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Four of the artists were fine arts students at the elite Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul, and today several maintain residences in this country -- Young June Lew and Sandra Sunnyo Lee in San Francisco, Yooah Park and Woonsook Kim in New York. |
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Wonsook Kim is renowned in Korea for her lyrical and melancholy figurative paintings and lithographs. Often drawing from literature (as in the case of a recent series inspired by C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces), she deals metaphorically with life’s deepest mysteries through compelling narrative scenes. Yooah Park studied oriental brush painting from early childhood. Seeing her calligraphic marks as fundamentally figurative (in spirit if not in form), she innovates centuries of Korean tradition by engaging a central concern of western painting since the Renaissance. Her bold strokes evoke contemplation even as they remind that Franz Kline and the American Abstract Expressionists were strongly influenced by Asian painting. For more than a decade, Kwang Jean Park has explored the Taoist concept of Yin and Yang in abstract paintings and woodblock prints. This ancient philosophy basing all existence on the endless intermeshing of opposites takes form in a body of work characterized by expansive spaces and dynamic energies. Young June Lew’s sumptuous works have a large following in the United States. Their thick painterly impasto on canvas and paper breathes life into feminine images of combs, roses, coats and dresses. The warm monochromatic earth tones and strong emotional charge evoke the earth and a connection between cultures across time and space. Soon Shil Baik was born and raised in Korea’s southwestern Cholla Province, an area dedicated to the cultivation of tea and its associated traditions. She ritually drinks tea every day and has imbued this practice with spiritual significance in her lithographs and gouache paintings on rice paper. Baik’s work is characterized by evocative, abstracted landscapes inspired by tea fields in a wide and bold palette. Sandra Sunnyo Lee writes of “living an American life with an Asian mind.” Her thoughts and art are rooted in the Zen tenet that an understanding of form as emptiness is a means to attain deeper awareness. Enigmatic faces emerging from her canvases blur the distinction between solid form and surrounding space and effect a sense of tranquillity in the midst of endless change. This show continues founder Andrew Bae’s ongoing project of introducing Asian artwork into the American milieu. By presenting work from his native Korea as well as other Asian nations, he hopes to demonstrate that while cultural backgrounds and personal circumstances may differ, successful artwork can communicate through a universal language and the Asian way of seeing can be a contribution to the American cultural climate. |
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