NAOMI SAVAGE

April 28, 2020

Unexplored Limits

April – June, 2020

Naomi Savage was a highly innovative photographer, who regarded the darkroom as a laboratory where she could invent new and exciting techniques that began with photography but expanded the capability of the medium to new and previously unexplored limits. She was the niece of Man Ray and studied with him for a brief period in Hollywood, California. It was he who taught her that photography had no boundaries. “The darkroom,” he told her, “was a place to make fearless tries at whatever images came to mind.” She followed that advice throughout her career, being the first to display metal-plate photoengravings (customarily used as a means by which to make prints) as finished works of art, thereby causing the very medium of photography to be redefined. She first showed her work in the 1950s and 1960s in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was represented in the 1970s to mid-1980s by the prestigious gallery of Lee Witkin in New York City. Her work can be found in some of the most distinguished museums and art institutions in the United States: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Princeton University Art Museum, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, etc. When digital photography emerged in the 1990s, Savage embraced it completely, considering it as a new and revolutionary means by which to engage in an even greater diversity of experimentation. The influence of Man Ray appears throughout her work, both formally, thematically and conceptually, as she fully embraced his position that art follows no rules and is without limitation, thereby, in the case of Naomi Savage, resulting in a range of work that stretched the limits of photography.

Due to the ongoing situation with COVID-19, Baahng Gallery is postponing upcoming exhibitions and programs. In the meantime, we will be providing series of online exhibitions and announcements. For information about the exhibitions or the works, please contact us at inquiries@baahng.com

Biography

Naomi Savage, photographer, born June 25, 1927 and died at her home in Princeton, New Jersey, on November 22, 2005. While still in high school, she took a class in photography at the New School for Social Research with Berenice Abbott. Some twenty years earlier, Abbott had studied photography in Paris with Man Ray, who was Naomi Savage’s uncle. In 1946, Savage enrolled in Bennington College, where she studied art and music, but before graduating, left to be an apprentice for Man Ray in Hollywood. He taught her that photography was above all a creative process, one of many tools that could be used for the purpose of visual expression. When she returned to New York in 1948, she combined her love of music with her skill in photography by taking portraits of the best known composers of day: Aaron Copland, John Cage, Virgil Thomson, etc. (over 30 in all). Throughout her career, she experimented with the medium of photography, continuously inventing new and highly original techniques. Perhaps her best known work is a series of metal photo engravings (1972) dominating the walls of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas. In her later years, she became attracted to the enormous potential of digital imagery, experimenting with various methods to manipulate and enhance color, even using new and unconventional materials for laser printing. She exhibited widely, most recently at the Montclair Art Museum, and her photographs are included in major institutional collections throughout the United States……………..provided by Francis M. Naumann.

Francis M. Naumann is an art historian, who specializes in art of the Dada and Surrealist period. He has written extensively on the art of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. His New York Dada 1915-23 (1994) is considered the definitive history of the movement, and his “Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York” (1996) is the most comprehensive exhibition on the subject ever assembled. His doctoral dissertation was on Man Ray’s early years in New York, later published as Conversion to Modernism: The Early Work of Man Ray (2003). Throughout his years of his research on Man Ray, he met Naomi Savage and, over the years, they became good friends.

NAOMI SAVAGE

Unexplored Limits

April - June, 2020

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Naomi Savage

MAN RAY

April 20, 2020

April – June, 2020

A l’Heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux, 1970 depicts Man Ray’s most famous painting, A l’Heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux, 1932-34: a pair of enormous female lips detached from a visage and floating mysteriously over the city of Paris. They were the lips of Lee Miller, Man Ray’s lover who left him just before he embarked upon the painting of this picture and, thus, historians have understood it to serve as his memorial to her or his personal purgative of loss. Whatever its motive, with this one image Man Ray has succeeded in capturing the essence of Surrealism: an image displaced from its natural environment and placed within a magical setting, while at the same time evoking the depiction of a dream.

Biography

Painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, draftsman…Man Ray has never limited himself to a single medium of artistic expression, tirelessly seeking new possibilities of creation or diversion of existing techniques. Considering art essentially as a game, he refused to attach himself to a determined style. Man Ray was born in 1980 in Philadelphia. In 1913, he discovered at the exhibition The Armory Show in New York European artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. With Marcel Duchamp he created and experimented with optical devices to study motion. He participated in the Dada movement in New york until 1921, when he left for France. As he arrived in Paris, Marcel Duchamp introduced him to the Parisian artistic scene. It was the beginning of an intense period of creation: photographs (fashion, portraits, art), exhibitions, films…In the interwar period Paris, Man Ray frequents all the greatest actors of creation, Dadaists, Surrealists, writers, filmmakers, fashion designers…In 1940, Man Ray had to leave France for the United States, where he realized major works like the Shakespearian paintings, etc. Man Ray returned to Paris in 1951, moved to rue Ferou where he painted, drew, wrote his memoirs and continued to use photographic processes. Thus begins the edition of his objects “Objects of my affection” first with Marcel Zerbib, then with Arturo Schwarz. Man Ray died on November 18, 1976 in Paris. He is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery.

…………………………………………. excerpt from Man Ray International Association

Mathematical Object (Anthony) is one of some twenty photographs taken by Man Ray in 1934-35 of mathematical models located in the Institut Poincaré in Paris. Twelve of the photographs were featured in a 1936 issue of the journal Cahiers d’Art devoted to the “object” and four were exhibited in MoMA’s exhibition the same year, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism. The models were drawn to his attention by Max Ernst, who had discovered them and thought them exceptionally provocative, surreal shapes. The models were used to render complex mathematical formulae into three-dimensional form, but it was not their origin in mathematics that attracted the interests of Man Ray. “The formulas accompanying them meant nothing to me,” he later explained, “the forms themselves were as varied and authentic as any in nature” (Self-Portrait, 1963, p. 368). While living in Hollywood, California, in the 1940s, Man Ray used the photographs he had taken in the Institut Poincaré as the basis of a series of pictures that he grouped under the title “The Shakespearean Equations,” which, in true Dada and Surrealist fashion, had as little to do with Shakespeare as they did with equations. Man Ray retrieved the photographs he had printed in the 1930s on a trip back to Paris in 1947, and this example is believed to be among them. This particular print is often titled Antony, as we know that it was used as the basis for the figure of Anthony in his painting Antony and Cleopatra, 1948.

MAN RAY

A l’Heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux

April - June, 2020

MAN RAY

April - June 2020

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Man Ray

SOPHIE MATISSE

April 1, 2020

Be Back In 5

April – June, 2020

……………..In the persuasive likenesses of well-known paintings, but all rendered without any living thing in them; The Mona Lisa without Mona; Velazquez’ Las Meninas as a vast empty room, Sophie produced some 20 paintings in all. Completely denuded of their human inhabitants by Jan Vermeer, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, Claude Monet, Winslow Homer, including by Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Edward Hopper, Charles Willson Peale, — most notably — her great- grandfathers, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse……………………..

SECRET GARDEN

Sophie Matisse

May 15 - June 30, 2021

SOPHIE MATISSE

MORE THAN ONE WAY HOME

Sophie Matisse
Janet Taylor Pickett
Zhang Hongtu

October 10 - November 24, 2020

Sophie Matisse was interviewed by BBC TWO on “Becoming Matisse”

Broadcasted on Saturday, April 25, 2020, 9:15pm - 10:15pm.

SOPHIE MATISSE

Be Back in 5

April - June, 2020

SOPHIE MATISSE

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Sophie Matisse

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

April 1, 2020

Mappings of Memory

April – June, 2020

……………………….“Throughout my development as an artist, I began to recognize ‘home’ to be a metaphor; an idea for finding my visual voice. The ‘home’ of personal geography, the self-landscape of memory revealed, become the journey from which the artworks in this exhibition have been created.”……………………………………….

Janet Taylor Pickett in the Traveling Museum Exhibitions

September 21, 2024 - August 2026

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

Sept 3 - Nov 2, 2024

GANGNAM, SEOUL PERFECT LOVERS August 16 - October 19, 2024

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

Sept 5 - Oct 19, 2024

Janet Taylor Pickett included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM February 9 to July 7 2024

Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM

February 9 - July 7, 2024

STAMPS interviews Janet Taylor Pickett: History and Artistry

September 25, 2023

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES 

Oct 5 – 31, 2023

Janet Taylor Pickett is featured at the Denver Museum

November 12, 2023 - March 3, 2024

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

NECESSARY MEMORIES | March 15 - April 28 | SUNY Old Westbury NY

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: LIGHT, COLOR AND DESIRE

May 27 - Sep 3, 2023

Janet Taylor Pickett, Melon Dress, 2001, oil, charcoal, oil stick and collage on canvas, 60 x 40 in

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT: NECESSARY MEMORIES

March 15 - April 28, 2023

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Janet Taylor Pickett

ZHANG HONGTU: I DARE TO MATE A HORSE WITH AN OX

September 19, 2019

Baahng Gallery is pleased to present I DARE TO MATE A HORSE WITH AN OX, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition of the highly celebrated works of Zhang Hongtu, a Chinese-born, New York-based artist and forerunner of the Chinese “Political Pop” art movement. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from September 27 through November 8, with an opening reception with the artist to be held on Friday, September 27, from 6 to 8 pm.

To dare to mate a horse with an ox is to dare to break down the zygotic barriers that maintain the separation of species. This notion of doing the impossible and breaking down barriers has been the lodestar of Zhang Hongtu’s life and five decade-long career. As a Muslim outsider in China, then as a Chinese exile in America, through his works, he has continually sought to disintegrate dividing walls in culture, politics, and time. His works involve thoughtful juxtapositions of critique with humor, and the appropriation of images of authority figures and cultural icons, for the purpose of deflating the power of such formidably divisive influences. While each work captures and contemplates a multi-layered discourse on competing ideas, the exhibition as a whole unexpectedly proposes universality and relevancy.

I DARE TO MATE A HORSE WITH AN OX highlights selected works from Zhang’s series Shansui, Political Pop, and Van Gogh/Bodhidharma. Van Gogh/Bodhidharma consists of 39 ink paintings created over the course of seven years, 2007-2014. They are the Van Gogh “self-portraits” merged into the style of the classical Zen portraits of Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. His morphing of Van Gogh and Bodhidharma into one is a remarkable display of the artist’s masterful ability to dissolve distinctions between two icons. Also on view are: Bada! Bada!!-11, #2, 2011, a lopsided map of China facing a mob of angry fish; Walking Monkey, 2016, a warning on a disrupted ecosystem; Landscape, Out of the Focus, 2011, a questioning of the assumption of near-sightedness; Long Live Chairman Mao Series, 1987-1995; Zodiac Figures, 2002; Mai Dang Lao, 2002; and Six-Pack of Kekou-Kele, 2002.

Zhang Hongtu was born in Gansu, China, in 1943. He attended the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in Beijing 1964-1969, moved to New York in 1982, and attended Art Students League 1982-1986. Selected solo exhibitions include at Queens Museum, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas, the Connecticut College Charles E. Shain Library, The Bronx Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. Selected group exhibitions at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museu Picasso, Spain, Brooklyn Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, Princeton University Art Museum, Israel Museum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba, The Hall for Contemporary Art, Hamburg, Germany, Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Germany, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan.

ZHANG HONGTU

I DARE TO MATE A HORSE WITH AN OX

September 27 – November 16, 2019

Opening reception with the artist

6-8pm, Friday September 27

Artist Talk on Van Gogh/Bodhidharma: 1-3pm, Saturday November 16

JANET TAYLOR PICKETT, ZHANG HONGTU, PINK and THE CORPSES 

Oct 5 – 31, 2023

Zhang Hongtu at Museo Picasso Málaga

October 3, 2023 - March 31, 2024

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

Zhang Hongtu participates Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions Summoning Memories: Art Beyond Chinese Traditions at the Asia Society Texas, February 10 - July 2, 2023

Zhang Hongtu is featured at the Asia Society in Texas

February 10 - July 2, 2023

PITCHES & SCRIPTS

Group Exhibition

January 20 - March 11, 2023

(DE)CONSTRUCTING IDEOLOGY: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND BEYOND November 13, 2022 to March 12, 2023

Zhang Hongtu lectures and exhibits at the Wende Museum

November 13, 2022 - March 12, 2023

TANGO

Summer Exhibition

July 13 - August 17, 2022

VAN GOGH / BODHIDHARMA

Zhang Hongtu

March 25 - April 27, 2022

Zhang Hongtu’s “Mai Dang Lao” from the Brooklyn Museum Collection is featured on PBS NYC – ARTS

February 17, 2022

LOVE DIFFERENCE

Eric Brown, Janet Taylor Pickett, Zhang Hongtu

May 15 - June 15, 2021

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Zhang Hongtu

VERTIGO

July 6, 2019

Vertigo

Works on Paper

July 19 – August 23, 2019

By Appointment

Romare Bearden

Lisa Beck

Joseph Beuys

Carol Bove

Mario Merz
Nobuo Sekine

Josh Smith

Pat Steir

Bob Thompson

William Majors
Zhang Hongtu

Categories: exhibitions

JACK SAL: Re/Vision

May 23, 2019

ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ART begins 2009 with “Jack Sal: Re/Vision,” a long overdue exhibition for a multi-faceted artist. His work appears in the many permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York City, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. He is a respected figure in Europe, where he has mounted a series of remarkable site-specific installations. He has collaborated with William Wegman and Sol Lewitt and exhibited along side Sigmar Polke and Nan Goldin. But Sal’s work remains largely unfamiliar to the American public.

ZONE is presenting a cross section of Sal’s work, including a chapel-like space of large-scale paintings, using gesso and silk surgical tape, created specifically for this installation. Minimalist yet profoundly humanistic, his work has a handmade look, which carries over into a group of smaller paintings and works on paper.

Sal is intensely aware of the temporal dimension of his work, in general, and this exhibition, in particular. He sees this new year as a “moment when the demarcation of change is upon mankind….” and it is the engagement of culture with such conditions that make up the conceptual language of the works created for Re/Vision. These art works refer to their own making and ultimately refer to the tabula rasa of this very important moment. Temperamentally, he has much in common with Terry Riley, the composer of seminal works of musical minimalism such as the serenely joyous “In C”. Like Riley, an unassuming figure who never crossed over into mainstream success, Sal works with pared-down idioms, avoiding epic emotions and climaxes, and finding lyrical grace in repetition on an intimate scale. In “Minor/Key” Sal makes an oblique musical reference, isolating an ebony piano key and enshrining it in a box.

While he sees marking as a basic artistic act, Sal also incorporates the natural processes inherent in some of his materials. A celebrated photographer, he uses photo-printing paper to capture light and has revived the cliché-verre technique used by nineteenth-century pioneers in the medium. He slices lead plates and allows them to weather naturally: the veining coalesces into landscape-like patterns. These small, square panels provide a dark counterpoint to the predominantly white works in the exhibition. Using a relatively simple palette, Sal explores a wide range of materials and ideas, offering a fresh vision of the art experience

JACK SAL: Re/Vision

January 22 – February 28, 2009

Opening reception

6-8pm, Thursday January 22

JACK SAL: Re/Vision

January 22 - February 28, 2009

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Jack Sal

PASHA RADETZKI: Crossed House

May 11, 2019

ZONE: CONTEMPORARY ART is proud to present Pasha Radetzki in his first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition showcases installation, sculpture, paintings, and drawings accompanied by sound. The concept of trans-space is manifest in the works on view and drawing on the artist’s childhood memories and heritage.

Crossed House is an interactive environment where a large-scale sculpture Cross cuts through a house. Viewers are invited to pass through the cross embodying themselves in the regeneration process of the site’s four cardinal directions. The installation adopts the Slavic nesting Doll within the Doll, Matryoshka construction tradition to present the house in all its dimensions, expanded and interconnected. This confirms the artist’s notion of “socium”: the micro-macro form coexists and interrelates, as there are multiple houses built in the space of one.

From the Republic of Belarus, the artist since 1999 has been based in New York. Pasha Radetzki has exhibited in Germany, Moscow, Spain, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan. His works are included in the public and private collections of Exit Art, Moscow House of Photography, Belarus Museum of National History, and Faro Disegni inRome. In 2002 he was a recipient of an international ArtsLink Projects Award for installation from CEC International Partners, New York. Numerous fieldwork projects have taken the artist to the tribal areas of Mynamar and Laos, the Amazon delta, the Himalayan western region, Andean Puna, and Western China. Pasha Radetzki’s art reviews have appeared in The Village Voiceand New York Arts Magazine.

Crossed House

A solo exhibition by Pasha Radetzki

March 5 – 28, 2009

Opening reception

6-8pm, Thursday March 12

Categories: exhibitions

Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities

May 11, 2019

Exhibition guest curated by Dr. Howard Risatti, critic and Chair, Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University

Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts will present the work of a group of established artists and their young, emerging counterparts, all of whom work primarily in traditional Craft materials, but without relying on function as their primary support.

In an art world in which Craft materials are regularly used in the manner of Fine Art (e.g., Rosemarie Trockel’s knitting and Jeff Koons’ slip-cast ceramics), traditional distinctions based on material alone hardly seem significant. Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities features a wide range of objects in typical Craft materials that challenge conventional notions of Craft and explore the sensibilities guiding Craft disciplines.

Craft has always involved a dialogue between material, form, and technique resulting in beautifully made objects that allow material to co-exist in itself. While few works in the exhibition are functional in nature, they all tend to have features that express the special nature of Craft. Works included in this exhibition demonstrate that cross-cultural, global affinities in form, material, technique, and concepts have long been a part of Craft.

Moreover, Craft generally adheres to an idea of the object as personally scaled and suitable for the domestic realm; thus out-sized, museum-scaled objects tend to be avoided. In place of the grand, public gesture common to Fine Art, Craft works tend to be more intimate and personal in scale and sentiment–more like chamber music than grand opera. Because Craft objects invite touch, interactive qualities of “feel,” weight, and balance are part of their intimate aesthetic appeal.

Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities

An Exhibition of Art in Craft Media

Exhibition guest curated by Dr. Howard Risatti, critic and Chair, Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University

June 30 – July 23, 2005

Opening Reception

6-8pm, Thursday, June 30

Curatorial Statement

MATERIAL MATTERS: A POETICS OF POSSIBILITIES

An Exhibition of objects in Craft Media

by Dr. Howard Risatti

Most of the artists in this exhibition engage a wide range of materials traditionally associated with Craft–for example, among the more established artists, Jack Wax works in glass, Allan Rosenbaum in ceramic, Douglas Finkel in wood, James Meyer in metal, and John Hawthorne in fiber. Because of this, they would be identified as “Craft artists.” However, in an art world in which Craft materials are regularly being used in the manner of Fine Art, distinctions based on material alone hardly seem important any longer. If they were, where would we place Rosemarie Trockel with her knitting, Mike Kelly with his stuffed animals, and Jeff Koons with his slip-cast ceramics? What is important about material, as this exhibition demonstrates, is how it is ultimately used in the service of artistic expression.

When it comes to Craft, most people, whether consciously or not, still assume that Craft objects exhibit certain features, the most prominent of which is function. This exhibition is decidedly not about function–in fact few works in it are actually functional, not even Bill Hammersley’s benches, Jason Hackett’s urns, or Adam Welch’s platters. Rather, it is an exploration of the special meanings and sensibilities inherent in Craft. For instance, embracing the global (currently so evident in the art world) is hardly new to Craft since Craft-disciplines have always had cross-cultural affinities in form, material, technique, and concepts. Artists in this exhibition such as Hyo-in Kim and Ji-Wan Joo exploit Korean and Western ceramics, similarly, Lydia Thompson’s work displays elements of African design, and Susan Iverson employs Peruvian weaving methods.

Craft objects tend to be relatively small and avoid the monumental scale implicitly invited by spacious contemporary museums. Ceramists Sergei Isupov and Suk-Jin Choi, fabric artists Nicole Haimbach and Maria Kovacs, and woodworkers Kate Hudnall and Travis Townsend, all create objects more closely scaled to the body than to monumental architecture. Their art works do not require large, formal exhibition spaces, but are quite at home in more personal and familial surroundings.

Craft objects tend to direct attention to the domestic realm rather than public spaces, something evident in J. D. Garn’s ceramics and Cindy Myron’s metal work. They also tend to speak intimately and personally; more akin to chamber music than grand opera. Moreover, in keeping with their sense of scale and setting, the concern with material in Craft includes fragility and interactive tactile sensations which, after all, are redolent with domestic life’s interpersonal and bodily relationships; such features are apparent in the glass works of Emilio Santini, Fumiaki Odajima, and Tim Wagner and the ceramics of Fiona Ross.

The Craft object speaks in another voice, one that compliments rather than contradicts Fine Art. In doing so it suggests a cross-cultural understanding of personal space that is rich with poetic possibility.

Dr. Howard Risatti

Howard Risatti is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University where he also was Chair of the Department of Craft/Material Studies from 2001-05. Before receiving his PhD in art history, he earned BM and MM Degrees in music and is ABD in music theory and composition.

His writings on art and craft have appeared in various journals including the Art Journal, Artforum, New Art Examiner, Artscribe, Latin American Art, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Woman’s Art Journal, Art Criticism, The Studio Potter, Sculpture, and Ceramic Art & Perception. Most recently he wrote on Jackie Matisse’s “Collaborations in Art and Science” for Sculpture Magazine, on “Contemporary American Ceramic Trends” for Korean Ceramics Monthly, and on the ceramic sculpture of Suk-Jin Choi for Ceramics Monthly.

He has presented numerous papers on various subjects including functional crafts at the 2003 Cheongju Craft Biennial in Korea; Jackie Matisse’s virtual reality kites at the “Art and New Technologies” conference in Chalon sur Soane, France; Leo Steinberg’s “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public” at the 2005 College Art Conference in Atlanta; and Craft versus Design at the 2005 Society of North American Goldsmiths’ conference in Cleveland.

His first book was New Music Vocabulary and appeared in 1975 (University of Illinois Press); Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in Contemporary Art appeared in 1990 and the 2^nd edition in 1998 (Prentice Hall). The Mountain Lake Workshops: Artists in Locale (1996, Anderson Gallery & VA Tech Foundation) ) accompanied the exhibition that he curated of the same title. In 1998 he co-authored with Kenneth Trapp Skilled Work: American Craft in the Renwick Gallery (Smithsonian Institution Press). His latest book, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (UNC Press), is scheduled to appear in Fall 2007.

Categories: exhibitions

YOOAH PARK

May 10, 2019

ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts is proud to present the second solo exhibition of the gallery artist Yooah Park. This exhibition showcases the many facets of her recent work, as she takes her signature fusion of inherited Asian art forms and Western abstraction in excitingly new directions.

Her blood-red medium is Inju, concocted from cinnabar, perilla oil and cotton. The color and viscosity of the medium allude to sealing wax, colophon signatures and Gyong-myon-ju-sa, the red mineral pigment used in Korean Bujeok, talismans fashioned to ward off evil spirits. The mix of cinnabar, mercury and sulfur in Gyong-myon-ju-sa represents a balance between positive and negative forces. The delicate and potentially dangerous ritual of mixing diverse elements lives at the root of the ancient mystical science of alchemy.

Ceramics have historically been an integral part of Korean culture. For the current exhibition, Park has hand shaped 13 monumental porcelain rice bowls, symbols of renewal and vitality. These majestic vessels – 32 ½ inches in diameter, 14 ½ inches tall – engulf the exhibition space, but the delicacy of the celadon glaze makes them seem weightless. It is as if the free spirit within the clay had been liberated. The gentle irregularities of the bowls are eloquent reminders of the casting process in which dynamic natural forces are guided by the artist’s shaping hand and eye.

Yooah Park was born in Seoul, Korea and currently works and resides in New York City. She has exhibited extensively abroad, including Seoul, Paris, New York, Beijing, and Tokyo. Her largest exhibition “Writing in the Void” was shown at the Center for Architecture and Design in Mexico City and at the Central House of Artists Museum in Moscow. Several of her works are also in international art museum collections.

YOOAH PARK

Solo exhibition

March 7 – March 29, 2008

Opening Reception

6-8PM, Friday March 7

Curatorial Statement

Yooah Park combines the aesthetic traditions of her native Korea with twenty-first century global technologies. This exhibition showcases the many facets of her recent work, as she takes her signature fusion of inherited Asian art forms and Western abstraction in excitingly new directions.

Ceramics have historically been an integral part of Korean culture. In 2004, ZONE presented Park’s 63 Cubes, heavy, solid forms in an elegiac matte charcoal color that alluded to temple tiles and funeral rites. For the current exhibition, Park has hand shaped thirteen monumental porcelain rice bowls, symbols of renewal and vitality. These majestic vessels – 32 ½ inches in diameter, 14 ½ inches tall – engulf the exhibition space, but the delicacy of the celadon glaze which is the color of a lunar moth’s wings, makes them seem weightless. It is as if the free spirit within the clay had been liberated. The gentle irregularities of the bowls are eloquent reminders of the casting process in which dynamic natural forces are guided by the artist’s shaping hand and eye.

Park’s new work represents an imaginative leap forward, but this flowering is rooted in her understanding of traditional techniques. Trained as a brush painter, she is extending the gestural language of calligraphy into unexpected forms and mediums. She laser-cuts brushstroke characters out of aluminum, then, suspends them as mobiles in an installation of cascading columns. Paper-thin, reflective and dangerously sharp-edged, they slice through the air with the physical energy of Action painting and the cool clarity of twenty-first century techno-modernism. She has freed calligraphy from the two dimensions of paper and ink and given writing a precarious sculptural identity of kinetic art.

The riff on calligraphy continues with a suite of 200 small, square paintings. Liquid vinyl, a synthetic material used by contemporary fashion houses, provides the non-traditional support. Park abandons the brush; instead she finger paints directly onto the translucent, skin-like fabric, with the visceral intensity of an abstract Expressionist. Her blood-red medium is Inju, concocted from cinnabar, perilla oil and cotton. The color and viscosity of the medium allude to sealing wax, colophon signatures and Gyong-myon-ju-sa, the red mineral pigment used in Korean Bujeok, talismans fashioned to ward off evil spirits. The mix of cinnabar, mercury and sulfur in Gyong-myon-ju-sa represents a balance between positive and negative forces. The delicate and potentially dangerous ritual of mixing diverse elements lives at the root of the ancient mystical science of alchemy.

Metamorphosis results when traditional knowledge is combined with a bold spirit of experimentation. Park’s sequence of red paintings constitutes both a personal diary and a record of the creative process. The goal of true alchemy, the philosopher’s stone that turns base material into gold, is the process that leads to self-understanding. Park breathes new life into raw materials – clay, pigment, metal, synthetic – through the incantatory power of words and gestures.

– Dr. Jennifer Baahng

Artist bio

Yooah Park currently resides in the New York area, but frequently travels to her native Korea. For years she has studied and traveled between the two places, and her artwork reflects this dual identification. At first glance, the use of black ink and brush on handmade paper in a free and gestural manner belie the artist’s Asian background, but there is a decidedly Western element here that is less obvious. Park’s paintings are characterized by a lyrical sense of movement. This is related to the artist’s practice of painting from a live dancer performing in her studio, so that her paintings might have a greater quality of flowing grace. This art, therefore, which some would link to an Asian tradition of brush calligraphy, is also intimately connected with the study of the human form that has preoccupied Western art since the Renaissance.

Yooah Park’s pieces are filled with forms that seem to tumble and glide beyond the frame into an infinite space established by the diaphanous layers of carefully-laid paper. This is a space first articulated by the American canvas painters of the postwar New York school; Park brings it forth here through the use of materials with centuries of Asian heritage.

In today’s art world there is much talk of “bridging East and West.” Rarely do we see a vision that accomplishes such an integration. Neither Asian nor American, but rather a joyous fusion of the two, the art of Yooah Park succeeds as a new synthesis of aesthetic strengths from both spheres.

Solo Exhibitions

2006 Writing in the Void

The Central House of Artists Museum, Moscow, Russia

The Center for Architecture and Design, Mexico City, Mexico

2004 ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts, NY

2003 Gana Insa Art Center, Seoul

2002 Gana Insa Art Center, Seoul

2001 Andrew Bae Gallery, Chicago

2000 Hudson River Gallery, NY

1999 Jean Art Gallery, Seoul

1998 Space Untitled, NY

1997 Shirota Gallery, Tokyo

Gallery Bhak, Seoul

1996 Gallery Simon, Seoul

MANlF Seoul International Art Fair, Seoul

MAC 2000, Paris

1995 Seorim Gallery, Seoul

Gallery Ihn, Seoul

’95 Seoul Art Fair (J&C Gallery), Seoul

1994 East-West Cultural Studies, NY

’94 Seoul Art Fair (J&C Gallery), Seoul

1993 Sampoong Gallery, Seoul

1990 Jadite Galleries, NY

Selected Group Exhibitions

2007 ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts, New York, NY

2006 ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts, New York, NY

2004 Korean Contemporary Art,

Forum Gallery, Dallas, TX

2003 Best Star, Best Artist,

Gana Insa Art Center, Seoul

2002 KCAF, Seoul, Korea

Works on Paper, New York

Art of Pacific Asia, New York

2001 KCAF, Seoul, Korea

Works on Paper, New York

Art of Pacific Asia, New York

Kwangju International Ceramic Expo,

Kwangju, Korea

2000 ACAF, Sydney, Australia

Art Miami, Miami, FL

Works on Paper, New York

Art of Pacific Asia, New York

1999 NICAF, Tokyo, Japan

ACAF, Sydney, Australia

Works on Paper, New York

Art of Pacific Asia, New York

1998 NICAF, Tokyo, Japan

SIAF, Seoul, Korea

Art Miami, Miami, FL

1997 NICAF, Tokyo, Japan

MANIF, Seoul, Korea

SIAF, Seoul, Korea

1996 MANIF, Seoul, Korea

SIAF, Seoul, Korea

IN THE ATRIUM

Yooah Park

VOID IN WRITING

September 3 – December 28, 2024

JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam

Yooah Park’s Void in Writing is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. It is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. This monumental presentation intrigues and piques the audience’s desire to walk around and contemplate it, enriching TRANSPACIFIC’s rich tapestry of contemporary art.

VOID IN WRITING

Sept 3 – Dec 28, 2024

“Communion Constellation” presented during the 53rd Venice Biennale

June 5 - June 19, 2009

YOOAH PARK

March 7 - March 29, 2008

Categories: exhibitions

Tags: Yooah Park

JENNIFER BAAHNG

Category Archives: exhibitions

NAOMI SAVAGE

Biography

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MAN RAY

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SOPHIE MATISSE

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JANET TAYLOR PICKETT

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ZHANG HONGTU: I DARE TO MATE A HORSE WITH AN OX

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VERTIGO

JACK SAL: Re/Vision

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PASHA RADETZKI: Crossed House

Material Matters: A Poetics of Possibilities

YOOAH PARK

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