Layered Expressions:Korean Contemporary Photography and Active Anesthesia-The Black Echo
Apr 16 - May 16, 2009
Layered Expressions: Korean Contemporary Photography
And Active Anesthesia – The Black Echo
At Gana Art New York
April 16-May 16, 2009
NEW YORK – Layered Expressions, an exhibition of Korean contemporary photography by Seung-Woo Back, Bien-U Bae, In Sook Kim and Jungjin Lee and Active Anesthesia – The Black Echo, a six panel, flat relief sculpture by Shin Il Kim will be on view at Gana Art New York from April 16-May 16, 2009. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 16 from 6-8 pm.
Korean contemporary photographers are reflecting on myriad issues that face a society which has so rapidly grown into a postmodern and transnational culture. Seung-Woo Back, Bien-U Bae, In Sook Kim and Jungjin Lee, the artists in this exhibition, address a wide range of social, psychological, political and traditional themes. Photography itself is a significant trend in Korean contemporary art today and is the medium of choice for a growing number of artists as it offers great freedom in capturing layered visions, as well as the illusory and real aspects of what can be revealed through the eye of the lens.
About the Artists in Layered Expressions
Seung-Woo Back
Back reworks recently discovered photographs that were taken immediately after the Korean War. He strives to reexamine an ideology that leaves a country still divided by this war. He overlays the clinical, black and white photographs of institutional spaces in North Korea with flashes of color that infuse an unreality to an overly real sterility of vision.
Bien-U Bae
Bae uses nature in his persistent experimentation with film and light to capture that which cannot be seen in "real" life. He experiments with the notion of a visual unconscious, a realm of seeing that explores what may lie beyond the surface. Bae offers a mystical view of pine trees that symbolize longevity and the cycle of life and death.
In Sook Kim
Within a seemingly uniform and structured framework of architecture, Kim offers us an unsettling view through windows that tell tales of what is happening indoors—contradictory private realities that traverse boundaries of normal/abnormal, deviant/straight, legal/criminal. Vignettes imbued with eroticism, the photos are disturbing voyeuristic incursions into hidden situations of women and urban isolation which portray victims in a collective loneliness.
Jungjin Lee
As a former painter and ceramist, Lee hand-coats rice paper with photo emulsion. The emulsion becomes deeply absorbed and embedded into the paper, lending a detailed yet abstract quality to the surface of her subjects. As a progression of her THING series, Lee's Pagoda series is a nod to her heritage and what is familiar to her. The pagodas float meditatively, quietly and weightlessly against a background devoid of all color and objects: "The act of vacating, like the blank spaces of my work, makes the thing dream of itself as well as me."
Black Echo – Active Anesthesia by Shin Il Kim
The Black Echo, a six panel, flat relief sculpture that is part of Shin Il Kim's Active Anesthesia series, will be on view in the project room. The 2 ft x 4 ft panels, which depict an abstracted image of an ice skater, are made of polycarbonate and painted with black acrylic paint. The ice in The Black Echo panels is a metaphor for the human passive state. The act of ice-skating is the active condition in the passive moment.
According to Shin Il Kim, human beings live in state of numbness and passivity comparable to anesthesia. The reason for this predicament is the overwhelming amount of media–supplied information that we consume on a daily basis. Marshall McLuhan's theory about understanding media is key to understanding this body of work. McLuhan says that different media invite different degrees of participation. Hot media provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus such as film and radio. Cold media provide little involvement with substantial stimulus such as television. Through this body of work, Shin Il Kim is attempting to "cool down" traditional hot media by manipulating them through abstraction and by making the viewer take on a more participatory role.