THE AHL FOUNDATION 2008 VISUAL ARTS AWARD WINNERS
Curated by Hyewon Yi
November 20 – December 20, 2008
Gana Art NY
Artists
Jane Jin Kaisen, Eun Hyung Kim, Zaun Lee, Jong Il Ma
The AHL Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 to support Korean artists living in the United States and dedicated to promoting exposure of their work in today’s competitive contemporary art world. In 2004, the foundation established an annual art competition open to all artists of Korean ancestry living in the United States. AHL awards four monetary prizes each year and has been mounting bi-annual exhibitions to display the winning works. This year’s exhibition is the first to be presented annually.
Several common characteristics common to this year’s entries were a high regard for craft, a strong sense of cultural identity, and the ordeal of displacement. However, the range of the works of the entries is as various as any on the pluralistic contemporary international art scene. The four artists selected as winners represent excellence in the new direction of contemporary Korean art. They break out of the stereotypical cultural confinement of current Korean art, redefining its scope advancing it to a new level.
Jong-Il Ma’s expansive sculptures hold his materials in a dynamic tension both physical and psychological. Considered site-specific, three-dimensional drawings, Ma’s sculptures engage public space through their tension with existing architecture and landscape. His sprawling wooden pieces expand the customary space of conventional sculpture and even most installation art creating immediate and bracing interrelationships with their surroundings. His tree-like, site-specific installation stemming from the staircase at Gana Art will expand diagonally to the second floor of the gallery, surrounding the central column of the space while exiting at the other end of the gallery.
Zaun Lee’s elegant, layered drawings and paintings, also linear, are of an opposing sensibility. Rather than surrounding the viewer, they draw the viewer into an intimate, contemplative space, rewarding close attention through interplay of self-imposed restrictions and chance. A minimalist rigor and atmospheric space of abstraction conveys an implied narrative of choices. Working within a structurally limited set of options, Lee develops a visual game that transcends the modesty of her precise markings on Mylar or canvas. She presents a new series for this show, Cloud and its Shadow, in which visual and philosophical logic emerges through cause and effect in an epistemic landscape that uses the simple strategies of Lego blocks.
Eun Hyung Kim’s exuberant energy is immersive, even antithetical to Lee’s. He infuses what might appear to be mere doodles with a personal intensity that belies the casual look of their arrangement. His cartoonish characters, set in groups or alone, in ordinary situations or engaged in not quite decipherable activities, inhabit a world of tall, skinny buildings that may morph into people, celestial bodies, or whatever else comes into the artist’s freely-associating mind. A raucous humor pervades snippets of inconclusive narratives, dream-like imagery, and whacky takes on everyday life. Kim’s drawings and animation sprawl over the mind of his viewers as though his imagination had run amok and taken over the space.
Jane Jin Kaisen works with time-based media and textual discourse to investigate the political and personal ramifications of transnational adoption by Western parents, in her case, Danish. One of many such adoptees that have emigrated as babies or young children, she focuses on such global displacements of oft-overlooked importance. The particular problems of growing up “different,” yet not altogether privy to one’s mother culture are more widespread than ever before. Her concern is not merely her own identity but the larger global phenomenon with its personal, psychological, and political ramifications. Kaisen brings to bear the methodologies of a broad range of theoretical analyses and of diverse presentational possibilities. One senses in her ambitious work an urgency to bring these vital issues to light.
