SPATIAL VISIONS; THE AHL FOUNDATION 2015 VISUAL ARTS AWARD WINNERS

I wanted to let everyone know that this week there will be an Opening Reception: October 22nd, 6-8pm at ART MORA Gallery 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001 for an exhibition that ODNY is co-sponsoring.

From October 22 – November 4, 2015 you can see Spatial Visions which features 4 artist who were the AHL Foundation's 2015 Visual Arts Award Winners. Read below to learn more about the artists and their work and please stop by the reception and the gallery if you live in the area!


Artists: Eunsook Lee/Buhm Hong/Yoosamu/Heelim Hwang

Curated by Hyewon Yi

The Ahl Foundation is pleased to present Spatial Visions: The AHL Foundation 2015 Visual Arts Award Winners, an exhibition by four Korean artists who won this year’s annual competition awards. The three jurors for AHL Foundation’s twelfth annual competition were David Cohen, editor-in-chief and founder of ArtCritical; Alise Tifentale, co-curator of the Latvia Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and Selfiecity project researcher, and Hyewon Yi, Director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY College at Old Westbury.

The winners are Eunsook Lee (1st prize), Buhm Hong (2nd prize) and Yoosamu (3rd prize); the Wolhee Choe Memorial Award was bestowed upon Heelim Hwang. Spatial Visions presents these artists’ most current and representative works. Eunsook Lee’s black-light installation, Bound, depicts Manhattan skyscrapers as letters of the alphabet. Buhm Hong’s black-and-white drawings and the video 18 rooms and 6 hallways, based on the same drawings, slowly pan enigmatic interiors populated by columns, staircases, shelves and windows. Yoosamu will present his newest painting, Sun Queen, part of his “Remake Culture” series, which addresses the phenomenon of American remakes of foreign films through incongruous “re-makes” of iconic Western paintings that incorporate elements of Asian anime. Heelim Hwang’s pictorial spaces reflect her multicultural experiences, rich with clashing visual elements of flatness and depth. All four artists explore spatial visions in their chosen artistic medium in which, according to head juror Cohen, “illusion and reality, social experience and interiority” are the common characteristics.

First Prize-winner Eunsook Lee’s site-specific outdoor works channel into intimate messages the power of historically and politically charged places, such as the Berlin Wall and DMZ in Korea. While her mesmerizing light installations are abstract in their minimalistic form, they are emotionally charged with longing and symbolic significance that is deeply personal•members of Lee’s family were stranded in North Korea after the war.

In Unfamiliar Place, Second Prize-holder Buhm Hong<http://buhmhong.com/> delivers delicate and mysterious drawings, installations, and video works that confuse the viewer’s gaze and trap it in a world that is part Piranesi, part Duchamp. Often relying on Renaissance one-point perspective, Hong’s rooms may at first seem familiar, but they are terrifyingly strange at the same time.

Third Prize-winner Yoosamu<http://www.yoosamu.com/> offers ‘database painting’ that possesses the qualities of the Picture Generation of the 1970s and ‘80s, but Yoo’s appropriated images derive from a younger generation’s video games and the Internet. The grandes machines of the pre-Impressionist salons of Paris also reappear in these large-scale paintings with their modern nymphs from Manga and modern warriors from videogames.

Winner of the Wolhee Choe Memorial Award for 2015, Heelim Hwang<http://www.heelimhwang.com/> offers abstraction and figuration that have never been closer than in these fresh takes on geometrical abstractions that suggest a twenty-first century reincarnation of Edouard Vuillard. The paintings’ diverse perspectival schemes and colorful textile-like patterns induce a meditative state in scenes rendered in reverse perspective that originated in the artist’s quest for personal identity within the context of her multicultural and multinational experience.

Established in 2003, AHL Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Korean and Korean-American artists living in the United States by promoting exposure of their work in today’s competitive contemporary art world. In 2004, the foundation created an annual art competition open to all artists of Korean ancestry who are living in the United States.

Another Art Exhibit Sponsored by Jason J Kim Oral Design New York: Get To Know Kira Nam Greene

Culinary Patterns: Kira Nam Greene is supported in part by Jason J. Kim Oral Design Center and through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

The exhibit is currently at BBCN Bank, 16 West 32nd Street, New York NY 10001 from October 14, 2015 – April 12, 2016

As described on her website, "Kira Nam Greene’s paintings and drawings negotiate the duality and dichotomy of her existence as an Asian immigrant woman in America. As an outsider, Greene is more aware of the contradictions in the plurality of cultures in the present American society. As a feminist, she is repulsed and demoralized by the objectification of female bodies in art history and popular culture, yet she finds herself strongly attracted to sensuality of these images. This paradox has led her to combine the rigidity of patterns with the imagery of desire in the female body. In her most recent work, she replaces the body with the images of lusciously styled food while heightening the complexity with the mixture of patterns and icons derived from various Western and Eastern sources.  The food, both in harmony and clash with its surroundings, is the body (literally and metaphorically) and the surrogate for desire to consume and control."

Learn more about the artist by clicking on Kira Nam Greene's website HERE.

A JK Family Event at MOMA

I love taking out my entire JK family of colleagues and friends to enjoy some of the best that this beautiful city has to offer - especially in terms of art. As someone who considers himself an artist within the field of oral design, I am committed to continuously being inspired by the beauty around us and I want my JK family to have that opportunity as well - lucky for me that NYC is a mecca of some of the most influential art in the world.

That's why this past weekend I took everyone to the MOMA exhibit "Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection." The exhibit is a " cross-medium selection of works, created in the past three decades by more than 30 international artists, represents a wide range of approaches to the political, social, and cultural flux that have shaped the current global landscape."

It was a wonderful day filled with friends, family and inspiring art. I recommend any of you in the NYC area go check it out!

JK Art Project - Art in the Work place at Oral Design New York Featuring Yongjae Kim

As part of my ongoing effort to support Korean artists here in American I love to showcase unique works right at the Jason J Kim Oral Design New York Lab. And currently have installed works by the incredibly talented Yongjae Kim.

His works including Late Afternoon and Drift 2013 have been placed all over the lab and they are both beautiful and haunting. An interesting look at the urban world around us here in NYC and beyond.

Yongjae Kim(b.1985) is Brooklyn based artist, originally from Seoul, South Korea. Kim works predominantly on representational painting that describes psychological landscape of isolation and alienation in urban environment. Kim completed his M.F.A. at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2014and B.F.A. at Seoul National University in Seoul in 2011. He received Best Color Work Award at 2014 KSCS International Invitation Exhibition of Color Works in Korea. In 2015, he is granted the membership of Elizabeth Foundation of Arts in New York.  His works have been shown at Attleboro Arts Museum, the Boiler in 2014, and Porter Contemporary in 2015. He attended Joshua Tree Highland Artists Residency Program in 2013.