Young June Lew

Young June Lew is a painter whose life cannot be separated from her art. An exuberant but reserved person, her palette is correspondingly sumptuous yet understated. Her richly worked textures in mixed media often incorporate elements of her daily life: the morning's coffee grounds, or handmade Korean paper stained with that coffee and applied onto canvas. Ms. Lew’s work similarly reflects her multi-sided character. The abstract works are "action paintings," done to provide explosive release of emotional energy. These are done largely without planning, each stroke dictated by her mood and circumstances at the time of creation. Often, however, she works with careful restraint to produce quieter works marked by figurative elements, such as her current series of clothing paintings.

These possess all the emotive strength of her abstract images, but that energy is more refined and focussed here. As she tells us, empty clothing represents each of us in our ordinary lives. The garments’ worn appearance recalls a past through which we all have come, even as we move forward. She explains: "mankind has a fundamental desire to migrate from one place to another. Making the move creates an event, which becomes history. This history does not disappear; we, the living, remember it and make it a part of ourselves. As we mature and gain experience in this way, we begin to foresee what will come. These clothes, then, are remembrances of history, experiences of the present, and yearnings of the future."


EDUCATION

1976   MFA California State University (Los Angeles)
1973   BFA Ehwa Womens' University (Seoul, Korea)

Comtemporary Asian Art Young June Lew

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