CULTURE SHARE: Kate Oh Gallery ~ Exhibit: The Lost Flame, Regained by Choo Kyung

With Reception:

Artist Statement:

The motifs of my works originate from earth, water, fire, and wind, the elements forming the world. Life can exist in Mother Nature thanks to these elements. Works on display at this exhibition are a representation of the vitality and vividness brought up by nature focusing on the motif of fire. These works are a figuration of the breaths or souls of living things through fire and flames. Priming work is completed in acrylic paint after thinly applying stone dust to the canvas. Some unknown images come into being when paint vaporizes or flows in ripples. I burn hanji (handmade Korean paper) that partly covers the primed surface of the canvas. Fire generates a new world, flowing over the canvas when it combines with oxygen. An amazing world is created by this fire work. This is the world that is extinguished and created by itself or the world that is completed by itself like life.

A new scene appears and disappears between the flames. This is a trace of earth, sky, water, and clouds. A canvas exists for itself, appearing as all things in nature. An enormous flame burns the surface of the canvas and is reborn as an unknown world, moving beyond my intent. My canvas is a forum where my unconscious innate in my invisible abyss emerges through the medium of fire, becoming a second nature. That is the Peach Blossom Land or nirvana I have dreamed of. I judge my fire work completed in this way like the flame of life through extinction and creation.

The Lost Flame, Regained

Review by art Critic Ekin Erkan

Artist Choo Kyung draw from the so-called “medium specificity” lauded by Clement Greenberg - i.e., that which speaks to “the unique and proper area of competence of each art” that coincides with all that is “unique in the nature of it’s medium” - while taking us beyond how this concept was motivated by 20th century art history. Like the modernist action painters who Greenberg extolled - splatter painter Jackson Pollock being the artist par excellence - Kyung’s use of brushstrokes and spray paint service as indices for the artist’s movements.

That is, rather than have her art practice service static imitation, pictography, or representational realism, Kyung, like the aforementioned modernist bulwarks, services abstraction to capture movement. Nevertheless, discerning her art practice from these abstract expressionist peers, Kyung also utilizes experimental methods - like using a blowtorch upon the canvas to produce an ashen, charcoal surface reminiscent of fire-cloaked mountain crags, to tether her canvases to real life.

This spiritual echos underlying Kyung’s art practice is underscored by the treatment of her canvases and is of a piece of the artist’s biography. Indeed, Kyung is based in the mountains close to Seoul, where she operates a fine art museum, The Seolmijae Art Museum, and an organic farm. Nature and materiality is the bedrock of her art practice. Kate Oh’s exhibition speaks to the wide-spanning breadth of Kyung’s oeuvre, one that depurates abstract expressionist tendencies from their non-naturalistic purview and galvanizes us to take a process-based view.

Indeed, unlike Rothko, Pollock, and company, Kyung does not do away with representational indices tout court. Rather, her work is a mediation between the archetypal action painter’s use of painting as an index of movement with the figurative or representational realist’s interest in capturing their environment as such. As art critic Robert C. Morgan notes, the construction of Kyung’s paintings is posed “toward unity by way of nature,” wherein the “physicality of her abstraction exists within the context of a realist sensibility.” It is a notable that the artist begins her works by placing a layer of “stone dust” upon the canvas, prior to applying a coat of acrylic paint upon it. This is then followed up by another binder, brushed over the painted surface. Subsequently, Hanji paper is directly adhered to the canvas. Kyung also sometimes coats the Hanji paper in charcoal power, as is the case with her Flame - Embracing Nature series. As Morgan notes, “her concept is borrowed directly from nature, whereby an invisible painting is then applied to water, which is followed by a culmination of fire over Hanji through the artist’s manipulation of a blowtorch. In both her use of diffuse material that are definitely layered and in her using a torch to burn her canvases, Kyung presents us with a sculptural, intermedia work of process art.

(photos by Mari M. unless otherwise marked)

To Purchase any of of the pieces go to Kate Oh Gallery

Video recorded by Mega