Vitamin K

Dayeon Kim

Judy Junghee Koo

Woojin Lee

ChaeWon Moon

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Vitamin K

June 22 - August 23, 2020

Dayeon Kim
Judy Junghee Koo
Woojin Lee
ChaeWon Moon

Curated by Joel Carreiro and Young Jeon

Organized by

Sponsored by

At a time when Korean artists and culture are having an unprecedented and pervasive impact on world culture, the AHL Foundation is especially pleased to present Vitamin K, an exhibition of works by the four winners of our 1st artist fellowship: Dayeon Kim, Judy Junghee Koo, Woojin Lee and ChaeWon Moon.

These artists are distinguished not only by the clarity and force of their respective bodies of work but also by their difference from one another. Each has located an area of interest that is uniquely their own and has developed relevant and effective methodologies for its exploration. This range constitutes a healthy sign that these artists are not bound to one set of concerns, style or precedent but feel confident to freely identify and pursue their own personal artistic directions. Whether revitalizing conventional forms or inventing new ones, they offer fresh perspectives and rich experiences.

Dayeon Kim

Judy Junghee Koo

Woojin Lee

ChaeWon Moon

The AHL's Fellow Artists were selected from a strong field of well over one hundred applicants to receive monetary awards to fund their ongoing creative projects. As a juror for this Artist Fellowship, I was impressed with the number of accomplished applicants as well as by the range and variety of artistic approaches represented in their work. I would like to thank the other jurors, Hitomi Iwasaki, from the Queens Museum and Bill Carrol, from the Elizabeth Foundation for their thoughtful insights and collegial generosity. Their critical involvement made the difficult process of evaluating so many impressive submissions a lively and expansive exchange of ideas. Our selected winners are distinguished not only by the clarity and force of their respective bodies of work but also by their difference from one another. Each has located an area of interest that is their own and has developed relevant and effective methodologies for its exploration. This range constitutes a healthy sign that these artists are not bound to one set of concerns, style or precedent but feel confident to freely identify and pursue their own personal artistic directions.

Joel Carreiro
Professor, Hunter College, CUNY

Dayeon Kim

Dayeon Kim (b.1989) is originally from South Korea and obtained a BFA at Sungshin Women’s University in 2014. She recently received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited several group shows in NYC and Korea, presented performances at: Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, New York, Gwangju International Performance Art Festival, Korea, OPEN SPACE “Survival” Festival Berlin, Gallery Stiftelsen 3,14 Bergen, Norway, L´MONO Bilbao, Spain, Platform Vaasa, Finland, Livery Gallery, Marseilles, France

The human body functions as the locus of our beliefs and priorities regarding identity, normalcy and the good; producing a hierarchical set of human values. The Renaissance notion of a well-ordered world and social structure was based on a foundation of the perfect human figure, exemplified by the ideal of the civilized male European body. Digressions from this ideal were categorized as lesser, the other, or the grotesque. Dayeon Kim challenges this history and its inherited value system through paintings, sculpture and performance works that deliberately distort the human body, courting the grotesque and the “disordered”. In doing so she targets the societal norms that enforce uniformity and conservative values. Through exclusion and censure, these restrictive social hierarchies are revealed as the source of much human suffering and misery. She destabilizes notions of gender, hierarchy and social order by reimagining humanity in more generous terms, embracing the hybrid and the varied. Thus, initial disorientation leads to freedom from established norms and new possibilities.

Face to Face, 2019

ceramics, 33 × 16.5 × 24"

Bi-polar, 2019

ceramics and epoxy, 11 1/4 x 16.5 x 9.5"

Dreaming, 2019,

ceramics, wax and fabric, 20 × 28 × 24"

Repose, 2019

ceramics, 7 3/4 × 28 3/4 × 21.5"

Falling Girl, 2018

ceramics, 8 3_4 × 12 7_8 × 7"

Judy Junghee Koo

Judy Junghee Koo(b. 1991, South Korea) is a Korean-American artist working in and around New Jersey and New York City. She holds an M.F.A. in Fine Art from Hunter College at the City University of New York in 2020, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University in 2015. She has shown her work at Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles; The Cluster Gallery, Brooklyn, and University galleries. She was an artist-in-residence at the Chautauqua School of Art, and a recipient of The AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship.

Let us assume for a moment that there is a world just behind the visible one - or just beneath it - that can be glimpsed from time to time, but not retained. Let us further propose that it is this parallel reality that provides the actual continuity in our lives and the connectivity between us. This elusive realm governs our dreams and our waking reveries - slipping away ever further as we wake and try to recall it with our clumsy logic. Our senses, focused on basic survival, wall us off from this essential strata, fearing it as distraction. Only the odd pursuits - poetry, music, painting - can offer access to it. This is the dimension Judy Junghee Koo explores in her work - starting with fragments of the everyday and turning them over, sorting them through layers of liquid paint, quietly arranging the colors - receptive - until the quotidian yields the mystical. The ambiguous, the enigmatic are patiently tended and teased into materiality - surface, line, substance. These are visual poems that transform the deeply personal into images that resonate along the subterranean wave-length - conclusions postponed indefinitely. She says she paints the backdrop, chasing the” feelings that have migrated and keep on migrating”, setting the scene - waiting for that hidden protagonist to finally emerge.

virtual silence, 2018

oil on canvas, 36×39"

Cherries, 2018

oil on canvas, 11×16"

Born with Fair Hair, 2019

oil on canvas, 26×30"

eyelet ballerina, 2018

gouache on watercolor paper, 6×8"

A stranger, 2019

oil on canvas, 26×30"

Woojin Lee

Woojin Lee is a New York-based artist and designer born in Seoul, Korea, who reimagines mythological corporate environments, characters, and objects from a historical context within our technology-driven society.

Selected exhibitions include Officescapes at the parafictional New York gallery, The Wiggle Room; Relativity and Sense Exposed at the Compton Goethals Gallery; and as a curator for the collective group show, WEAR(E), at The Urban Garden Room in New York. Woojin was a New York foreign correspondent for G Colon Magazine in Seoul and published her book, NY2587days: A record of creative encounters in NY, in 2014.

Selected awards include the 2020 Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) Award, the AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship 2019, the Red Dot Award, two Creativity Media & Interactive Awards, four Creativity International Awards, and the Connor Award. Woojin received an MFA in Digital Interdisciplinary Art Practice from The City College of New York, an MS in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and a BFA in Crafts from Kookmin University in Seoul. Woojin has taught at Pratt Institute, the City College of New York, and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

There are many entertaining stories of accomplished artists and the early jobs that kept them going till fate called. One such is William Shakespeare`s first job as essentially a car park attendant, although the cars at the time were carriages owned by devotees of the theatre. The day jobs of some artists had an obvious influence on the work they did as artists. For example, Andy Warhol and Barabara Kruger were graphic designers for publications such as Glamour and Vogue, who later utilized design principles to structure their artworks. Less obviously influential were Gauguin`s employment as a stock broker or Jackson Pollock`s early work as a babysitter. Woojin Lee`s relationship to her day job is of a different order. She uses the corporate environment as both setting and subject matter for her artwork, exploring it as a habitat with its own atmosphere, rituals and social relations. Her works constitute an in-depth inquiry into corporate life, often reflecting complex social, psychological and power relations through objects and materials activated as metaphor. For example, tiny office fixtures are held in a state of charged suspension by invisible magnetic fields, embodying precarious social dynamics. She describes these “Officescapes” as phenomenological daydreams.

At the Office

two-channel video (12:26)
Watch Excerpt (2:54)

Corporate Poems:
1440 Broadway (00:55)

Listen to the Poem

375 Hudson Street (01:02)

Listen to the Poem

dimensions variable

Unstable bond III

detail | wood, glass lens, lights, magnet, staples, fishing line, 60" x224" x14"

Officescapes (Installation View)

dimensions variable

Unstable bond III

detail | wood, glass lens, lights, magnet, miniature furniture, fishing line, 60”x224"x14”

ChaeWon Moon

ChaeWon Moon is a visual artist living and working in Brooklyn. Her practice focuses on the inevitable failure behind the situation that only needs an ideal result from the process. She borrows pictures and texts from manuals and reassembles them into a non-functional system. The work reflects her interest in the tension between order and playful illegibility, and also ambivalence caused by this conflict. By deconstructing and rebuilding the structure of the manual, which is designed to point the answer or the goal, she parodies familiarity and perfection. Moon’s work have been exhibited in group exhibitions across the US, including Carnation Contemporary(Portland, OR), CIRCA Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Ejecta Projects (Carlisle, PA), Ground Floor Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Recently she received Artist Fellowship from AHL Foundation, and selected as a member of 2020 Glogau Artist Residency in Berlin, Germany.

The principles of evolution record the efforts of organisms to adapt to their environments. On the practical level, for contemporary humans this often boils down to a reliance on sets of instructions, diagrams, manuals and guide books to provide sober, helpful solutions to the problems of life. These clear, goal-oriented helpers offer unambiguous steps to a successful negotiation of various aspects of our adaptation to “reality”. ChaeWon Moon borrows the look and language, signs and symbols of textbooks, guides and manuals to fabricate images that cleverly co-opt their logic and authority. She challenges these systems that reduce a complex and possibly unknowable world to a series of dependable steps, by reordering and rearranging their components. This causes practical information to veer into a world of deadpan humor and whimsy worthy of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. This disruption of linguistic meaning and questioning of the notion of translation itself may produce a fear of the unpredictable but it also provides a more “real” model of our existential situation.