March 23 - April 21, 2002

Following a retrospective in December 2001 at South Korea’s Kumho Museum, the paintings of Young June Lew will come to Chicago for her first major exhibition in the Midwest region.

Young June Lew was born in Seoul in 1947 and studied art at Korea’s elite Ewha Womens University. She holds a masters degree in painting from California State University, and for the last 30 years she has made her home in California.

Her work is characterized by monumental canvases that contain coffee-stained Korean paper cutouts of empty clothing and other objects. She combines acrylic paint with graphite drawing and the embedded paper to create thick impasto surfaces which simultaneously conceal and reveal their strata. Through this method and her deeply-felt subject matter, Lew attempts to articulate something of the human experience of time’s passage and the nature of memory.

Young June Lew’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), the Oakland Museum (Oakland, CA), the Triton Museum of Art (Santa Clara, CA), the Sonje Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), the Woods Foundation (Lincoln, NE), and the McKinney Foundation (Modesto, CA) as well as in private collections around the world. She will exhibit at the 2002 Kwangju Biennale in Korea.