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.