Ghada Amer (b. 1963, Cairo) uses her erotic embroideries to reappropriate traditional motifs of misogyny and hypersexualization of women. She at once rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women’s bodies and repudiates the first-wave feminist theory that the body must be denied to prevent victimization. Her works explore dichotomies of an uneasy world, confronting the language of hostility and finality with narratives of longing and love. As seen above Amer’s multimedia practice also includes bronze sculptures, paintings on cardboard, as well as, ceramics and garden installations, with her quintessential motif reappearing across material boundaries.

Davide Balliano (b. 1983, Turin) is an artist whose research operates on the thin line of demarcation between painting and sculpture. Utilizing an austere, minimal language of abstract geometries in strong dialogue with architecture, his work investigates existential themes such as the identity of man in the age of technology and his relationship with the sublime. 

Wook-Kyung Choi (b. 1940) graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University in 1963. Shortly after, Choi moved to the United States to expand her education as well as artistic career, studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and receiving her MA in Fine Arts from the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. From 1968 to 1971, Choi taught painting at Franklin Pierce College as an Assistant Professor. She continued her career as an artist and professor after she returned to Korea in 1978, teaching at Yeungnam University and later at Duksung Women’s University. Throughout her short yet prolific artistic career until her death at the age of 45, she was most known for her association with Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art which were the main movements in the United States at the time. The influence of these schools distinguished her from other Korean artists and the dominant contemporary groups at the time such as Korean Avant-garde who worked with performance and installation and Dansaekhwa. Choi’s challenge to the orthodoxy of the Korean art scene came in many different forms: abstract paintings, ink drawings, paper collages, and figure drawings.

“An artist should constantly grapple with color. And I thought I would be able to finally complete the puzzle of my art when I filled in the missing color.” 

Ha Chong-Hyun (b. 1935, Seoul) is a central figure of the Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome) movement that emerged in the early 1970s. Following the success of Ha's solo exhibition at the gallery earlier this year, Ha Chong-Hyun: Post-Conjunction, we are excited to present the artist's newest body of work in our presentation at the Armory Show. The works displayed explore Ha's return to color after decades of operating within a strict earth-tone, monchromatic practice.  

“We are governed by size, material, color, and form when we analyze objects... What’s more, these factors are themselves invested with their own implicit political innuendo.”

Gimhongsok’s (b. 1964) balloon sculptures specifically refer to the rampant socioeconomic inequality that emerged in Korea following the Korean War as the country modernized rapidly. Before casting, each balloon was inflated by someone in the artist’s life—a friend, family member, student, someone working in the foundry, etc—who was then allowed to select the color of the balloon. In capturing the breath within the balloon, each individual cast functioned as something of a conceptual portrait. The artist then stacked the bronze casts at random, visually equalizing those he enlisted to contribute.

Gimhongsok’s Incomplete Order Development series continues Gim's discussion revolving the hierarchy of materials in sculpture, playing with styrofoam, concrete, and bronze. This series also deals with the concept of perfection and completion, asking when, how, and who decides something is complete or finalized? 

Suki Seokyeong Kang’s (b. 1977) research-driven practice spans across media, incorporating sculpture, painting, video, installation, and performance, as she investigates the notion of space and its relationship to an individual’s social position within society. Kang appropriates the formal language of the grid used in traditional Korean musical notation as a spatial and social structuring device. The grid is translated and reproduced as standing formations in her works that balance against, hinge on, and even protrude from the wall. In her works, the sculptures in the space appear and are further activated in her videos or performances. Hwamunseok– mats used in traditional Korean court dances – produced from woven sedge by Korean craftswomen. Each of these signals the minimum space an individual is provided in society. As these notations multiply, Kang configures them into a rich visual score suggesting the possibility of a collective consciousness rooted in individual action.  

Minouk Lim (b. 1968) is an artist of many forms, and has been creating works that are beyond the boundary of different genres and media, deepening the scope of questions while encompassing writing, music, video, installation and performance as her means of artistic expression. Lim’s work recalls historic losses, ruptures, and repressed traumas. Rooted in language, and specifically the politics of expression, of what has been said and what that, in turn, has silenced, her sculptures, videos, performances, and installations don’t replay past events, rather, they elevate the experiences, memories, and feelings of those sidelined by the political violence of the Korean war and its ensuing process of modernization. Curator Soyeon Ahn has written that Lim’s work “testifies on behalf of the invisible.” Indeed, her projects cast that which has gone lost and missing—be this collective memories or deep feelings of longing and grief--into generative, even hopeful, new forms.

Tania Pérez Córdova (b. 1979, Mexico) quiet and contemplative works relate to temporality and the lifespan of objects. With her installations having often been likened to film sets, she uses language to situate each work within a larger narrative, forgoing the autonomy of objects in favor of their integral role within a nexus. Her practice spans across media, incorporating sculpture, photography, found objects, and activation or performance. Objects function as characters in Córdova’s installations. With her guidance and care they seem to undergo narrative arcs and inherent changes. Verbal clues in artwork titles incite the viewer to consider both the lifespan of the object and the practices and actions that were involved in its making. She considers media in an abstract sense, often embedding actions and situations into an object as a material itself. Such references to the world beyond the sculpture itself create a vivid sense of time and space outside the gallery. She strategically widens the nuanced relationship between artwork and viewer to include external places, people, and actions. 

Kibong Rhee (b. 1957) achieves a perfect sense of the ephemeral in his hazy, dreamlike landscape paintings, in which he layers painted plexiglass and sheer fabric above canvas in order to create a convincing optical depth that draws the viewer in. The scenes in these works appear to be in the process of either disappearing or taking form, capturing a between a moment in time and space. The diaphanous quality of these images is informed by the foggy and humid landscape surrounding Rhee’s studio in Korea. Water plays a crucial role in these paintings, as Rhee believes that water, in its variety of forms, embodies the fleetingness of life.

A seminal figure in Korean contemporary art and a founding member of the Dansaekhwa movement, Park Seo-Bo’s (b. 1931, Yecheon) works perfectly demonstrate the commitment to methods and materials that distinguishes a Dansaekhwa painting. In the 1970s Park began his Ecriture series, a repetition of script-like graphite markings carved into wet oil paint. Last year Park partnered with ArtNedition to create a series of high-quality textured prints of this early body of work. Later in the 1980s until recently, Park experimented with the materiality of Hanji paper. Incorporating his own hands or tools, the artist would repeatedly press the wet surface of Hanji so that the soft layers of paper could be gently pushed and manipulated to create new forms. 

As a founding member of the Origin Group and the Korean Avant-Garde Association, Lee Seung Jio (1941-1990) is a pioneer of Korean geometric abstraction who established his own identity through the notion of “nucleus.” Throughout his 25-year-long painting career, Lee developed his abstract pipe-like forms from a mere pattern into an integral element to his paintings, visualizing the interactions between flat plane and optical depth.

Kim Yong-Ik (b. 1947)'s prominent refusal to be categorized within the dominant art movements of the 1970s and 1980s played a significant role in the evolution of contemporary art in Korea. Kim studied at Hongik University in the school’s renowned oil painting department under Park Seo-Bo, a figurehead of the country’s Dansaekhwa movement, who exerted strong influence on the South Korean art scene at the time. Kim’s group and solo exhibitions after graduating all focused on his Plane Object series, which features spans of cloth of roughly human scale that are stained, creased, and then displayed directly on the gallery walls without a frame. Later, in the 1990s  Kim turned his focus to a new series: his dot paintings, which feature the repetition of seemingly crisp geometric circles. Rooted in modernist painting, Kim Yong-Ik's self-reflective practice continuously questions the relationship between the avant-garde and society. 

Kwon Young-Woo’s (1926-2013) works explore the relationship between traditional materials and abstract expression. The artist is considered as a pioneer in Korean abstract art known as Dansaekhwa. He enrolled at Seoul National University‟s art school as a member of its first class with a major in Oriental Painting in 1946, and also earned a Master of Fine Arts from the same school in 1957. 

In his early career, Kwon worked with ink painting to achieve pure harmony of paper and ink; however, in the early 1960s he soon began working solely with paper and developed his own style. Insisting only on paper, Kwon moved away from brush and black-stone ink and challenged traditional Western uses of paper and canvas. He would use his fingernails to scratch and tear paper and then stack another layer over it. Kwon‟s layers-upon-layers of glued paper turned flat canvas into three- dimensional sculpture. By defying the conventional use of paper, Kwon added a new dimension by being able to view the tactile of paper from all directions. Along with this technique, Kwon also took advantage of the blotting nature of ink by applying it onto the torn edges of his paper.