Andrew Bae Gallery is pleased to announce “New Faces,” a summer group show of painting and sculpture from four young artists who are showing for the first time in Chicago. The guest curator for the exhibition is David A. Parker. The opening reception will be July 9 from 5 to 8 pm, and the exhibition will close on August 7.
Each of these artists pursues an individual direction with clarity and integrity. All were born and trained in South Korea; as a group, the works on view represent a multiplicity of materials, methods and motivations that characterizes the vitality of Korean art today.
Lim Seung-chun (b. 1973, Korea) creates figurative sculptures that appear as psychological portraits. Sensitively rendered, each work includes fantastic elements, such as an extra eye, or a cluster of houses atop a head, or oddness of scale, that take the viewer beyond the literal into the subject’s state of mind.
Jiha Moon (b. 1973, Korea) considers herself a “cartographer of cultures.” Her lush paintings reflect her hybrid experience of growing up in Korea and then immigrating to the US after art school. Her paintings are dynamic combinations of traditional Korean ink brush techniques & motifs with Western popular imagery in a high-color contemporary palette.
Shin Youngmi (b. 1979, Korea) uses a clean, illustrative style to create compelling narrative scenes. Her pastel colors and flat rendering result in fairytale visions that are tonally bright but dark in mood, featuring glowering owls, severed heads, and tortuous braids. Most images are populated with one or more half-dressed females, stand-ins for the artist as she relives past dreams and experiences.
Wang Ziwon (b. 1980, Korea) creates kinetic sculptures that merge space-age materials with ancient belief systems to question the relevance of tradition. His Buddha-z is a direct reference to the 7th century Korean bronze depicting the Maitreya Bodhisattva (or “Buddha of the future”). Wang’s seated figure gently sways, its aureola a hypnotic structure of precision gears. He has said: [in the future] “a self will be able to become a ‘postperson,’ achieving immortality by dispensing of oneself through mechanical deliverance.”
Exhibition curator David A. Parker, an artist and art consultant in Chicago, is principal of DPFA Inc. (www.dpfp.net)
