May 13 to June 5, 2009

Gallery Korea

The Korean Cultural Service New York presents the exhibition Haunting Memories, held from May 13 to June 5, 2009 at Gallery Korea. Six Korean and Korean American artists, who draw humor, wit and sensation out of personal experience, are presented : Christine Sun Kim, Eva Jung, Young Rong Bae, Young Min Moon, Baishian Bae and Ke-Sook Lee.

Haunting Memories is the fourth show from the finalists of Gallery Korea’s open call, “Call For Artists 2009”. Christine Sun Kim, Eva Jung, Young Rong Bae, Young Min Moon, Baishian Bae and Ke-Sook Lee explore various sensations from their personal memories associated with identity, feeling, gender and culture.

Christine Sun Kim introduces her drawings and paintings on memories of her early period as a deaf. She traces the episodes of other peoples’ reaction to herself and their effort to cure her, by creating spontaneous drawing images in acrylic and ink. Eva Jung presents her video recording of her site-specific installation-performance, so called the ‘street intervention’: The Samples of Emotion and The Samples of Emerging and Established Artists. Inventing her own barter system in the specific urban environment, she associates gone-by feelings with daily objects.
Ke-Sook Lee, in her installation Window, situates her childhood memory living in Korean traditional house in the present context reasoning her identity as an immigrant and a woman. The pieces altogether recreate a scene where a child pokes the mulberry paper to see through a view on the other side, and at the same time where her work closely relates to a female labor of doing laundry. Ke-Sook’s respect for a humble and everyday material led her to create a construction following a natural flow and texture of the material itself. Drawing on a borderline between drawing and installation, the work present a capturing moment of lifelike situation, at once isolated and assimilated.
Baishian Bai shows Planet, composed of various objects and toys, which delivers a special feeling she had for a relationship between a person and an object, nature and a human, dream and reality.
Young Min Moon’s mixed media works explore a poetic and political potential of language. Inspired by Korean American literatures, such as Dictee of Hak Kyung Cha and Native Speaker of Chang-Rae Lee, Moon reconstructs the meaning of the narrative language associated with memories in his fluorescent light boxes, In Layers of Forgetting and Half Blind Romance with the Land. Young Rong Bae presents a ‘Good Game’ series, referring to her legal and linguistic status as a Korean immigrant, sarcastic in tone with the contrasting brightness of color.

This exhibition is curated by Yu Jin Hwang and the opening reception will be held at Gallery Korea, located within the Korean Cultural Service NY at 6:00pm to 8:00pm on Wednesday, May 13, 2009. For more information contact the Korean Cultural Service New York by phone: (212) 759-9550 or by email: nyarts@koreanculture.org.