December 05 – January 15, 2010
Riverside Gallery
Artists
Aegi Changsuk Park, Ha Rhin Kim
AHL Foundation, Inc. is pleased to announce its exhibition entitled,
“Flora & Fauna” presenting works by Aegi Changsuk Park and Ha Rhin Kim
With diverse inspiration ranging from simple floral and modern wild reflections of ancient organisms to human bodies, this eclectic body of paintings creates a new habitat for the viewers.
Aegi Changsuk Park takes the form of life: flora enters her art in forms of portrait paintings in the simple watercolor medium. Nevertheless, she renders flowers that are innervated yet concomitantly passive and fragile; she never fails to address their resiliency and innate power.
Ms. Park’s humble beginning as an artist is the origin of with her femininity of approach. She looks at each flower as an individual and suggests their complex allusions, solitude and infancy. Her earlier collections reflect the reminiscence of her empathy with small subjects and delivers the artist’s own intimate essays in complex contemporary life. Consequently, her portraits are fashioned into introspective and contemplative figures. She calls her flower painting collection “Portraits of Fragile Aspects in Childhood.” This form of life seems to always re-emerge; even her recent painting projects that are relevant to social concerns.
Ha Rhin Kim utilizes human bodies as working surfaces on which she imposes and juxtaposes the pattern of botany to invoke the ancient origins of contemporary life. With mysterious forces, the artist depicts the growth pattern of branches or feathery shapes tattooed onto skin. These curvilinear patterns portray human figures in her paintings. She crosses the boundaries of a wide range of media: two dimensional surface, video, installation and performance. Works such as Humanoid Herb, Rotte Tree 2004-18 and others provoke the viewer to imagine some sort of wild exotic creatures, mutants or mythological reptilians. Her art explores and reveals the idea that the human being is still ‘in process’. Many cultures consider tattoo practice a taboo; however, she dared to tattoo botanic growth patterns on bodies as a reinforcing agent to explore human nature that is ‘in process’. While the startling images of her works capture the viewers by surprise, her art offers redemption of Nature.
