which I cannot recommend highly enough). Rather, and I do think Robinson is on to something, “zombie formalist” artworks lack the authenticity that is indexed by the somatic response that the great abstractionists of yore (viz., Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, van Doesburg, the Helhesten/CoBrA artists, Hofmann, Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Still, Lewis, Delaney, Krasner, Motherwell, Newman, Frankethaler, to name just a few)—invited. I shan’t name any names, but there is an unfortunate veering towards flatness and tepidness in much of the abstraction of the past fifty years, with notable exceptions like the late, great French Stygianist Pierre Soulages. This is met by an unfortunate turn towards figuration, recently baptized “New Figuration”, which trades solely on the exhibition-value of the artists’ identity, betraying the autonomy from heteronomy that Trotsky, Rosenberg, and Adorno all recognized.

 All of this brings me back to Kwan Jin Oh. Oh is not an abstractionist, proper. Nor if such a figurative artist, proper. That he has not committed to either camp in full is all for the better. Oh makes use of abstraction, in continuity with figuration, bringing elements of both into a latticework that is affectively effective. The affective response I feel from these paintings is, granted, quiet, but is a low, sustained rumble—a peaceful prodding and humming that invokes the very poetry that these aged moon jar vessels, so craftily plucked and imprinted, croon. This shows that there can indeed be a melodious act of intertwining abstraction and figuration. In this case, it is songlike.

by Ekin Erkan, PhD

UES Minhwa Exhibition

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

The Pictorial Representation of Characters

            Historically speaking, characters carry distinct importance in many East Asian cultures, influencing not only the particularities of the language, but often the conceptual understandings of the cultural entities themselves. In detail, Hanja characters in Korean, which originated from Chinese, are pictographic representations, which means that the words are constituted as pictograms, rather than spelled out with letters of an alphabet. And although Hanja characters are very infrequently used in today's Korean society, at least in everyday life, they still command literary and aesthetic value.

            And because of this artistic significance, there is a beautiful tradition to create paintings that display the meaning of characters pictographically. This is indeed a fascinating way of conceptual representation, which is both particular as well as universal. It is particular because the depiction of the characters is specific to the language involved; and at the same time, it is also universal because when rendered in a painting, the graphical representation can convey the meaning to all audiences regardless of their familiarity with the language. Thus, in a sense, it is the best of both worlds.   

            The Korean Folk Traditions Exhibition gives us a wonderful proof of this dual concept. In this show, which includes both Korean artists and students of a Korean Traditions class at Rutgers University, displays paintings which are cleverly grouped around the theme of characters, conveying great technical balance and polish. Paintings of stunning pictographs are revealed, one after another, often in exquisite detail, and both the rendition of the characters and the graphical transformation flow organically and brilliantly.

            For instance, in a composition by Kate Oh, there is a rendition of the character for faithfulness, or loyalty, which contains a radical of the word “heart” at the bottom. Graphically speaking, it is a character that shows flowing harmony and intrigue at the same time. The radical for heart is ingeniously executed with three animals: clam, fish, and shrimp, which together represent auspices of the concept of the heart. These auspicious animals all surround a central black stroke of the heart character which stand like a sturdy trunk of a unshakable tree, representing quite graphically the central concept of loyalty.

            In addition, the rest of the upper part of the character showcases a beautiful dragon, which is of importance in the East Asian cultural tradition. This brightly scaled dragon winds around the central stroke of the character and, as if turning in its powerful gaze, harks downward, while its long tail emerges in an innovative swing out of the mouth of the fish. This remarkable emergence shows the great continuity inherent in the concept of loyalty – a continuity which can be said of all the paintings of the organic manifestation of this exhibit.

By B. Su Alexander, PhD

“Populist Animals”

by Heemin Moon

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

Heemin Moon’s Populist Animals

Visual art history and visual art appreciation is plagued by a serious problem, which we might call the “specialist problem”. The “specialist problem” is that of interpreting and appreciating a visual artwork that, at least upon its immediate reception, confounds viewers: what is the meaning of a minimalist, blanche-white work by Choong Sup Lim, for instance? The “specialist problem” is particularly rife in works like Sherrie Levine’s and Richard Prince’s re-photography, as well as much of abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art. Occasionally, such works may be visually pleasing to non-specialist audiences and elicit genuine interest but it is also the case that, without the art historical context of twentieth century appropriation (as inaugurated by Duchamp), re-appropriation, and art theory, many of these works are robbed of their due complexities. What is then left is, on the one hand, representational realism, the likes of those photorealist bastions who elicit high praise for their technical vim. On the other hand are artists whose works could, as the overwrought platitude goes, have just as easily been “constructed by my child.” The “specialist problem” is thus also of a piece with myriad questions concerning populism in the arts—are these conceptually-stoked and often inaccessible artworks made exclusively for the intelligentsia? If so, we risk the dilemma of painting losing its place amongst the masses and therein relegated to academia while more popular forms of entertainment like cinema and music take its place. In fact, I have long maintained that if we were to ask a randomly selected rider from the subway what their favorite work of painting or sculpture is, they very well may not have a response; nevertheless, if we were to ask the same subway rider what their favorite movie or song is, they very likely would have a response (and likely could even substantiate their choice with reasons pertaining to the movie/song). 

That the visual arts—i.e., painting and sculpture—have fallen out of populist favor is by no means the fault of the masses. Nor is it necessarily a fault that we can ascribe to artists like Mel Bochner, Sherrie Levine, or Mike Bidlo, who implore conceptual questions worth thinking through. The fault lies in myriad directions that are, in the last instance, circumscribed by the machinations of so-called “contemporary capitalism,” where an increasingly autonomized working class is poised contra the “art historically educated” collector/academic art history class. How, then, do we respond to this quandary? Do we simply accept that painting and sculpture have been largely outpouched, relegated to the same specialist fate as Shakespeare and classical music? And if we do not want to accept this fate, what, then, can artists themselves do to relieve this unfortunate trajectory? Heemin Moon's art practice, imbricated in the aesthetics of familiarity and innovation, provides one possible answer, charting a veritable path for culling non-specialist audiences into art appreciators.

Heemin Moon is a three-dimensional artist whose work makes use of innovative technological approaches to sculpture. His work dovetails sculpture with architecture, as Moon's works proffer designs derived from his surroundings (e.g., animals). However, these characters are simultaneously steeped in the patterns and forms of digitality. Thus, although Moon's subjects—often dogs, but also reindeer, birds, and other such wild animals—are plucked from the wilderness, they are composed with boxy plating and patterns. Stygian and gray stripes may coat the chest plating of a perched dog whose eyes are patterned a cerulean gingham. The legs of one of Moon's archetypal deer are heavyset and blockish. An eagle reveals the inside of their outspread wings: a patch of cobalt blue outpouring into cyan pointed triangles. These are not animals of the so-called "natural world" but digital creatures typified by sharp angles. Yet what makes them accessible to non-specialist art viewers, and thus truly unique, is their delicate balance of familiarity. Indeed, we know at once that Moon’s sculptures are animals but also recognize that what they achieve is distinct from that which photorealist painting and precise sculptural recreations could accomplish. As Moon has noted elsewhere, his art practice is guided by the belief that art must retain elements that reflect "the essence of life and familiarity that everyone can approach easily". This approachability is much needed in a contemporary art sphere that has increasingly come to alienate popular audiences. Furthermore, we desperately need an approach to art-making that does not simply replicate the aesthetics of pop art while retaining its guiding ethos. Moon achieves this with great dexterity.

I would be remiss if I did not underscore that Moon’s works are, simply put, charming. Moon's dogs, in particular, invoke a curious mix between childhood memories of Neopets and robot toy puppies with high art: the shadowy bulldog, one of Moon's smaller works, invokes a futuristic design that is characteristically charismatic. The lion, one of Moon’s more gargantuan sculptures, towers at a height of 54 inches, its leafy-lush mane cast in a verdant blaze. Moon's most extensive series are sculpture of dogs, with the Pollock-esque Dalmatian’s pattern being one of my personal favorites. Notably, the animals are stripped of their orifices and, instead, what remains is their form. However, this "form" is translated from smooth surfaces into geometric vectors: squares, hexagons, and trapezoids abound. These unique pieces, on display at Kate Oh Gallery for viewers to enjoy, will undoubtedly appeal to audiences interested in novel approaches to sculpture and non-specialists, alike. This is, indeed, a noteworthy undertaking.

By Ekin Erkan, PhD

“Infinitely Repelling Orbs”

by Marko Stout

“Let There Be Light”

by Chris Gocong and Rod Lathim

Exhibition Date : November 3rd - 25th, 2022

Transmedia exhibit Let There Be Light brings for the first time the multidisciplinary oeuvre of three collaborative West Coast artists to Manhattan. Probing the interaction between light and matter, their neon-transformed paintings and sculptures combine the ethereal dimensions of light art with the whimsical accessibility of pop culture, reinterpreting contemporary styles through an organic lens and provoking a witty thesis about creativity and spiritual growth.  

About the curator
Benjamin Alexander is an art historian and international curator who has worked for Jenny Holzer Studio (USA), Pearl Lam Galleries (Hong Kong), Tina Keng Gallery (Taiwan), and published a monograph through Skira Editore (Italy); Benjamin holds a bachelor's in philosophy and a doctorate in electrical engineering.

“Let There be Light"—The Flicker as Bridge
by Ekin Erkan, PhD
Philosopher and Academic
Columbia University

Chris Gocong and Rod Lathim are two West-coast artists who have historically collaborated, and this exhibition finds their collaboration coming to an apotheosis. Kate Oh’s new exhibition, "Let There be Light", attempts, in the artists' words, to proffer a "continuous process of growth". How exactly, does this growth come to be, then, and what is it that grows? My answer is: the flicker, which grows not in size or pronouncement, but in vigor and vim. This is accomplished through subtlety and playfulness—by making the flicker but an apparatus and not the primary material.

However, before we settle on this motif, is important to be honest. Indeed, the two artists are distinct in their chosen styles and approaches: Gocong is primarily a portrait artist while Lathim creates sculptures. Yet there is also a striking point of collective closure between the two that reveals itself in this exhibition. This is the use of light as a faint gesture, attenuating it into a flicker. The flicker is not the light that transpires in figurative modes—which, indeed, is necessarily at play in Gocong’s portraiture. Rather, it is light as an extraneous element in Gocong’s portraits of Basquiat and light as it informs the entirety of Lathim’s sculptural practice. Such is a light that suggest movement (suggesting, and not directing, for we are in the realm of still images and the plastic arts—not moving images).

Consider Gocong’s portrait of Basquiat. There are a few direct art historical sources that immediately come to mind—Warhol’s portraits and the expressionist tradition of Soutine and company. Basquiat’s frizzled hair is painted in thick blue that almost veers towards layers of impasto; his skin is blanched plum-red, and the background comes apart at the seams, the edges of the shoulders and face fading into unsure limits. This underscores the pulpy fleshiness of the subject, made all the more pronounced by the forceful brushwork—smears of rose shades, blotched cyan, and grey-white streaks that resemble smudged panels. Yet none of this is where light pervades, for this is all anchored in the realm of dimensional hardness. Rather, it is to the upper left of Basquiat’s fact and the lower right of his cheek where creases of sunny-colored, near-neon light zig and zag, such that light becomes a pervasive force.

This motif recurs in Gocong’s portrait of Bowie, the Starman icon’s famous thunderbolt now re-rendered in teal and violet outlines—the twin stripe pared to its lineal edges. In Memonto Mori, we see light crowning the skull—the famous signifier of mortality that brings us into contact with the fleeting possibility, or grim lack thereof, of an afterlife. The flicker is here of a piece with light. It is the bridge between the two artists. The flicker perfectly distills the world electricity, of movement, settling us into the overpass that guides Lathim’s neon microcosm.

With Lathim, the art historical anchor is Chryssa, the great luminist who brought neon, barcades, and the implications of the red light district to the stature of high art. But where Chryssa worked exclusively with neon qua pictography, for Lathim it is but one element amongst many in his sculptures. In one particularly evocative work. a collaboration with painter George V. Wolf, a vampiric jester features prominently, their drag-suited purple makeup striking jarring, sharp contours. Their horns, like those of a gargantuan antelope, plume to the heavens. Emerald-apple hoop earrings loop and a wispy crimson scarf shoulders strands of Stygian hair. Even here, where the flicker is made literal vis-à-vis neon furnishings, it is utterly subtle—it indicates, underscores, and suggests but is not overwhelming. In turn, Gocong and Lathim play with light and manipulate it, without becoming overpowered by it. This subtlety is what makes the works playful.

“Photography Exhibition”

by Peter Ha (Jaeyell)

Exhibition Date: October 20th - 30th, 2022

Ha Jae-yell’s Dusted Photographs

Ha Jae-yell’s background in visual design and advertising design seemingly informs his photography, albeit in a mode entirely distinct from Pop Art, and much more subtle. What visual design and advertising teaches the nascent practitioner is an attention to composition: that any work of art should be informed not only by its subject matter or stylization but, with equal vigor, the “cut-out” or framing of the subject. When a photographer undertakes their selection process and, for instance, chooses to take flora or fauna as their subject matter, they are presented with a framing question: what is to be left “offscreen”, so to speak, and thus relegated to the imaginary? What, then, is to be visually presented? Which trees should loom quietly, understood as excessive, and where should poetry blossom? This also brings to bear a much more subtle issue, which is that of editing. For, indeed, framing is a kind of editing. Traditionally, when we think of editing, whether executed with digital software (e.g., Brad Troemel, JODII, and other such net/post-internet artists) or in an analog sense (e.g., Kunie Sugiura), we think of an art-object, perhaps a photograph, that is manipulated after its subject has already been captured. However, the very choice of what will be captured and,consequently, what will not be captured, is also an editing choice—one which belongs to the aesthetic vision of the artist, and hence profoundly informs their artwork-to-come. And it isout of such editing/framing issues that Ha Jae-yell’sphotography proffers ethereally-bedaubed profundity, casting magicscapes and adumbrated fantastical scenographies out of the natural world.

Remarking on his art practice, Ha notes that:

"The world’s orthodox flow of photographic art places importance on the originality of the artist. All of [my] works are taken as-is with ‘storytelling’ incorporated into them, giving them this artistic vitality. The ability to capture a moment that can express the ‘story' of silence that nature tells at that instance, speaks to the artist's ability”. 

These works often take utility poles, the Winter sky, crinkled tree leaves, crescent moons, and barbed wire as their subjects. But, contra the Dusseldorf School of photography and myriad other photographers interested in the aesthetics of banality, Ha steeps these objects into wonderous, breathtaking compositions. Compressing the pictureplane such that the background and central object are woven into a bustling, flat latticework, Ha’s photography does not lure us back into the natural world of the naked eye but prods us into revisiting. There is a moodiness—an elegant, shadow-scoped luminescence—that quietly shimmers in his muted works. 

In one particularly riveting photo, strands of Stygian tree branches braid and careen into one another like nettle-bitten spiderwebs sewn into a loose basket. A tangerine-tinged night sky blooms below—yet barely below, for recall the compression act; through the lower third of the photograph we see a series of fluorescent rectangles. Then we realize this is a skyscraper buried in the trees. Other works herald fewer indices anchored inthe empirical world of recognizability. An hoary, silver-dusted photograph breathes ripples: it seems that these could belong to the sky or the sea. Only peering through the drab-dusted shadows can we make our reeds, soothing us into a river or lake.In yet another equally-nightlit photograph, we see naked, raspy tree stems spiraling and spraining against an invisible wind. A fleck of light dances above a dry branch—perhaps the moon twinkling her cheek or a star piercing the smog-sifted eve. If poetry were ever translated into photography, it is here that the act of version comes alive. Revealing and unveiling, these photographs are quiet, serene blanched stories ready for the pruning and plucking.

by Ekin Erkan, PhD 

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.

“Wild and Pure in New York”

by Park Doo

Exhibition Date: Oct 11th - 19th, 2022

The Art of Leaving Things Undone
By Benji Su Alexander, PhD

Viewing an abstract painting by Park Doo is like experiencing a virgin scenery at first light of day. On pure canvases, white as fields of snow, widely-spaced brushstrokes part the landscape like breezes of wind. Leaves are turning with gentle rhythms. The colors are earthy yet never boring; forms swerve in myriad directions without appearing chaotic. And yet the viewer, ambling through a gallery transformed into a field of grass, taking in the curious space shining through the canvas, encounters both the certainty of abstract forms and the unexpected joys of being spontaneous. At once wandering and still, the mind is brought by the compositions into a different natural world, one where the forms and shapes of external reality are reshaped into the inner mind of the artist. Here, far away from the hustle and bustle of contemporary society, the world is lost in ever deepening contemplation, a never-ending process that takes as its end goal the journey itself. 

It is a journey that requires patient study, for at first glance, the viewer will feel that the wild and raucous brushstrokes render the paintings unfinished. The artist himself used to describe his work in a witty, humorous, almost self-deprecatory manner: "What could this be?”, he wondered. “Why would something that wouldn’t even go on a small canvas be put on such a large one. Somehow this 'art' looks like it should not be on such a large canvas.” In his paintings, indeed, the artist aims for more than surface appearance. The appearance of imperfection is the key feature of the artist's aesthetics; in achieving imperfection, the artist is striving for the perfect way of leaving things undone.   

Having studied at Musashino Art University in Tokyo and worked at Kyungwoon University for 17 years, Korean-born painter Park Doo is a dedicated disciple of East Asian art theory. He has professed a passion for the teachings Dong Qichang, a Ming Dynasty painter and art theorist who advocated for personal expression over formal skills and emphasized self-cultivation of the artists' character – Dong claimed that an artist should read ten thousand books and travel four thousand miles. Park has followed this intellectual guide with such obsession that he prefers to have shows outside of his native country, Korea, so that he can travel four thousand miles many times over (he cheekily notes that the distance between Seoul and Europe is roughly four thousand miles). More importantly, Park understands the true meaning of Dong's philosophy, the essence that lies beneath the surface: the experiencing of the journey is more essential than the destination.

For Park, this journey is all about imperfection through perfect spontaneity. Dong argued that art is more than representing reality and imitating nature; its highest expression is only reached when skill and all formal aspects become subservient to bringing out the true character of the artist, which can only be attained in moments of sudden inspiration and spiritual enlightenment. Imitating nature is only scratching the outward appearance of the world, itself inadequate to contain the inner universe of the artist's mind. The task of the artist in honing their skills, Dong insisted, is to cultivate their character; only a worthy character is worthy of artistic activity. Dong created landscapes with intentionally distorted spatial features, which today would be recognized as elements of abstraction; through these unorthodox works, as well as his calligraphy, he expressed his own unique mind. 

Taking Dong's teachings to heart, Park is very keen about not imitating or representing nature in his paintings. But these are not merely works of abstraction; defining them as such would be a limiting exercise and a severe misreading of the artist's philosophical tradition. Instead, the viewer will find it much more enlightening if they approach his art through the lens of his intellectual teachers: in following the exquisitely spontaneous outpouring of the brushstrokes, in pondering their imperfection and incompleteness, we can appreciate that the journey always comes before the destination.   

About the Critic: Benji Su Alexander, PhD 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. 

Alberto Murillo

Exhibition Date: October 2-8, 2022

On the Aesthetics of Interior Decoration as Abstraction

 Famously, the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s increasingly pursued a humanist purview, albeit in myriad directions. On the one hand were those like Rothko (1903-70), Gottlieb (1903-74), and Newman (1905-1970) who, drawing from myriad philosophical influences, pursued the possibility of transcending the human condition by way of the “sublime”—the paradoxical experience of being simultaneously overwhelmed and exalted. While these artists adopted a penchant for color field painting, other Abstract Expressionist compatriots in the 1950s, such as Willem De Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-62), and Lee Krasner (1908-84) drew their attention to the anguish and banality of the human psychological condition through the use of the abstract gesture.

Alberto Murillo (b. 1974), a self-taught painter who began his career in interior design, gives us paintings which are closer to the first tradition than the latter. Interior design is perhaps the most marked non-art historical force detectable here, however—these works, upon a quick glance, have a clean arrangement to them that is markedly domestic. Yet rather than incorporate textile products plucked from the home, Murillo embraces novel types of industrial aesthetics valued for their extra-aesthetic properties and utilitarian potential. Works like Red Dust and UnderWater— the former being acrylic on canvas and the latter high gloss enamel on canvas—utilize vibrant, glistening panels in blocked arrays that unspool architectural vim and structural cohesiveness. There is a certain neatness to these works that reminds viewers of Claes Oldenburg and Eva Hesse, both of whom, like Murillo, experimented with the structural (and, thus, sculptural) potential of vinyl and fiberglass. Unlike the aforementioned twentieth century artists, however, Murillo's compositions are redolent of the architecture of Spain—for me, it is Spanish Colonial Revival architecture that most readily makes itself known in these works; not through any structural similarities but through sun-kissed palettes and plates of sea-swept blue upon sand-bitten apricot planes.

Yet another critical influence is that of Pop Art, which is squared not in the aesthetics of the sublime nor the phenomenology of painting, but that of reappropriation. The great art critic and philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, asked the question why an object, such as a Brillo Box, which in any other environment would not be recognized as an art object, is received as such in the gallery context? The answer, albeit more involved than this reductive rehearsal, related to the “art world” and its myriad theoretical resources, as well as the gallery/art-institutional framing. Murillo, however, does not give us any such direct resources which point to objects that we would encounter out in the world and are appropriated with such ontological queries to boot. It is, instead, the clean-edged, hard-nosed aesthetics of Pop Art which infect Murillo’s paintings. In some sense, Murillo’s proximity to both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art brings him closest to the world of artists like Claes Oldenburg who, in works like his 1960s series of Candy bars, dovetails the prismatic, splatter-strewn rivulets of Abstract Expressionism with those of recognizable Pop Art motifs. Such commercial products and their coeval seep through Murillo’s own art practice, albeit ushered into the twenty-first century. Indeed, while works like American Pride (2017) recall Jasper Johns' own renderings of the flag, Murillo discerns his art practice from conceptual artist like Michael Bidlo and Richard Prince, who appropriate the appropriators, by way of color schemes, such that it is not the ontological question that looms large but an aesthetic one. American Pride, for instance, features an uneven, azure, almost milky-blue field upon which the fifty stars are strewn, discerning it from Jasper’s flags. This is, perhaps, the most readily "Pop Art" piece in Murillo's cannon, although works like Ray of Sunshine (2022) and Siesta del Sol (2022) do recall the flat, two-dimensional commercial aesthetics that populate myriad advertising platforms—particularly those of our new media digital epoch.

Murillo’s paintings are also soothing. The surfaces often contain carved slivers: hoary grays, tangerine oranges, and cascading marrons. These slivers are almost rainbow-like boxes—little sets furnished with acrylic or polymer emulsion that, in the artist’s own works, “are liquid skins that can be pulled, pushed,” before being coated with resin. The finished product is crisp and luminescent—far from the world of natural beings and organic elements, these almost appear to be digitally rendered. Works like My Japanese Garden do, admittedly, at times, point to the natural world: the pear-like shapes could either be garden stones or fruits ready to pluck and table. The array of color fields that are layered on top of one another, however, prod these quasi-fruits/stones quite far from the empirical realm of natural objects. Mustard yellow and dusted brown shavings splinter and intersect. Murillo’s work, compendiously exhibited at Kate Oh Gallery, show a distinctively novel direction for abstraction today.

By Ekin Erkan, PhD

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.

“Invisible Women”
by Angels Grau

Exhibition Date: October 2-8, 2022

The nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison's magnum opus Invisible Man –  a young African American male – proclaims that the society which he was born into, which counted him as a citizen, effaces people like him. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” addresses the narrator the reader at the beginning of the novel, “Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.” The existential invisibility acts like a noose around the narrator's neck. Rather than being alive, he is relegated to wander as a specter, both of the world yet unrecognizable in the world. As people only see him through his skin, the body, the face, and the true self are therefore rendered immaterial and exist only as social constructs. This remarkable limbo of an identity is both a curse and a gift for him, as he finally retreats into an underground space to seek his identity in isolation. This sentiment, magnified on stark canvases rising from the floor, and transformed by the contemporary theory of intersectionality, is echoed powerfully in the paintings of Angels Grau.

Her series, aptly titled “Invisible Women” pays tribute to the inheritance of minorities, and the phantom of invisibility, which so gripped Ralph Ellison. The poltergeist-like faces lack all features: a person most individual organs, the eyes, the nose, and the mouth appear to be torn off so as to leave a haunting blankness of a contour that contemplatively peers at the viewer. The colors, often in the hues of red or white, look worn, and even faded. As a result, the featureless canvas appears as an empty blackboard whose writings have been wiped clean, with only bare residues remaining. Even the shapes of the faces are reduced to mere geometry: ovals and circles whose upper section has been cut off, as if by a razor.

Grau's constricting minimalism forces the depicted people into signs and categories. Nothing is specific, for specificities have been eliminated, effaced, deemed irrelevant. Indeed, this aesthetics of elimination is particularly evident in the formal techniques of the painting: through the subtle layers of color, the viewer sees traces of color which seem to have been washed away. In a revelatory passage on Grau's website, the artist confides, "I paint by superimposing layers of different colors and intensities which I eliminate with water in a healing process to convey my message.” The washing away, in particular, has religious connotation. Water and baptism are essential elements of Christian soteriology whose tradition undoubted has been influential in the Catalan region where the artist grew up. If one believes that sins could be washed away through baptism, then similarly, the sins and bloodshed of racial strife perhaps could be cleansed, purifying the wounds of one's identity, and a new process of healing may begin.   

Yet the forbidding austerity of Grau's portraits suggest that any reconciliation and progress may be a tall order, and could not happen before work is done in an neglected arena: that of intersectional identity. The theory of intersectionality posits that discrimination is not one dimensional and that race and gender, along with other factors, combined have unexpected impact. People who identify both as female and black, for example, will be affected differently than people who identify as only female or only as black. While Grau's work pay tribute to Ellison's Invisible Man, the issues it raises cannot simply construed as extensions of Ellison's problems, nor are they derivative, for they contain specifics of the female experience which can only be addressed in the context of intersectionality. The multiple identities that have been effaced from both society and the canvases of Grau's paintings will continue to haunt present generations.

by Ekin Erkan, PhD

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.

“An Artist Who Paints From the Heart”

by Yang Si Young

September 25 - Oct 1, 2022

The Mysteries of Urban Life

An art-loving New York City resident can be no stranger to renditions of urban life. At their best, such paintings immerse the senses in the exuberant energy of a metropolis that attracts myriad tourists and dream seekers to bask in its rambunctious vivacity. In fact, one may be so inured to this universal narrative that it has become difficult to discover anything new, and one ought to be forgiven for sometimes equating this genre with hotel art – prints of cliched compositions mass-produced and available at a mouse click on Amazon.com. Is the painting investigating the urban condition dead? Not so, argues the youthful Korean-born artist and New York resident Yang Si Young. His newest show at the Kate Oh Gallery on Madison Ave, brimming with faces he's encountered in the city as well as the world stage, represent an intelligent study of urban mysteries.

In Yang's paintings, colors are earthy yet never static; lines radiate elliptical, sprawling, yet never chaotic. Raucous brushstrokes and delicate contours collide to produce compositions that are purposefully made to appear unplanned, even incomplete. They hail squarely from the tradition of folk art rather than pop art. To be clear, these paintings are not of buildings and bridges, not of skylines or iconic statues. These constitute intimate portraits of subway riders and street people, of Manhattan strangers and studio models. Even images of billboard faces are rendered in such a down-to-earth style as if they evoke someone you know, someone you've passed by looking out from the bus, gently revealing the urban condition from the inside. They eschew the intensity of a dog-eat-dog urban existence, something that is too familiar, for a personalized and organic grammar based on curiosity and respect. You may peer at the same composition for a while and still not have quite figured out the precise interior world these faces represent: they provoke questions rather than provide answers. And, before long, a rather fantastical realization will arrive: you're looking through a different pair of eyes than your own.

Yang is very open about the distinctiveness of his eyes. On his website, the Gen-Z artist confides that he was diagnosed with autism and developmental disabilities, and while unable to speak even when he was five years old, he nonetheless started painting at that age. Facing a significant language barrier, any child would struggle with relating to others and have others relate to them. Yang struggled with finding his own identity in a society where being who you are is not always taken for granted. Making art, and using his eyes, was therefore the spiritual salvation he found in a world dominated by language. The silent faces of his paintings indeed seem to speak not words relating to our daily experience, or sentences expressing common meaning, but a syntax of its own fashioning, and of its own reality, which despite its ghostly and even hermetic appearance we can listen to keenly because the sounds of this language are delightfully relatable.

It is therefore quite apt that Yang calls himself a “heartism artist.” This peculiar word, likely a neologism, immediately conjures up an interior world of intimate nature. And although we may not know the precise meaning of this new ism, we can appreciate its delicate insinuations, its invitation for us to find relationships between us and the people on the paintings, and to reexamine common identities with fresh eyes. In an attempt to illuminate heartism, the critic Jun-Seok Jang from the Korean Art Criticism Research Director writes that Yang's world seems to be “composed of multiple relationships with life, death, delight, pleasure, beyond the aesthetic phenomenon built from the relation between artist and objects. He visualizes the inspiration, which he felt [...] before drawing a picture, into a formative image by re-illuminating through his inner mind.”

To peer through the oblique window Yang has provided us is to probe the faces and relationships we've always taken for granted. Common faces that pass us by fleetingly reemerge as charming apparitions that flicker with strange rhythms, as uncanny traces of people we wish we knew.

Images one glimpses on billboards and walls suddenly intrigue us not because they are cliched and humorous but because they look like images transformed into real people captured by keen eyes. In a urban world where everyone seems to struggle with maintaining their identities, these paintings hint at the opposite: finding a new identity may be easier than keeping your old self.  

By Benji Su, PhD

Benji Su Alexander, PhD 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.

“Expressionist Scenes of Harrow”
by Nancy Prager

September 6-23, 2022

One immediately feels at home with Nancy Kamel, this very gracious, graceful and spirited lady. Our three hours flew with as we spoke mostly about things philosophical and metaphysical, sharing experiences broad in range. The World Trade Center attack was gone and over again, this being the month of November, with the memories still very fresh. Nancy had been below the Towers during the devastation, trapped in the subway for two hours during their collapse. The passengers, could smell the smoke but knew nothing of the events going on above them. I could see this has had a profound effect upon Nancy, changing direction, as evident in the newer material done after Sept. 11.

Nothing I had been told about the works of art prepared me for the wealth of creative energy I saw at Nancy’s Southhampton home/studio that afternoon during the Christmas Holiday week. A tour of the house, room to room, brought to life over thirty years of Nancy’s paintings. Large and small statements bright with color, contrast and movement. Three-dimensional works, watercolors, oils and multi-media pieces all took their rightful positions on the walls of the artist’s home.

During the course of my stay, I learned that Nancy had been painting since childhood. After graduating Syracuse University, she attended Cooper Union. She has shown extensively in Manhattan and won the prestigious Le Prix de Paris award early in her career during her first major exhibition in Europe in 1975. Many important museum and collections own her works. Each work communicated clearly it’s visual story, individually competing for my attention. Complete sentences of visual thought. Rich in symbolism, metaphor and personal iconography, all combining a balance and definition of line that delivered classical and well-developed personal statement.

By the use of softly muted forms Nancy finds light from an unknown source — a technique used by other accomplished Impressionists. Working toward an abstracted field, Nancy’s work stated a rich personal atmosphere — a statement about life that profiles her lifetime journey as an artist. Punctuating each segment in a her own distinct abstract impressionism, Nancy embraces her internal movement and reactions. They are released on canvas, resulting in a poignant and fresh picture of the moment she is sharing. Landscapes, portraits, and scenes all side-stepping and superficial. The hue of colors, pattern and form allow the emotion and movement in the artists’ eye to be absorbed by the viewer, never insisting that the viewer see as Nancy has seen, but opening the door artistically for the osmosis to occur between viewer and artist. There is an alchemy of thought, a chemistry that occurs in her paintings. The form, color, light and subject are given animation in a non-obtrusive way. Great sophistication is achieved in a very simple and classic approach to subject and medium.

With a sensuality that is not blatant, Nancy sculpts the icon — the anima — of the feminine body in paint. Gentle vibrant color is sometimes employed and somber shadows are invoked for the purpose of creating mood. When warm pastels, such as peach, rose, light sapphire and a slate gray are applied to the works, subtle emotion is conveyed in the depiction of this nude trilogy (Life and Death). Possibly the self is seen catching a glimpse of its own existence? The nude reclining torso in bright yellow with bright flowers, red, whit and blue becomes one with an earthy background of burnished color. No special emphasis is placed here other than the statement of how good this feels. In Tarot, the man with his crown on is a king in repose. Drifting into the reflection of his thoughts, one notes here the space between reality of the reflection and the haunting undercurrent he is experiencing.

Moonlight Escapade features two women in a doorway. One standing, one sitting turned away from the other. All around them turns toward the darkness, although it appears to be waiting for a turbulence needing to be brought on by action. This painting is particularly calms and set in the moment. Time, space and conditions of life have not yet been set into action. Possibly they are recovering from some former event — both parties taking this time to see a perspective and share an experience in whatever light is available. Nothing is spoken, so that this piece of life stands on it’s own outside of time.

In Erudite, A woman is reading a book. Her back drop is a fabric of white with bright red flowers. The black of her outfit is emphasized by the color. Once again there is a tranquility in this repose. But the accent of yellow at the bottom of her pant leg and the dancing flowers tell of the mental state of the reader. Active vibrant and happy. It seems to be good to read one’s book on a warmish day while sitting on your front porch.

By Jamie Ellin Forbes, Fine Art magazine

The Movements Of Our Roots
by Anely Girondin

Anély Girondin, a young artist hailing from Haiti, is showing a series of works at Kate Oh Gallery. The works, many of which are monochromatic minimalist pieces penned on paper with India ink, recall silhouettes and rivulets of the wondrous and wild. Prodigious stems spring forth—whether they plume from trees, rope, or elsewhere is left unanswered. At times, Girondin’s bustling scenographies include patches of more figurative elements, with recognizable vines and branches breaking into serpentine forms that recall natural semblances. Curated together, the works seem minimal from a distance. However, upon approaching any one piece, the viewer is struck by the detail that Girondin imbricates her work in.

Stygian trickles of ink bow into one another, proffering different forms: at times, they recall torn-heeled branches, crooning into crooked hooks and vines, like the strings of a grape tree outcast along the wall of a forlorn and forgotten brick building. A number of the works are admittedly more minimal and ambiguous, comprised of patterns reflected and refracted, repeated into haecceities. Other pieces also veer towards more representational terrain. In one such piece, the artist centers the torso of a nude figure, their back turned towards are view; the figure is here shrouded in blossoming flora and fauna, a snake-like river of undulating trickles crowning her body. Despite their two-dimensionality and their neglect for anchoring us in the empirical, recognizable world, there is a serene naturalism to these works that is omnipresent.

A few of the works do also sport colors, however. Hence, Girondin’s realm is not one exasperated of chromatic landscapes altogether—they merely do not follow a detectable order.  One such extravert piece features flaxen yellow strips and a deep, cobalt blue that bursts beyond any kept borders; like strings, these colorful elements fall, a downcast pooling waterfall or cascade pluming kaleidoscopic threads. Whether the reams rise like smoke or descend like plopping beads of water in a pool is left open—gravity has little presence here. My favorite works are these prismatic pieces bursting with colors: crimson and cherry red linealities pierce through patches of verdant green and bluster brown. Any natural scenography gestured at is here made alien, with Girondin proffering an otherworldly array that could just as easily be a patch of wilderness sloping and, in serpentine fashion, plotting to thwart the canvas. Each work is a rebellious act, with deracinating elements of fantastical creation disparately presented, background and foreground collapsed into a dashed array.

At first glance, one might be tempted to liken Girondin’s works to those of Kara Walker. After all, like Walker, Girondin has a penchant for minimal black silhouettes. Nevertheless, Walker is closer to the world of representational realism than Girondin, and this is an important point of departure between the two artists. Famously, Walker’s silhouettes are of figures chosen to index epochs—often the darkest moments of world history and, in particular, Western history, which is of a piece with the history of capitalism and imperialism. Following Walker, these figures, wrapped in silhouettes, are often chosen to stand in for entire subaltern group privy to the margins of history. Girondin, on the other hand, does not give us such silhouettes stand-ins; rather, these are evocative, lush scenes that have a languorous, peaceful, and almost fantastical quality to them. They invite gazing and dreaming, and thus are an escape rather than a confrontation.

By Ekin Erkan

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.

“Matrixes Small Works”

The Beautiful Awaking from the Matrix

 by B. Su Alexander, PhD

  What is the meaning of the word “matrix”? In our postmodern age, where the idea of living inside a computer simulation has risen to the height of a philosophical credo, the word “matrix” conjures up, thanks to the famous movie which popularized the term, a virtual universe devoid of physical substance and the enslavement of the mind. Even before the movie made waves in the popular consciousness, philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard theorized that capitalist society constitutes a simulation, because originals are rampantly replaced by replicas and fakes, which have become ubiquitous. Take the Mona Lisa for example: very few have seen the original painting, yet everyone has seen copies and images of it, so that we are infinitely more familiar with the simulated Mona Lisa. Accordingly, postmodernism has raised the virtual and fake to the level above originality, and by promulgating endless replicas enslaved us to befuddling excesses. This has lead, in the minds of critics, to a bewildering nihilism which has ended artistic progress. Yet, anyone who claims that there is “nothing new under the sun,” I would like to invite to the art show “Matrixes Small Works,” which can be read as a welcoming proof that physical reality and originality still have the currency and power to enthrall us through aesthetic thrill.

            To experience the show's wide-ranging selection of artwork is like hearing an orchestra where all the parts combine to create a soundscape out of disparate instruments. No less than thirty-four women artists are represented in an intimate space on New York's East Upper Side off Madison Avenue, whose atmosphere is astonishingly cozy for its location. The viewer is confronted with the sheer physicality of an array of compositions, which are as diverse as the many members of wind, brass, string and percussion sections. An organic whole emerges with captivating originality, imbuing the collection with a dynamic and open-ended quality.   

            The idea for the art show came from observations made by Elizabeth Riley and Christina Massey, two artists/curators well-versed in the New York art world, who have recognized that the city's high-octane environment is prone to division and artificiality. Like many of us, they're no strangers to the feeling that contemporary society is a gigantic simulation. Sensing that this malaise is a condition to be rebelled against, they proposed an all-women collective which seeks to bring together a group of women artists who, as diverse as their approaches may be, are characterized by overlapping career trajectories: they all have a connection to the New York art world and have reacted to its hectic and divisive side. Under the name Trill Matrix, the collective has had exhibits throughout New York City. (Tellingly, the word “Trill” in the collective's name is a neologism consisting of “true” and ”real,” which functions like a mantra against the artificiality and falseness of a virtual world.) Now, for the brand new show Matrixes Small Works, the collective's original roster has been choicely expanded. 

            While the powerful array of the collective's works cannot be, and should not be, exhaustively described, there is an overarching freshness across all compositions on display. Organic forms dominate the space with stark purity, creating an aura of openness and mystery. Among the various shapes inspired by nature, floral forms stand out the most, ranging from abstract (Patricia Fabricant) to photo-realist (Sung Won Yun) to subtly sculptural (Christina Massey) to mini-installations (Kathleen Vance). This dominance is fundamental: In many cultures, flowers are associated with purity and beauty, and by extension, truth. Take Kate Oh Trabulsi's lotus flowers for example: In Buddhism, lotus is a symbol of clarity and enlightenment. And here, the down-to-earth tradition of the Korean Min-hwa painting is skillfully reinterpreted via a pop-art style, evoking spiritual understanding rooted not in artificiality but the enlightenment of simplicity. This painting perfectly encapsulates the goal and thesis of the show, which is to awake the viewer from the jaded comfort of postmodern society's matrix.

 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. 

“HYPNOTIQ: The Contemporary Pop Art Sensibility”

“HYPNOTIQ: The Contemporary Pop Art Sensibility” by Arian Lor-Amini

In many ways, Arian Lori-Amini (HYPNOTIQ Design) is the pop artist par excellence of the day. The artist, hailing from Seattle’s tech industry, uses 3D printing and UV resin, alongside more traditional sculptural material, to create neon-bedaubed works that replicate popular media artifacts. These include a Marilyn Monroe bust, Bugs Bunny and Louboutin heel, Venus bust, or Jeff Koons-esque balloon dogs. Each work is glassy, glazed, and reflective, abounding with cherry-red crimsons and cobalt blues.

Some of these works point towards Pop Artists past and present—most notably, Andy Warhol. To trace this relationship, we must first consider the sources from which HYPNOTIQ draws. One such starting place is HYPNOTIQ's Shahyad Tower - Shah's Memorial Tower (2020). The artist, who is originally from Iran, was a young boy living in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9. He often notes that this was a seminal experience for him. The bright, flashy coral and azure drips that adorn the small-scale replica of the monument located on Azadi Square in Tehran are, according to the artist, not merely decorative but also indices of explosions and brittle witnessed first-hand. Hence, the Azadi Tower is recreated with graffiti-like paint splatches. Yet rather than imbue these recreations with melancholia, the artist's penchant for flashing variegated colors is of a piece with a particular West-coast finish, an aesthetic that is redolent of 1OAK rooftop balcony parties and the tepid, bubbling Le Bain pool that clubbers perch in as they sip vodka redbulls.

If the artist is interested in culling the Iranian Revolution—stripping the popular uprising against Mohammad Reza Shah's regime and the populist appeal of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of its sociopolitical purpose by, instead, reifying this event through the eyes of a naive child—then the aesthetization of debris, refuse, and detritus can perhaps be most closely identified with pop art works such as Andy Warhol's 1964 Electric Chair. There is no commentary about the Shah in this piece just as Warhol did not necessarily criticize the death penalty. Notably, however, this is the work that is most overtly tethered to HYPNOTIQ’s reported experience of witnessing the Revolution first-hand, making the work somewhat more personal than Warhol’s experience with the electric chair—after all, in Warhol’s case, the silkscreen work, which was part of the “Death and Disaster” series executed between late 1964 and 1965, replicated a found image. HYPNOTIQ, on the other hand, insists that his experiences during the Iranian Revolution inform his choice to use the splatter-paint motif, even in works that reference popular culture instead of historically significant icons. In turn, this brings to bear another commonality between him and Warhol: the post-modern ambivalent stance.

A current running through much of Warhol’s work, taken up by many art historians and critics over the last few decades, is whether Warhol was launching a criticism of consumer culture or merely celebrating popular aesthetics? The latter option is politically feeble, hailing the death of criticism (in parallel to Lyotard’s proclaimed death of grand narratives) while underscoring the simultaneously commonplace and extravagant aesthetics of mid-to-late twentieth century commercial culture. If we adopt this interpretive approach, Jackie O, Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s Soup, Mao, and even the electric chair are stripped of sociopolitical and historical weight and, instead, presented in silkscreen form as adorned, visually stimulating icons.

Thus unspools the birth of the iconic as such. Granted, even this politically de-tasked mode, wittingly or not, presents a mirror to consumer society and, consequently, allows for viewers to adopt the critical position. This offers for myriad analyses. For instance, subsequent theorists have drawn our attention to Warhol’s life-long devout Byzantine Catholicism and the strong impression that the Christ icons adorning the Ruthenian Greek Catholic church in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh had on young Warhol. Others, like Douglas Crimp, have spotlighted Warhol’s queer identity, turning to markedly queer works like Warhol’s 1964 film, Blowjob. Similarly, one might query if HYPNOTIQ's Iranian identity and, more markedly, his witnessing the Iranian Revolution, might offer us a critical position with which to approach the Western media images that his sculptural practice centers. Rather than offering mere replicas, both the sculptural works and the Instagram-photo presentation of these sculptures are polished and, in turn, retain a technological sensibility to them. The Campbell’s soup cans, now in HYPNOTIQ's hands, become lustrous and sleek, like airbrushed digital images. This is fitting, given that the analog media of Warhol’s day has been displaced by the ubiquity of contemporaneous digitality. Hence, if Warhol was the 20th century pop artist par excellence, offering us a mirror to critically observe the celebrities and media icons we were once usurped by, HYPNOTIQ cedes us a glossy digital selfie, imbricated with present-day personages that range from Kim Kardashian to Steve Aoki. Regardless of whether HYPNOTIQ’s art practice is intended to criticize capital and consumer culture or, alternatively, willingly participate in it vis-à-vis glorifying and extending its aesthetics, we as postmodern viewers can situate them within our present-day milieu and prod forth such critical queries which, ultimately, rest in the seat of the interpreter.

Written by Philosopher and Art Critic Ekin Erkan

“The Pursuit of Happiness”

“The Pursuit of Happiness” by Kim Gyoungmin

By Art Writer Jonathan Goodman

As an artist, Kim Gyoungmin favors highly accessible works of Korean people doing everyday things—riding bicycles, sitting on benches, reading a book. Her figures, elongated and thin, make extravagant gestures and offer idiosyncratic facial expressions, usually in the form of an exaggerated smile. Kim is very much aware that her idiom, which she extends not only to indoor sculptures but also to public works commissioned for city halls, parks, and subway stations, is extremely approachable both to the art milieu she belongs to and to everyday people taken by her colorfully clothed, slightly eccentric figures. The people she portrays are not specific individuals, but rather characters found in regular life. Their context may be unusual—the book reader sits on a high branch of a tree reading—and so Kim’s willingness to present an idiosyncratic, stylized view of people engaged in regular activities, such as listening to a cell phone or taking a bath, allows her to comment on the way life is usually lived in South Korea. This does not mean that the figures are bounded by East Asian culture. Although their faces are Asian, the sculptures participate in activities known throughout the world—actions familiar to most of us, anywhere, who live in a contemporary mercantile culture. Kim thus celebrates the ordinariness of life, making it more than slightly amusing as she constructs acrylic on bronze works whose familiarity of gesture joins the art to the perception of anyone caring to look it over.

The sculptures’ humorous rendering of common activities suggests that Kim is given to a democratic reading of culture, in which the mundane supplants the high-minded. Mostly, the artist achieves such a portrayal by being humorous, in a way that includes caricature. Often in art, caricature involves judgment of the person depicted, but we do not find that so in Kim’s art. Alternatively, we find a readymade lightness of being, expressed in the stylized figures and their very commonplace activities. Perhaps we could find a parallel in American Pop art, which engages in the easily shared recognition that, worldwide, we are living in a culture devoted to images taken from television and the Internet. So the audience for this sort of work is the many rather than the few. Kim’s accessibility feels aligned with such an outlook, and it makes sense that her work would be popular as public installations. Usually, today, we emphasize the gap between a regular audience and the intellectual caste that regularly supports new fine art. But Kim will have none of that, preferring instead an art of immediate comprehension, funny and eccentric at once, in which the distance between the work and the viewer does not exist. Everyone immediately understands Kim’s pieces, which ask only that we glance at them and smile.

Kim’s choice to work figuratively, in terms that are as available for the artistically uneducated as for the sophisticated viewer, enables to reach most everyone. Because we are living in a time of populism in art, sometimes politically driven and sometimes not, we experience her caricatures with only a bit of dissonance. As has been suggested, it is possible to see these figures as a critique of the good life. But that is most likely the case. Instead, Kim is offering us a vision of simple pleasures, based on material goods available to us now. One might argue, with the insight, finding that the figures seem self-contained, surrounded by a self-serving bliss only they are taking part in. At the same time, because the activities they are engaged in are as simple as they are, this self-absorption is available to everyone. In South Korea’s mercantile democracy, a premium is placed on private satisfaction, fueled by the ubiquity of things. Thus, Kim illustrates a particular kind of happiness, in which anxiety is forbidden and the pleasure of the moment embraced. There is nothing to judge, nothing even to experience except the ecstasy of a simple life. While the artist’s works offer caricature and idiosyncrasy, that does not mean that her sculptures are condemning the life they portray. Instead, they offer a brave new world, in which gratification of the moment holds sway.

“The Lost Flame, Regained”

“The Lost Flame, Regained” by Choo Kyung

By Art Critic Robert C. Morgan

             In the work of the Korean artist Choo Kyung, the construct of her paintings appears to strive toward unity by way of nature. Her perspective remains clear. This would suggest that the physicality of her abstraction exists within the context of a realist sensibility. One is not necessarily removed from the other. In her paintings, she removes herself arbitrarily from imposed distances that separate the body from time and space, which, throughout East Asia, are considered essential ingredients in painting. This, in turn, further removes Choo Kyung from imposing a desire that leads towards an unnecessary end-result. Rather her focus is perceptively given to a sense of unity where nature is her guide. It is here the artist embraces living and working in the present tense. It is here the flame resides. It is here Choo Kyung discovers the linguistic interlude that captures the transformation of non-Being into Being. It is here the flame defines her space and time.

Choo Kyung offers a multiplicity of layers in her paintings wherein different applications of material are definitively placed one over another.  The artist begins with a layer of “stone dust” prior to applying a monochrome coat of acrylic paint on canvas. This is followed by another binder brushed over the painted surface whereupon the application of Hanji paper is directly adhered. Occasionally the Hanji is coated in charcoal powder as shown in Choo Kyung’s series, titled Flame – Embracing Nature. Her concept is borrowed directly from nature whereby an invisible painting is then applied with water, which is followed by a culmination of fire over Hanji through the artist’s manipulation of a blowtorch. According to the artist, “Fire generates a new world over the canvas” whereupon “a new scene appears and disappears between the flames.” Choo Kyung’s paintings are “strongly sculptural in nature” – a statement that can be interpreted from two points of view: one, the manner of production involved in layering her paintings as if to suggest a systemic physicality of work coincident with that of sculpture; and two, the artist’s reference to motifs found in nature – earth, water, fire, and wind – that maintain a presence exceeding the necessity of a two-dimensional simulation, thereby moving the construct into the realm of three, if not four dimensions.

The Hanji paper (originally processed from mulberry bark), returns to its original status by way of the flame, signified through the force of nature. The genius of nature is the genius of art. They interact with one another. For Choo Kyung, they are representations, contingent on the flame in which the force of nature has been regained. Nature and art have returned to one another. The artist’s memory constitutes something close to the Jungian concept wherein the “collective unconscious” transmits energy (qi) from one artist to another, each with their own turn, each with their own biography, and their own relationship to nature. Choo Kyung refers to “a figuration of the breath or souls of living things through fire and flames.” The key to her paintings Is the flame, the undercurrent of the artist who seeks the mystery of the universe within herself. The prescription is the Hanji on canvas, the source of energy that keeps her moving through space and time.

“ Cancer Fundraiser Show”

by Richard Volpe, Eliza Bender and Alyssa Giammona

Wall Street International Publication: https://www.meer.com/en/69791-cancer-fundraiser-show

By Art History & Philosophy Researcher Ekin Erkan

Kate Oh Gallery’s cancer fundraiser show, programmed on behalf of Richard Volpe and featuring work by Alyssa Giammona, uniquely features geometric artworks that are imbricated in a number of art historical modalities that make this small exhibition rather unique. Giammona’s Left Triptych, Middle Triptych, and Right Triptych feature a prismatic, serpentine zipper-like pattern composed of coral pink, lavender-lilac purple, flaxen yellow, and crystalline beryl. These lines bleed into one another, unspooling an academic demonstration in color theory and geometric play. Simultaneously, the works are reminiscent of the great Italian avant-garde artist Carla Prina and other members of the twentieth century “Group of Abstractionists of Como”. These artists who layered geometric fields and objects—often including lines and ovular, egg-like forms—to create formal assemblages where colors seeped into one another, bereft of the kind of sharp edges that would serve as borders for Cubist and post-Cubist artists like Picasso and John D. Graham.

Giammona’s work is in some sense quite minimal and thus quietest: the cultivated, zags belong to the still, static, and foreign world of perfected shapes, one resolutely distinct from our world of jagged, uneven edges and stumbling mistakes. Giammona’s world is also distinct from the Cubist sensibility, as there is no tethering to representational indices: no faces, legs, or geographical landmarks. Consequently, Giammona’s Triptych series speaks to a both a scholarly exercise in color theory, optics, and architecture blueprints and also an celestial, intangible world of forms. Notably, the exhibition also features a contribution of an entirely distinct order, made by Richard Volpe. Amongst these works, which are graffiti, is one that reads “Power” and another that reads “Free Spirit”. The latter includes a three-dimensional triangular shape floating in the clouds; other are more abstract expressionist-like, with streaks and blots dripping down the canvas. On the one hand, Volpe’s use of “Power” and “Free Spirit” clearly speak to the power that one battling cancer invariably wields, taking atrocity and mortality head-on. The letters’ blushpink tone is fleshy and human, while the blue outline drips outwards into a deep, ocean-like background. Placed in a lineage of art history that includes bastions like Stan 153, Kool Koor, Copez, and Richard Hambleton, Volpe speaks to the dovetailing of high-art and street art. The third artist of this group show is Eliza Bender, whose black-and-white works resemble melted, oozing iron and ore. Anthropomorphic figures can be made out, such as a large-eyed, smiling canine or a woman with beads of dripping, thick silver strands of hair. Bender’s work is rather impressive, using figures that appear digitally rendered and placing them into a cascade of pooling metal.

Despite Giammona’s Triptych34wazhny6 series seems entirely distinct from the graffiti work, which is in turn distinct from Bender’s, upon closer examination one notices a number of formal connections. Indeed, a similar color palette between the Triptych series and Volpe’s graffiti pieces; furthermore, similar silhouettes occupy Bender and Volpe’s pieces. These are, on the one hand, distinct worlds: with Giammona, we have the realm of the ethereal, which is preoccupied with formal exercises in visual fields and optics. With Volpe, we have the concrete world of sprawling, chipped cityscapes littered in dust and spray-painted with tags and so-called “throw ups” (works of graffiti that often feature bubble-like lettering). With Bender, we have foreign substances lapping into one another and, in doing so, proffering slight resemblances to faces and animals. Stitched together, these worlds collectively communicate a kind of hopefulness and bright energy, speaking to the optimistic ethos of Kate Oh’s exhibition and the fundraiser at large.

"Convalescence”

Bong Jung Kim's Convalescence exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery deals with addiction and technology. Throughout his career, Kim has preoccupied himself with addiction vis-à-vis symbology in a multiplicity of ways. This is most pronounced in Kim’s Poppy series, which takes up the poppy as a painterly subject, but, rather than veridically reproduce the poppies by way of screen print, as Warhol did with his flowers, Kim makes use of the gestural, drip-like composition of Abstract Expressionism. The splattered poppy figures speak to Kim’s interest in symbolism, which is markedly continued in Kim’s works that deal more explicitly with digitality and our mechanical coupling with machines. This is the case with works like State of being Black, State of being Gold, and State of being Blue. These three works pair copper electric wires swept in serpentine rings, dark-green computer chips, and abstract-yet-recognizable machines layered upon Rothko-like color fields. The dialectical relationship here is set between the abstract, which corresponds to the felt phenomenology of navigating the world as emotion-bond creatures, and the representational, which corresponds to the didactic world of digital technology and coding. These two are set onto a mutually reinforcing mantle where, albeit discerned from one another, they also inform each other.

            Kim’s works are also guided by a decidedly pessimistic flair: that the works are part of a cannon that deals with addiction, which is negatively coded, means that Kim’s works do not celebrate technology. Here, Kim (thankfully) runs contra a recent trend in contemporary that involves bleary-eyed artists, some quite venerable and others more dewy, flocking to NFTs and cryptocurrency. The mixed-media Addiction paintings are particularly suggestive in how gray and hoary patches of paint are often lined with dotted tracks, computer chips, and wire-like figures, proffering an aesthetics of malaise. This critique of technology is particularly welcome given this unfortunate recent blind turn, especially when we consider the environmental catastrophe that cryptocurrencies proffer (to say nothing of their nature as an unregulated asset used for Ponzi schemes).

            According to one position held by philosophers of technology like Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Ernst Kapp, and the late Bernard Stiegler, technology is not something out in the world which we construct out of wires and chips but is, in essence, a functional activity. According to this view, early homo sapiens who fashioned hammers and axes from rocks were extending—or, in Leroi-Gourhan’s verbiage “externalizing”—the functional activity of hammering with one’s fist, which has its bedrock in the cognitive, intentional activity of wanting to hammer some object. In turn, all technologies merely extend intentional-cognitive activity and, if we take up this view, hammers, wheels, and forks are every bit as technological as laptops, iPhones, and drones. Furthermore, according to this position, technology is inherently an addictive activity because we come to depend on the tools, artifacts, and other technologies that we fasten, such that we outpouch our original mental activity. In a particularly elucidating example plucked from Plato’s Meno, Socrates speaks to slave who uses a stick to perform a mathematical equation. The point in this example is that the slave is unable to do the mental operation of solving the equation without using the stick, although in theory the slave could do so without “extending” his cognitive activity. Thus, even rudimentary technology like a stick, in “externalizing” cognitive activity, makes mental activity more easily performed. In turn, we come to depend upon the technology and become “addicted” to it.

            This addiction-centered view towards technology also comports with the behaviorist position in psychology made famous in the twentieth century by Burrhus Frederic Skinner. As a graduate student at Harvard, Skinner spent many of his working hours in the machine shop. This is an interesting anecdote as it speaks to the very mechanical relationship between man and machine that Kim’s paintings examine. Skinner had been an adept tinkerer and inventor since his childhood, and he developed a number of technologies for measuring reward-seeking behavior. In his rat experiments, Skinner measured the rate at which rats helped themselves to food pellets, showing the regularities that developed in reward-seeking behavior. Skinner introduced the concept of “reinforcement” to describe the pleasurable consequences of an act that increases the likelihood of its being repeated and, relatedly, coined the concept of “operant conditioning” for behavior that “acts upon the environment in such a way that a reinforcing stimulus is produced.” One of Skinner’s most important discoveries involved a jammed food dispenser; Skinner found that the rats pressed the lever even more compulsively when it failed to produce a reward. These experiments involving compulsively lever-pressing rats today stand as a potent image of pleasure-seeking and addiction in humans.

 Kim’s work, however, deals with digital-computational technology, as it centers computer chips exclusively. Thus, Kim’s art deals with addiction as it pertains to digital technology and our compulsive relationship with these technologies. Whether Kim would make the distinction between analog and digital technologies and regard the former, addiction-laden though it may be, without the aesthetics of malaise that he ascribes to the latter is an open question. However, we do know that these works are rife with pessimism, and they engage pessimism quite successfully. Kim’s paintings which overlay such abstract machine—whirring, buzzing motors and computer chips that bleed a hair of wires—upon crimson, purple, and flaxen poppies underscore Kim's bleak message. The context working in the background is, of course, the dependency-based relationship that we have with our cell phones and other digital devices. Indeed, as many psychological studies have evinced, our general attention span has been severely compromised thanks to these digital technologies. Kim’s thesis that we are addicted to our technological devices is not a new one, nor does it intend to be—however, it tells this story from a distinct angle, and unspools abstraction appropriately, such that we are not brow-beaten with literal messaging. This means that Kim approaches a familiar worry from a novel point of view, doing so quite admirably.

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

"TO BECOME LIFE": Two-Person Show

 To Become Life features Irina Rodnikoff—a Ukrainian multi-dsciplinary artist who works in installation, sculpture, and painting, alongside—and Miroslav Duzinkevich, a New York-based Ukrainian painter whose work is occasionally tinged with social realism. Kate Oh’s decision to display two Ukrainian artists in the midst of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one that illuminates hope and bolsters the aesthetics of protest. Thus, it is poised in a history of art as protest; yet this response to Russian aggression is not simply one tethered to displaying artists from Ukraine but also indeclinably rooted in what kind of art is displayed. The content proffered by these artists is thus as critical to foreground.

 It is significant that, despite a variation in subject matter and approach, these works each speak to the concept of "life" in unique modes. For instance, Duzinkevich's Calla Lilies takes organic forms of life and naturalism as its subject matter; muted-green stems swoop and arch-like bent backs are displayed while lavender-lilac petals rise. The gray backdrop, set across the politically-seeped backdrop of present-day Russia's aggression, unspools with metaphoric prowess. These could be war-cloaked flowers, or they very well could be flowers set across a dreary, gray rainy day. Yet these flowers are alive nevertheless, and hence artifacts of persistence. Still life with garlic is of an entirely different persuasion. There are no living organisms here but artifacts of a life lived: brown, painted pottery and a coffee mug are set beside long, spindly garlic upon a crimson-dotted tablecloth. This scene could very well be that of a home or restaurant, but the disheveled indices suggest life creeping at the margins. Notably, this work approaches the concept of life side-on, rather than directly. Paradise, blush-coral hued and heavenly, is the most celebratory of the works. Four beautifully dressed women hold hands, encircled in a dance, while a lone woman gazes out. The trees and skyline are plucked from a fuchsia-flush dream, while sprawling swans and a peacock decorate a red-crazed sidewalk. This is the most peaceful of the displayed works as well and can even be read to evoke heaven, the afterlife, or images of hope in the face of misfortune.

 A number of more abstract works are also featured in the show, including Rodnikoff's Celestial Sail, Passage Thru Fire, and Urban Labyrinth Triptych. These works also utilize the aforementioned ethereal color palette of pink and glowing-maroon, with occasional splatters and streaks of expressive blemishes. It is tempting to read situational exigencies into these works (blood, turmoil, etc.) but perhaps one would do better to consider the cathartic act of splatter painting as such, and thus understand this painting more directly in line with the theme of "life”. To Become Life is thus an important show, not simply because it shows two Ukrainian artists but because of the subject matter that these works tactfully entertain.

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

“Love Walk in New York” Exhibition

Felines and canines occupy an interesting and historically robust relationship within the annals of art history. From Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Child with Cat (Julie Manet) (1887) to Andy Warhol's cat lithographs, i.e. 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy (1954), and Lavinia Fontana famous painting, Portrait of a Noblewoman (1580), cats and dogs have been a recurrent motif for many visual artists and painters. In some traditions, the use of the cat and the dog has served simply the whimsy of portraiture; other artists have used the cat or dog as a symbolic relic with which to embody theological themes. Notably, Young Kyoon Kim's terracotta sculptures and Su Young Lim's natural mineral pigments and dyed mud pigments on silk are in continuity with these traditions, as both artists have taken the figure of the dog as their muse. However, both Kim and Lim also advance the motif of the dog beyond the aforementioned artists.

Young Kyoon Kim's terracotta works feature a whimsical, recurrent dog. The dog has orange-auburn fur, a brownish nose, and an ashen-white underbelly. Often, this dog is poised in regal stature, eyes closed, and an almost-anthropomorphic smile cast across its cheeks. The work is an example of an artwork effectively evoking a veridical emotional response over drawing simple likeness; due to the medium and the style of sculpture that Kim pursues, the dogs are often caught into animated poses—one might even deem them “cinematic” at points, like isolated frames from a film. Balled up and hunched, the dogs sometime seem ready to pounce or brush their head against the viewer. One of the most impressive works features the dog splayed across its back, its doughy alabaster stomach revealed. These poses will be familiar to all who have owned or interacted with dogs. In turn, Kim does an admirable job of giving us familial snapshots and proffering the amusing, lively site of sculpture as a foundation for intimacy. Kim’s paintings are not works that aim to philosophically challenge us but instead serve both decorative purposes and are restorative. That is, glancing at these ebullient dogs, one cannot help but smile to oneself and gleam some therapeutic vim.

Some of Kim’s terracotta sculptures feature the dog paired with one or two more of its mates; in exaggerated poses with paws open and backs stretched, these dogs seem to be cast in eternal conversation. As I noted earlier, the theme of anthropomorphizing is lightly imbued in some of the faint details of these works, including the light smiles one might make out between the dog’s lips. This theme is only affirmed (if not underscored) in certain works where Kim renders the dog half-cherub. In a most inventive work, we see how underneath the mask of the dog peers a cast child, raising his arms and chest out of the dog-fur legs and pouncing through the torso of the dog-figure. Like a faun, minotaur, or some other mythological creature, this figure straddles the thin line between man and animal. This work in particular is quite curious, insofar as it both frames the technique of anthropomorphizing as it is subtly utilized in the other works and introduces questions related to the distinct cut-off between man and animal. Such questions include what, exactly, discerns one from the other: is it sapience, or perhaps being able to give and ask for reasons about what one believes/takes to be the case. Despite the innocence with which the dog sculptures are introduced, in their out-stretched charming mode, the works do also introduce such further questioning.

Young Lim's works often feature a very similar dog to Kim's: ash-brown and dark-flaxen fur is bifurcated by bright tufts of white hair. However, Lim, contra Kim, does not stick with one single dock, as an array of dogs is often featured, including an all-white, snowflake-like dog. One of the most interesting features of Lim's work is their inventive use of the background vis-à-vis handmade paper canvases. Throughout these works, Lim also incorporates a mud-amber background evocative of traditional Korean painting, which adds to the possibility that the dogs play a symbolic role (as animals always do in Minhwa painting). Many of Lim’s works also feature the figure of the human alongside the dog, including one of the aforementioned brown-white dog perched behind the torso of a human who hands down a feeding bowl. Sometimes scattered relics and signs of human activity abound, including single discarded shoes and disheveled blankets. The dogs are often also robed in brightly lit clothing, including one such image of two dogs donned in sweaters—one crimson-and-white, reminiscent of a shining candy-cane, and the other robed in bright blue-and-red; a carved heart is detailed on both dogs' sweaters and their tails are neatly arced, almost as if they are coordinated. On the one hand, the dog sweaters are rather commonplace and a cute embellishment; however, like Lim, Kim’s work and its integration of the motif of the dog with that of the human also unspools a series of questions about the identity/relationship between dog and person.

Kim and Lim’s work, first and foremost, reminds us that visual art can be genuinely fun. Indeed, both Kim and Lim’s ever-whimsical scenes are highly inviting and most enjoyable to get lost in. However, it is also worth underscoring that while both contributions explore the boisterous and the convivial, they also subtly experiment with anthropomorphizing non-human figuration.

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

Rainbow Group Show

March 2022

Kate Oh Gallery’s Rainbow Group Show is an eclectic, motley amalgamation of artists working in a multiplicity of media, including Deidre Swords, Shamona Stokes, Rebecca Winsor, Florencia Sanchez, Pema Rinzin (who is also the curator), Lori LaMont, Laetitia Guyon, Kunsang Kyirong, Kenji Hirata, Katy Fischer, Kate Oh, Irina Rodnikoff, Evie Zimmer, David Ellis, and Pema Dolkar. The prismatic theme of the rainbow draws from Tibetan culture, where the rainbow is a motif of enlightenment. While Tibetan artists (and the Tibetan curator, Pema Rinzin) feature in the exhibition, the group show is diverse in both nationality and subject matter. As such, it is a truly international and multi-media display that results in an encyclopedic review of contemporary art practices.

Deidre Swords' Conductors is perhaps one of the works that relates most literally and directly to the theme of rainbow, as this ceramic sculpture features an anonymous figure with arms flung towards the heavens. This auburn- and silver-streaked figure's raised arms are balanced by its thick legs and squarely poised feet; this recollects a Paleolithic so-called “Venus figure” and, in turn, the racialized history of these statues which have often erroneously been termed “fertility figures”. Indeed, this relates to Swords’ broader interest in social justice-based art. Shamona Stokes' watercolor works like Vase in the Sun and Venus of the Blueberry Patch are an interesting complement. Specifically, it is noteworthy that, on a formal register, Venus of the Blueberry Patch similarly has a bulbous, carnal shape that at once culls the aforementioned trope of the Venus figure but also prods this into a more jovial terrain. The lips of the figure are almost duck-like, and the "Blueberry Patch" title, as well as the splatches of dark purple, mauve, and azure are playful. Stokes’ work, too, thus relates to the greater theme of the rainbow vis-à-vis a whimsical sensibility.

Sanchez patterns of the orange world, patterns of the green world, and if life gives you oranges--all gouache and ink on canvas--are also equally playful; these canvases, tangerine-orange, aquamarine, and apple-green, feature spiraling decorative patterns. There is also an interesting, striking formal parallel between these works and Rinzin's Peace and Energy (Yellow). The two artists both use a flat canvas background with meandering arches. Peace and Energy (Yellow) also features rainbow-like ribbons that weave in and out of balloon-like figures, forming a tableau. When Blue was Gold is much more abstract, with malachite, azurite stone pigments drifting in and out of each other; a serene six-panel work to gaze upon, the piece resembles an aerial view of the sea. Guyon's work similarly uses ground mineral pigment on rice paper, flaxen streams of gold lapsing into blue-green beryl. These artists draw from the pure beauty of minerals and the intrinsic patterns they form.

Lori LaMont's watercolor on paper works are some of my favorite from the show. Delectable Yeast Breads and La Premiere make use of pop-art sensibilities and advertising motifs. At first, these works seem to simply celebrate commercial advertising and fashion insignia. But, upon closely examining La Premiere, for instance, one notices a cacophonous scenography that, while beautiful, also utilizes the aesthetics of maximalism to imbue critique. A "Dior" logo crowns a bird that picks at a flower bud, its chest and wings stamped reading "Heremes"; "YSL" flags are draped and littered around the brilliantly-colored, lush scene that dovetails naturalism with corporate overload, setting the two into a dialectical relationship. Kyirong's contribution is much more abstract and utilizes patterns in a mode somewhat similar to Shusaku Arakawa’s spirals; these charcoal-colored corkscrew circles, painted as brushstrokes recall the ensō Buddhist motif. Kate Fisher's work is more of a collage-cum-mosaic that takes the alphabet and distends them into bubble-like variegated strips; in turn, the artist places herself in conjunction with a history that includes Robert Indiana and other verbal-visual artists.

These artists all approach the theme of calmness and celebration from unique positions and, indeed, the show is a success because of this amalgamation of media and messaging.

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

The composer Steve Reich wrote about music, “Now, in the 21st century, we live in an age of remixes.” Yet, what can be said of music can equally be applied to the realm of paintings. To reanimate the free-for-all exuberance of postmodernism, painters have been reaching back to old traditions and remixing them with contemporary styles. The Rainbow Group Show at Kate Oh Gallery, bringing together some of the most exciting recent art pieces that straddle the boundary between the ancient traditions and contemporary pop art, is a case study of remix working its magic. 

Some of the painters at this show are readily familiar to connoisseurs of the New York art scene. Tibetan-born Pema Rinzin, who has exhibited at the Rubin Museum of Art, is the curator of the exhibit. His painting “Peace and Energy” displays paradigmatically his intricate re-interpretation of tradition and popular art: on an uniformly bright orange background, which is devoid of any variation and shading, reminiscent of a colored cartoon page, floats a complex structure fashioned of colored ribbons and structures of intriguing appearance. These may remind one of textures and patterns seen in textiles, or alternatively, traditional garments. Several types of textures and patterns are seen. Their shapes ripple and undulate, suggestive of ocean waves and clouds. Other times, one may even imagine doves in flight, briskly flapping their wings. I would be amiss if I didn't mention the technical prowess the artist demonstrates through the intricacies of the patterns. At close inspection, one is ineluctably drawn to the plethora of details, the cleanliness of perfectly rendered contours and reticulations, often shimmering through an array of gold and white. A technician in the use of traditional brush, Rinzin has been able to demonstrate his craft through such finesse and remarkable control, as if the composition was a print. On a large scale, however, these scintillating details dissolve in the shapes of the textiles. Rainbow colored ribbons weave in and out of them, creating a unified whole out of this bustling diversity. Therefore, the energy alluded to in the title of this painting underlies the variegated wavelike motion of the ribbons and textiles, an unseen force permeating the visible world, of which the painting is a material manifestation.

 Other works also offer an impressive display of takes on tradition through the contemporary lens of popular art. Evie Zimmer challenges the viewer with unexpected and dazzling optical effects, reminiscent of computer generated images in which can be found ghostly echoes of floral drawings by modernist painters such as Georgia O'Keeffe. Lori LaMont questions notions of the contemporary entertainment industry through her large-scale paintings that look like advertisements from a bygone era. Irina Rodnikoff explores her native East-European heritage through stylized and near-abstract woodblock prints that deal with themes found in Continental philosophy. Laetita Guyon turns her fascination for the mineral world into other-worldly psychedelic patterns. Katy Fischer's love for signs is transformed into gigantic modern mosaics.

 One of the most affable takes on tradition can be seen in the painting “Light” by Korean-born Kate Oh. Within the confines of an intimate size, the artist brings to life a pop-art rendering of a flower which calls to mind the shape and appearance of a delicate chrysanthemum. The flower is traditionally popular in Korea and, depending on the color, can have many meanings. In this painting, however, the traditional flower is transmuted into constituent parts, brightly colored lines and dots, as if exploded by an bolt of energy. Here, as in Rinzin's “Peace and Energy,” the coloration is expertly controlled, achieving the heightened effect of a print. Yet one should take note of the unusual material of Oh's composition – mixed media on mulberry paper, wrapped on wooden panel. A popular choice as a decorative art paper, mulberry paper is of a diaphanous texture, and is rarely used for painting due to the level of control required of the artist. But this painting has sublimated the rough original appearance of the substrate into an even appearance which is in tune, both materially and figuratively, with the floral essence of its subject matter.   

Review by Dr. Benji Su Alexander, PhD

Miky Kim Exhibition

March 2022

The Korean Archetype by Miky (Yoohyun) Kim

 Kate Oh’s Gallery’s new exhibition, The Korean Archetype, on view from March 1 until March 11, 2022, introduces the stridently feminist work of Miky (Yoohyun) Kim to a wider audience. I characterize Kim’s work as “stridently feminist” even though Kim is not interested in veridical or representational indices that directly cull femininity nor straightforwardly espouse an appraisal of masculinity. Rather, Kim’s is a subtle feminism, and, as indicated by the eponymous title, one ineliminably tethered to Korean visual culture and history. Thus, to truly appreciate Kim’s work, we have to understand that her pieces are not simply presenting us with visually pleasing abstraction but are indirect references to feminized labor as situated in the Korean context/history.

Works like Autumn, Ways to Happiness, Path of Flowers, and Summer feature variegated patches of color stitched together. In Autumn, for instance, we are privy to a quilt-like tableau, a latticework of rectangles, including verdant green striped with flaxen yellow, purple- and white-lined gingham, and checkered crimson with blue X-shapes bisecting the corners. These small rectangles cover the entirety of the canvas, forming a motley kaleidoscopic map. The Ways to Happiness similarly uses the stylistic motif of a repeated pattern, but this time uses the figure of the fish while also introducing a background plane and negative space. Plum-cherry fish coil and crimp their tails, the negative space allowing for dimensionality such that a slight shadow can be made out between the fishes' tails and the flecked green-gray background. Rather than recall the sea, Kim’s background looks like a sidewalk darted and layered with colored chalk. The fishes' detailed scales and gills can be made out, faintly etched with great precision. Like Autumn, Path of Flowers fills most of the canvas with tile, but these are flower-like circle pieces of tile rather than rectangles. Layered and stratified like luminous scales, these circles remind the viewer of unfolded umbrellas gazed upon from an aerial view. The circles are, like the rectangular tiles featured in Autumn, brilliantly detailed: lilac and gold lines unfold beside mauve-periwinkle whirligigs. Summer's palette is lighter, consisting of a network of leafy-green, cyan, and turquoise quilt-like patches. Each work is simply mesmerizing to gaze upon.

But what, exactly, do these tiles represent? Contra Western art history’s bastion Modernist movements—as exemplified by De Stijl, Concrete Art, and abstract expressionism—the geometric motifs in Kim’s work are socio-politically poised, looking inwards at feminized labor in Korea. Before progressing further, it is critical to understand what, exactly, feminized labor as a concept means. Traditionally, housework—i.e., the labor undertaken by so-called “stay-at-home wives” (but, critically, also daughters)—has been understood as “feminized,” and, with the exception of outlier matriarchically societies, this has been the dominant mode of labor division in much of the world. Because of the distinction sociologically upheld between “male bread-winners” and “stay-at-home women” being such a dominant, if not near universal, division throughout history, it can be understood as a structural feature. That is, “feminized labor” is a structural feature not only of the contemporary U.S., but all societies that have upheld this division. This division means treating certain kinds of work—commonly, those associated with stay-at-home mothers (i.e., cleaning, cooking, housework, etc.)—as categorically distinct from the kind of work that the bread-winning men undertake, with the latter understood to count as “genuine labor” but the former disqualified from this category. Contemporary feminist scholars like Judith Butler and Donna Haraway have donned a light on how this occupational segregation operates, with Haraway noting that:

“[t]o be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex” (D. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, NY: Routledge, l985, 166).

Notably, with women more widely entering the workforce in the mid-20th century (with the classic example being the U.S. opening up places of employment to women during World War II), “feminization” has also seeped into the workplace. Hence, “feminization” can be used to describe how the work that women have come to take up within the economic sphere (taking up jobs often previously held by men) has also become re-structured so that it downgrades this professional work, and in turn lowers the pay level and satisfaction of the job.

This theme of “feminized labor” is critical to the political stance that Kim’s work espouses. All of Kim’s aforementioned pieces feature tile roofs, which colorfully replicate traditional Korean roof construction. While these tile roofs were not necessarily constructed by women, the tiles themselves are indices of domesticity, the home, and upkeep—i.e., the “feminized labor” of the aforementioned maternal figure (or daughter), who is expected to clean and cook for her husband/children, and to maintain upkeep in the house. An important facet of Kim’s practice is her paying deference to the centuries of anonymous women who endured agony and abuse at the hands of patriarchal customs that not only treated “feminized labor” as disparate from the labor of money-earning men but also the women who suffered physical and psychological abuse, which they were expected to keep silent about. Hence, the repeating motif of the rectangular tile or angled fish is an allegory to the unidentified Korean women—each tile singular but, simultaneously, speaking to a structural group with a common history.

Consequently, Kim’s work has a political vim to it that we do not find in much of Western art history that has, since the era of Abstract Expressionism, often deracinated abstraction from politics. Famously, following the late 1940s, Abstract Expressionism was championed and bolstered by both the CIA and some of the most famous US art intuitions as a repudiation of the Soviet Union’s explicitly political, and representational, “Socialist Realism.” It was thought that abstraction was explicitly apolitical and this style soon became predominant in the US, if not most of the West. However, Kim’s work is a direct counter to this stance, as it illuminates how abstraction can be instrumentalized for the sake of political critique. That Kim does this tactfully and evenhandedly is a testament to her artistic prowess, one that we would be wise to laud.

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

Kwanjin Oh Exhibition

January 2022

“Emptying and Filling”

Holiday Gift Collection

2021-2022

A movement away from darkness

Pop Art Figures: Present and Past

Rosalyn Engelman Solo Exhibition

October 1-30, 2021

The Pietro Antonio Narducci (1915-1999) Collection

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

It is a genuine tragedy that the art of Antonio Pietro Narducci (1915-1999) is not a staple within Abstract Expressionism but, luckily, curator Inhee Iris Moon has prompted what is hopefully the first step in changing this unfortunate art historical shortcoming. One reason why Narducci’s work and name is perhaps not as well-known as it should be is that the artist was reclusive and his life was ridden with drawbacks that stilted him from achieving the fame of a Pollock, de Kooning, or Rothko—indeed, Narducci was never interested in such fame. As a young artist, Narducci exhibited at a New York gallery where, after the show’s closing, the gallery took a sledgehammer to his canvases, complaining that they were gargantuan in size and thus immovable. Most understandingly, Narducci was beyond frustrated that his works were tarnished. Later on, in the mid-1950s, Narducci’s private art dealer disappeared with almost two hundred paintings which, to this day, have yet to resurface. Narducci was utterly uninterested in the superficial vagaries of the art world and its coeval market, committed to pursuing a genuine practice, both structurally and theoretically. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 24 paintings and works on paper that comprise Kate Oh Gallery’s magnificent exhibition “Narducci.” Here, one is allotted an impressive, variegated, and stylistically diverse array of works from Narducci’s work in the 1950s, 60s, and 80s.

One could easily write an entire book about this show, and Narducci’s works most certainly merit such an endeavor. The works are each numbered but “Untitled”, yet they are thematically rich enough that a title would be superfluous. Contra the field paintings of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, Narducci readily engages in the figurative. In many of Narducci’s works, we can make out familiar images and figures, such as men suited in bleached white playing guitar and drums, their bodies bouncing and gyrating between slivers of sun. Given Narducci’s lifelong interest in musicality—notably, Narducci was enchanted by, and would often paint to, Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"—such motifs heavily figure in many of Narducci’s works. However, it is not a commitment to the icons of musicality that springs to the fore—rather, Narducci’s paintings are committed to the mode of musicality, and the concept of movement inherent to it. Thus, even in his more abstract works, we can make out the figures of men or women collapsing into one other, with such characters bleeding through Rorschach-blotches of stygian black and mossy green. Movement is thus prioritized above and beyond the bodies that move.

Thus, both Narducci’s paintings and drawings alike eschew the iconic as such, instead proffering the mode of perceiving as key—there is a vapor that thematically sets these works together, one that culls intuition. It is thus fitting that this theme of pursuing the intuitive comprises Narducci’s lifelong pursuit such that, in 1985, when Narducci was seventy years old, he found himself at his artistic apotheosis. This point was one of contact with the “transcendental”, albeit it simultaneously involved a medium-based, empirical discovery. Narducci, an early adopter of acrylic pigments, mixed his paint with India ink, ammonia, and rainwater, so as to muster an amalgam that imitated earthly tones. This discovery was accompanied by a shift in Narducci’s style, as his later works demonstrate an interest in imitating the tones and colors of bark, moss, the sun-bleached sky, and crag-ridden rivers, while divorcing these from any icons—there are no trees, plains, or riverbeds to accompany these raw slivers of sense-data. That is, the phenomenal “intuition” of nature is preserved without its figure. Narducci considered this a genuine movement beyond American Expressionism, and he termed it “Transcendental Aesthetics.” 

One here might recall Kant’s “transcendental.” According to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), that things in themselves are transcendentally real means they are real with respect to the transcendental level of reality, i.e., that they exist at the point of view of fundamental ontology and are mind-independent. This is distinct from empirically real things, which are located at the empirical level of reality and exist mind-dependently from the point of view of fundamental ontology; transcendental reality is also distinct from empirically ideal things, which are mind-dependent but do not exist from the view of fundamental ontology—things like hallucinations, fictional objects, and illusions. For Kant, (transcendental) things in themselves are, famously, not representable. Narducci’s practice is not one of attempting to represent what is not representable—this is not the “transcendental” that Narducci is concerned with. Indeed, for Kant, there is, at once, the aforementioned transcendental register of (mind-independent) things in themselves, and the transcendental faculty, wherein the characteristic forms of our cognitive faculties determine the conditions of experience. Such transcendental conditions of experience need to be taken up/fulfilled for a resulting cognition to be able to truthfully represent an object of experience. Narducci’s interest in the transcendental seems not to be representing that which is celestial and beyond the world of empirical appearances. Despite an otherworldly, celestial motif to many of Narducci’s late works, there is always an intuitive sense of the earthly that tethers these paintings to our world of experience. Rather, Narducci’s works examine the conditions of perceiving, and what a field of representations, not yet “taken up” and organized into a series of empirical representations in space and time, would look like—an “as if” that gives an image to the representing work accomplished by our transcendental cognitive faculties. 

Thus, on the one hand, Narducci’s works are simply beautiful and visually engaging, utterly unique from his contemporaries. One ought to appreciate the canvases that adorn Kate Oh Gallery’s walls for this reason alone. But, simultaneously, they are theoretically profound and philosophically rich. This is what makes Narducci inimitable and deserving of the highest of praise, even if this praise comes too late. I must underscore that it is a genuine tragedy that many of us are not familiar with Narducci’s name or his body of work. Luckily, Kate Oh Gallery has taken us one step forward in changing this.

“Towards the Light”

Group exhibition on view from September 3 - 17, 2021.

Artists in the show:

Emily Auchincloss Kate Oh (Trabulsi)

Ekin Balcioglu Swoon

Jessica Cannon Shamona Stokes

Kevin Connolly Gillespie Kunkyi Tsotsong

Laetitia Guyon Pema Rinzin

Pamela Knoll Amy Ross

Kunsang Kyirong Irina Rodnikoff

Karen Margolis Kristine Virsis

Susan McDonnell Rebecca Donner Winsor

“Towards the Light” Review

 Kate Oh Gallery’s group show, “Towards the Light,” which is curated by Pema Rinzin, features a variegated series of paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works by nineteen different artists. There are a number of well-known artists, such as Swoon and Kunsang Kyirong, who will immediately be recognized amongst those familiar with contemporary art. However, the show also features younger and lesser-known artists—names that may be new to viewers but are equally interesting. Given the multiplicity of media and approaches that these nineteen artists motivate, the group show is less preoccupied with aesthetic cohesion and more interested in navigating a diversity of thought and technique. Nevertheless, despite being thematically manifold, the show is able to successfully motivate a cohesive series of object studies of the natural world and our place in them, managing this by way of increasing registers of abstraction and experimentation.

Shamona Stokes’ sculptures, “The Giving Tree” and “Cloud Buddha,” stand out as two personal favorites. “The Giving Tree” is a Stygian, crackled figure resembling a bottle, with small, protruding, upturn branches that rest in stilted fashion. Stokes’ sculpture does not attempt to mirror the size or dimensions of a tree but to use the ceramic medium to abstract and play with the worldy, familiar tree as we know it and transmogrify it into something utterly alien and uncanny. This is uncanniness done in the best of modes—gold-kissed adornments that keenly resemble leaves dangle off the ends of the small, crooked branches and several flaxen, folded leaflet-blades rest atop the canopy. Several chambers in the tree’s trunk open up like receptacles, where removable flowers rest. A gaping socket is driven into the tree’s belly, where several flowers—gold, bright cherry, and beryl—sprout and swell. “The Giving Tree” at once suggests a tree but, also, a somewhat human figure. “Cloud Buddha” similarly plays into the otherworldly nature of abstraction that Stokes delicately motivates without descending from the object of her study. “Cloud Buddha” finds the Buddha figure, also a familiar artistic and spiritual mainstay, reimagined—a bulbous, billowing, alabaster cloud takes up the shape and form of the Buddha’s legs. Again, Stokes also plays with proportions: the Buddha’s feet are shrunken and bent against the ground, while the Buddha’s long, spindly arms bend into triangles that lapse against his chest. Most interestingly, the Buddha’s would-be facial features—eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows—are outpouched by a golden sheen visor which begins at his neck and glistens up his entire forehead; threads of speckled golden flakes trickle down the Buddha’s neck, chest, stomach and groin, landing at the floor before his feat. 

Kate Oh’s contributions, "A Movement Away From Darkness” and "The New Phase,” similarly make use of the gold motif alongside abstraction to lightly suggest the natural landscape—a field of clouded dusk edges around and envelops a crackled, brilliant gold enclosure. In both paintings, the three-dimensional resplendent center blends into the edges of nightfall. While Stokes’ sculptures capture the otherworldly and Oh’s paintings presented nature in abstracted form, Swoon’s images of an urban train, as presented in “Subway Windows,” ground us in the everyday urban cityscape; Swoon’s contribution is sketched and printed onto a torn leaflet, the medium itself an artifact of the litter-filled urban cityscape. Anonymous faces and figures can be made out through the windows. Stop-motion animator and filmmaker Kunsang Kyirorong's “Automatic Drawing 1” and “Automatic Drawing 2" use charcoal and soft pastels on archival paper to present cutouts of a serpentine figure, similarly making use of monochromatic presentation. Kristine Versis' cut-paper piece, “Catmint” is monochromatic but more on the realist camp, as is Susan McDonnell's "First Light" watercolor, which presents a tranquil resting black bear. This is well complimented by Amy Ross’ “Buck Moon” watercolor which is, similarly, an exemplar work of the realist animal-study genre, with this graphite and charcoal portrait presenting a petrified deer’s ominous gaze.

Ekin Balcıoğlu’s portraits and iconography similarly motivate the object study in altogether different way, focusing instead on feminine figures, past and present, each dressed with exaggerated, almost cartoonish facial features. Similarly drawing on the theme of femininity, Pamela Knoll’s figurative portraits of women dovetail with Rebecca Donna Winsor’s. Karen Margolis’ “Splat” proffers a gauche map—an arachnean latticework—composed of holes and maps that guides the viewer through a field exchanging negative and positive space with diagrammatic weavings. “Splat,” another personal favorite, is a lineal mixed-media work that finds the group show at its apotheosis of abstraction and experimentation. Irina Rodnikoff's abstract expressionist painting, “Trypillian Myth,” makes use of vibrant bursts of coral and rusted lines, folded within a concentric wheel dotted with gray spots. Kevin Connolly Gillespie’s “Light Lines” takes up the theme of the environmental study via pop art sensibilities, with wispy smoke-like lines connecting to pink petals that seem to suggest fauna. Tibetan artist Kunkyi Tsotsong similarly speaks to environmental themes, albeit in a more surrealist vein, using the image of a gargantuan splayed fish from whom a dangling human carcass swings—the fisherman now the fished.

Curator Pema Rinzin’s own works are another favorite, as he engages in traditional Tibetan Buddhist painting techniques; these detailed works present a deep, penetrating background of aquamarine blue before which tree branches and tufts of moss-and-peach colored clouds breathe and curl. Emily Auchincloss's mixed-media works offer concentric, cloudy figures dotted with vibrant notes of color and Jessica Cannon’s “Morning Glory, Milky Way” depict imagined landscapes and night skies. Likewise, Laetitia Guyon's "Living in Chessy," which makes use of traditional Japanese painting techniques, uses ground mineral pigment on paper to suggest a natural environ cut-out flattened against a canvas—perhaps a pebble-tossed ocean bed or clouded sky. These works each, to varying degrees, suggest the natural landscape, or icons that refer to it, but do so in unique modes. Some motivate realist motifs and others engage in increasing abstraction. However, the diversity of style is precisely what makes “Towards the Light” a successful show, altogether breaking free from stylistic or thematic uniformity.

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

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