Two Korean Artists Explore Color, Mood, and Material at JanKossen Contemporary

Artsy
Mar 7, 2016 12:37AM
Les Saisons (The Seasons), 2015
JanKossen Contemporary

Working across figurative and abstract styles, Korean artists Keun Woo Lee and Park Byung-Hoon explore the expressive qualities of paint. In “Asian Reflections,” a new show at JanKossen Contemporary in New York, the two artists use paint as a vehicle to convey moods and states of being, each using different techniques to create sensuous material surfaces.

Wave 4, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary
Wave 10, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary

While Keun Woo Lee is the more representative painter of the two, many of her works veer close to becoming purely abstract compositions, maintaining only the slightest connection to a real-world scene. For her “Wave” series, the artist turned to an unusual base: porcelain, sourced from Jingdezhen, China’s “porcelain capital.” The surfaces, which the artist paints before firing in a kiln, combine polished hardness with an airy painterly touch. Like the waves of the work’s title, the compositions undulate between geographic spaces, from skies to forests to oceans.

Forest 2, 2011
JanKossen Contemporary
Blue Forest 5, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary

JanKossen also includes several works from Lee’s “Forest” series, which fall more in line with traditional representation. Painted in monochrome blacks and blues on a white canvas, these works turn energetic dashes of lines into tender scenes of overlapping flowers and branches.

Transferences GRANDE JAUNES, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary

Lee’s landscapes find echoes in the built-up surfaces of Park Byung-Hoon’s abstract works. Like Lee, Byung-Hoon enjoys painting on out-of-the-ordinary surfaces; for his works in “Asian Reflections,” Byung-Hoon has applied acrylic on top of sheets of glass. Many of Byung-Hoon’s works invoke masters of the 20th century, with the double-rectangle structure of a works like Transferences GRANDE JAUNES (2015) recalling Mark Rothko’s abstractions. His usage of surface, meanwhile, picks up on the experimentations of Helen Frankenthaler, who created paintings by patiently staining raw canvases.

Transferences GRANDE BLEU, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary
Wave 7, 2015
JanKossen Contemporary

By using glass, Byung-Hoon is able to play with contrasting opacities. In Transferences GRANDE BLEU (2015), for instance, Byung-Hoon combines a dense blue rectangle in the top part of the painting with a semi-transparent patch of thinly applied paint in the bottom. The transparent section looks as though Byung-Hoon has scraped away layers of paint. The process leaves the viewer with a powerful sense that something has been left behind—an idea of remnants and traces that resonates strongly with Lee’s glazed surfaces.


—Andrew Wagner


Asian Reflections” is on view at JanKossen Contemporary, New York, Feb. 18–Mar. 26, 2016.

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