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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PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

Madison Ave New York

Picasso, Welcome to America

June 15 – September 27, 2023

R.C. Baker

Brandon Ballengée

Romare Bearden

Deborah Buck

Shijia Chen

Billy Copley

Eileen Foti

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht

Jaye Moon

Pablo Picasso

André Raffray

Janet Taylor Pickett

Zhang Hongtu

Every artist since the early 20th century has been influenced by Pablo Picasso.  The protean painter/ sculptor/ printmaker/ ceramicist helped define what “modern” art once was – and is still becoming.  In 1939, MoMA’s staff was gathering 300 works by the world’s “most famous living artist” (according to the museum’s press release) for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art.  A centerpiece of the exhibit was Guernica, his grisaille mural decrying the destruction of the small Basque town by Nazi bombers, in 1937.

Along with Michelangelo and Rembrandt, the name Picasso (1881-1973) has become a synonym – a cliché, even – for “artist.”  But none of the artists in Picasso, Welcome to America see the Spanish-born titan as an old hat.  Instead, these ten Americans find in the European trailblazer constant inspiration and ongoing challenge.  Zhang Hongtu imagines Chairman Mao exposed by glaring illumination similar to the all-seeing lantern in Guernica.  Jaye Moon also reimagines Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, in When Bob Dylan Meets Picasso, Guernica – using Lego bricks in Braille rather than paint.

The bodies and masks in another Picasso touchstone, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), come under scrutiny from Eileen Foti and André Raffray through substitution and homage.  Billy Copley finds masks in unlikely surroundings, while Janet Taylor Pickett moves effigies aside to place her powerful female figure at center stage.  Deborah Buck turns Picasso’s infamously harsh male gaze around, painting surreal figures that might be asking, “Who’s crying now?”  In Weary of Treading the Earth, from 1945, Romare Bearden, working in watercolor and ink rather than his later signature collage, energizes cubist space with a circus-like palette.  R.C. Baker riffs beyond Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods through primary-colored aluminum printing plates.  Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s dynamic wood and enamel sculpture strips the figure to cubist angles and voids, while Brandon Ballengée searches for animals that, like Picasso’s minotaurs, are no longer with us. Original works by Pablo Picasso will also be on view, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.

All of the artists in this exhibition have been influenced by Picasso’s experiments with form and perspective – his breaking of traditional and academic rules.  Some of the work here also comments on his darker side, while other pieces engage with the social and political aspects of Picasso’s art.  Ultimately, these ten contemporary artists in Picasso, Welcome to America appreciate the formal and aesthetic complexity of a constant innovator.  This great artist was effectively barred from ever visiting the United States because he was a member of the French Communist Party.  But the joke was on the Feds – Picasso has been in America all along.

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