"Green Light: Twenty Young Korean Artists in New York"
November 23 - December 23, 2004
Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Ave. 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022)
Gallery Korea is pleased to present the special exhibition, Green Light: Twenty Young Korean Artists in New York, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Korean Cultural Service New York. For Gallery Korea, this exhibition has a three-fold purpose: marking the 25th year of the Korean Cultural Service New York; maintaining a thematic connection to our 2003 exhibition At the Crossroads, which focused on twenty established Korean artists in New York; and lighting the work of young emerging Korean artists based in the New York area. Green Light, which shows diverse mediums and the unique approaches of each artist, will embrace not only the contemporary flows of Korean or Korean-American young artists in New York area but also their personal explorations and energy of expression. The exhibition consists of eight installations, seven drawings or paintings, two photographs, two videos, and one ceramic work. A catalogue is available for the exhibition. In the essay for the catalogue, Richard Vine, managing editor of the Art in America, writes, ...To judge from the examples selected for "Green Light," a middle path is often the most productive creatively and the most strategic diplomatically. Threading between two dull extremes (slavish traditionalism on the one hand, slavish adoption of all things Western and "new" on the other), these artists have produced work that is at once respectful yet liberated, informed by history yet clearly directed to the road ahead. The show is a worthy contribution to an international visual discourse conducted in the lingua franca of late (and sometimes post-) modernism, strongly influenced by regional, national and ethnic "dialects" of form. Call it monoculturalism with a Korean inflection... The artists participating are as follows: Jae Hi Ahn (installation), Wonjung Choi (installation), Theresa Chong (painting), Hyoungsun Ha (photograph), Nancy Hwang (installation), Ran Hwang (installation), Kyung Jeon (painting), Si Young Jin (video), Cheol Yu Kim (drawing), SongYi Kim (video), Heyung Bok Lee (ceramic), Jin Lee (painting), Mi-Kyoung Lee (painting), Chunsoo Park (painting), Dae Seung Seo (photograph), Hyungsub Shin (installation), Han Sam Son (installation), Miyoung Song (installation), Heesung Yang (painting), Heeseop Yoon (installation) An opening reception will be held on Tuesday, November 23, from 6 - 8 pm, with the artists present. A limited number of free catalogues will be available to guests at the reception. Copies of the catalogue will also be sent to libraries and museums in the U.S and Korea. Please contact curator Jin Yong Chung for further information at (212) 759-9550 or nyarts@koreanculture.org.