TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

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

TRANSPACIFIC: PERFECT LOVERS

September 5 – October 19, 2024

JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam

20 Seolleung-ro 119-gil

Gangnam-gu, Seoul

South Korea, 06100

In celebrating its 20th anniversary, JENNIFER BAAHNG is making a significant mark. The gallery is opening its first Asia galleries, in Seoul, featuring TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers and Love Difference. This exhibition, presented in two parts at two locations, is a testament to two decades of artistic excellence. It showcases over a hundred boundary-leaping, subtle, playful, and political works presented by a diverse group of twelve artists and one poet, each with their own unique perspective. Perfect Lovers, opening September 5 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam, is an intimate space of vast intrigue, debuting polyphonic collectives of love, alienation, and the absurdism of ideal love. Love Difference, opening September 3 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam, explores creative differences, alluding to Manet, Warhol, and the art of loneliness. While New York is its home, JENNIFER BAAHNG is expanding its horizons, pivoting to the Pacific to share expertise and resources to develop the collective in Contemporary Art. 

Perfect Lovers, installed in the Gangnam district of Seoul, attends to splendid superficiality and yields a rich psychological weave. It is refreshingly sensuous and seeks flexible interpretations: Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, Kevin Melchionne steps into an imaginary space he aspires to but cannot fully inhabit; Jaye Moon reworked Felix Gonzales’s “Perfect Lovers” with a clock face in numerical Braille; the celebrated Mr. repurposed a found snowboard with iconic Japanese manga adolescent couples; quandaries of love are seen through the prism of the omnipotent Picasso; stories in first-person narrative are found in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “Pride and Insouciance.” TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers takes on the confines of adorning life.

Love Difference, installed in the Hannam district of Seoul with a palette of soft concrete in tandem with stark white walls with rich tonal nuances, presents clashing, flourishing, and playful works with a contemporary edge. While the installation feels ethereal, the format lends itself to a vivid, grand fantasy of love: R.C. Baker uses a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, in “Holy of Holies,” for which Andy Warhol was credited as the album’s producer; Brandon Ballengée’s “Frameworks of Absence” meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence; John Cage, a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde, is featured through a set of thirteen Ryoku, created with the principles of an ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching; going beyond collaboration to a kind of conspiratorial imagination, Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi’s “The Corpses” has evolved into more than two decades of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch of collages usually in progress or transit; Ru Marshall’s iPhone photo of a bodega in Brooklyn captures fleeting inquiries of interactive perception; Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s old book covers are raising expectations, holding authority, hiding secrets, and promising a visionary spirit—remnants from the proverbial “junkyard of history”; Jaye Moon’s “Get That Money” uses 9,216 Lego bricks to reconstruct K-Rap lyrics by Okasian into Braille in number codes; in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “The Liminal,” a voice chimes with Manet’s “Olympia.” TRANSPACIFIC: Love Difference reminds us that love is all-inclusive.

Yooah Park’s “Void in Writing” is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. The piece 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.

TRANSPACIFIC embarks on a tour, cites the intricacies, and amps up the romance, love, and deliberate insouciance. Playing out riotously in the soul and on the body of each work in myriad ways, the exhibition sets up methodical beats so that every work resonates. The show moves forward in a vibrant, varied way that brings different perspectives to the tenets of the unexpected. With sensuality and drama, Perfect Lovers is the good, the mad, and the quirky brought together into fantastical stories. Love Difference is profoundly thoughtful and cleverly argued. JENNIFER BAAHNG’s inaugural exhibition in Asia, TRANSPACIFIC, is a tale of love, in two cities, in Seoul.

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KEVIN MELCHIONNE

Kevin Melchionne

Kevin Melchionne

Lives and works in New Rochelle, New York

ARTIST BIO

Kevin Melchionne (b. 1964) is a painter and a writer. He grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where he took Silvermine Guild Arts Center classes. He studied painting at the Philadelphia College of Art, lived in Paris, and traveled to Italy. After graduating from Hunter College of the City University of New York with a BA in philosophy, he received a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His dissertation was Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life. He continued to paint.

His profound insights on the aesthetics of everyday life, taste, art, and well-being have left an indelible mark in the field. His articles have graced the pages of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophy and Literature, and Estetika. His influence extends beyond the written word, as he has been a Renwick Fellow of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and a recipient of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council Award for Arts Writing.

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