KCCDC x Hillyer

Virtual K-Artist Talk Series

Hillyer has teamed up with the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, DC to present a six-week series of virtual artist talks and studio visits with Korean and Korean-American artists. Get a behind-the-scenes look into their art practice and studios.

 

Yuni Kim Lang

Friday, June 12th @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Yuni Kim Lang is a Michigan-based visual artist who creates sculpture, installation, photography and performance that explore ideas of beauty, adornment and cultural identity. She investigates themes of weight, mass, accumulation and hair in order to understand her personal and cultural identity.

Lang was born in Seoul, Korea. All her life she has been living as a TCK (Third Cultural Kid). Raised overseas, formal training in New York City, Lang holds a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art(2013) and earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design (2009).

Lang was an artist in residence the Kohler Art/Industry residency program (2018). She was awarded a merit-based grant at the Vermont Studio Center Residency (2014), artist at the Red Gate Residency (2013) in China. Her work has been favorably reviewed in several publications including the American Craft Council, Groove Korea and Huffington Post. Lang’s work has been shown at venues such as the John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI), Frost Museum (Miami, FL), Collective Design Fair (New York City, NY), Galerie Marzee (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and a solo exhibition at Sienna Patti Gallery (Lenox, MA).

Artist Statement
My work is about today. It’s concerned with materiality, process and is strongly autobiographical. The work reflects my multicultural background. I was born in Korea, but grew up overseas. Traveling and going to an international school had me questioning my cultural identity at a young age. I wanted to understand my identity and where I fit in this every globalizing world. Through my work, I strive to find the voice that recognizes my roots and reveals my story.

 

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Kyoung eun Kang

Friday, June 5th @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Kyoung eun Kang was born in South Korea and currently works in New York City. She received her BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul and her MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design. Her solo exhibitions and projects have been shown at NURTUREart, SOHO20’s +/- Project Space, BRIC Project Room, HERE Arts Center, A.M. Richard Fine Art Gallery Project Room. Her group exhibitions and performances have been featured at Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, A.I.R. Gallery, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Australia, the Museum of Imperial City in Beijing, China, and Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea. She received the Grand Prize at the 8th Annual Na Hye-seok Grand Exhibition and the Special Prize at the 23rd Korea Art Grand Exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, BRIC Media Arts, and A.I.R. Gallery. Kang has participated in residencies including the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, I-Park Foundation, ChaNorth, New York Art Residency and Studios Foundation, Lower East Side Rotating Studio Program, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Artist Statement
I observe and focus on the small, simple everyday gestures that can have a great deal of meaning. I capture the subtlety of human nature and behavior by observing situations that question how humans form bonds and attachments, the small gestures that bridge the gap between continents to create a connection between couples, families, communities, and even strangers.

I work in a wide range of mediums –from live performance to video, painting, photography, installation, text and sound pieces. For the last few years I have been meeting and videotaping Mexican flower sellers in New York City; a Jewish family in Brooklyn; a 90-year-old elderly couple who live in Nebraska. I have developed special relationships and trust with them through simple gestures and actions.

I also have been closely working with my family in Korea. I often introduce particular Korean stones, and care packages sent to me from my mother in Korea or other objects from my childhood and Korean culture into new environments to question what heritage, culture, and family means.

Recently, I am developing a new body of work inspired by the American painter Elizabeth Murray’s studio space in Washington County, NY. Through my work I hope to raise questions about how we build and keep human connections alive and how we create emotional bonds to places in a constantly changing and multicultural time and space.

 

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Tai Hwa Goh

Friday, May 29th @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Tai Hwa Goh, an artist working with printmaking and installation, was born in Seoul, Korea, where she spent her childhood years through college. Goh’s installation pushes the boundaries of traditional printmaking from two-dimensional images on paper to three-dimensional sculptural installations that transform space.

Goh is a recipient of 2019 New Jersey Individual Artist Fellowship Awards and the Gold Award winner of the 2017 AHL Visual Art Competition. She also has been awarded and grants from National Endowments for the Arts, Lower East Side Print Shop, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Guttenberg Art, Emerge11, Vermont Studio Center, AHL Foundation and Evergreen Museum and Library Residency at John Hopkins University, MD, among others. She had an installation show at Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill and BRIC and her works have shown at IPCNY, DUMBO Art Festival, Islip Museum, William Paterson University, Gallery Aferro, AIR Gallery and Snug Harbor Center for The Art.

Goh has participated in the International Artist Residency at NARS Foundation and the Artist-in-Residence, Museum of Arts and Design’s Artist Studios Program, Textile Art Center and Artist-in-Residence at Children’s Museum of Manhattan.

Goh earned an MFA from the University of Maryland, as well as an MFA and a BFA from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. She has been featured in US and international exhibitions.

Artist Statement
I create delicately layered installations from printed and cut paper. My imagery evokes biological forms and landscape, reflecting on the accumulation of memory and experience, and the interior and exterior worlds of the human body. I cut, fold, layer, and form the hand-printed paper into three-dimensional objects that engage with the architecture of a space. I construct tubes, pipes, and balls brimming with fluid-like stands of paper as a metaphor of the cycle of the body, industrial machinery and natural phenomena, as well as the endless processes of growth and decay. Highlighting the contrasts between the joyful tropical fantasies of landscape vis-a-vis a land brashly invaded by fragments of American suburbia, I respond to the architecture of the space while reflecting on experiences of loss and absence.

I start with many sketches and drawings built upon close inspection from landscapes to biological forms about the penetrability and vulnerability of the human body. I experiment with traditional printmaking to push the boundaries of the medium and explore three-dimensional space. The process involves transforming the characteristics of the material by reacting opaque Hanji with batik. Thin sheets of beeswax are ironed onto the prints, obscuring the images underneath. By folding, cutting, flipping and overlapping, images are gradually transformed away from identifiable objects. By densely layering the imagery, I reflect on the accumulation of memory and experiences.

 

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Namwon Choi

Friday, May 22nd @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Namwon Choi is an artist based in Savannah, GA. Choi acquired her BFA and MFA in Traditional Korean Painting from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea in 2002, and her MFA in Drawing and Painting at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the New York City Korean Culture Center ,the Los Angeles Korean Culture Center, Aqua Art Miami, the National MFA Wet Paint Biennial Exhibition in Chicago, and at TheMuseum of Contemporary Art, Georgia in Atlanta. Her work in the “New Connections” exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center in Washington D.C. was reviewed in the Washington Post. Her recent solo exhibition In-Betweenness showed at Gallery 72 in Atlanta, Georgia; Open Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee; and Artist Homes Gallery in Berlin, Germany.Her upcoming solo exhibition, Blue Distant, opens in October 2019 at Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta. She is currently a professor of Foundation Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.
Artist Statement
As a Korean immigrant living and creating in America, I perceive myself as being in a constant state of perpetual motion. Attempting to bridge the gap between my simultaneous feelings of affiliation and alienation, I focus on the notion of migrancy when addressing my subject matter, relating its temporal condition to my own personal disposition. In privileging movement over fixity in space and time, I am able to promote procession and engage in action as I navigates relocation and the condition of in-betweens.

I combine traditional Korean painting in rendition of a network of special yet forgettable highways, essentially connecting the new to an older art form. For me, a highway signifies the span of time between a departure from one location and the arrival in another, and it is then reinterpreted as an interval in which I can freely discover my identity within the constraints of two cultures. In turn, monochromatic fragments of each painting react alongside integrated scenery installation works so that they may create an experiential narrative of the in-between in fuller view. I construct a physical representation of the migration space itself while showcasing a life lived in transition.

 

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Tae Eun Ahn

Friday, May 15th @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Tae Eun Ah is a visual artist who currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Ahn received her BFA and MA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Royal College of Art (UK), and is currently enrolled in a Doctorate program in Sculpture at Seoul National University in Korea. Her works have been featured in various international exhibitions including at Camden Art Centre and OXO Gallery in London, Galerie Métanoïa in Paris, Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center New York, Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi in Venice, and the Asian Cultural Center and Sejong Center Chamber Hall in Seoul. Ahn recently was awarded by the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism of the Republic of Korea at the Gwanghwamoon International Art Festival 2019 and previously was invited to present her performance art at the Gwangju Biennale 2018. In 2017, Ahn was selected as a recipient of the Anthology Award and the Khojaly Peace Prize.
Artist Statement
My work is about a matter of perception. It is deeply rooted upon my attempt to perceive the world and the others through the body. To me, body is considered not only as a bridge between the inner and the outer world but also as an open site to encounter the world. The mutual interactivity between the body and the world plays a significant role in a process of creating perception, forming unprecedented relationship between them. Emphasizing intersubjective body, most of my practices focus on its movement (gesture or action), accepting it as a core medium to work with.

Through my practices, I use a simple gesture that can be easily found in everyday life. However, rather than using it under the context of everyday, I get rid of its daily context by positioning it in a shifted condition which I particularly provide. By doing so, the gesture can be separated from its original function and its conventional meanings and allows itself to be purely released and perceived as-it-is. In removing any social, political, or cultural conditions from the gesture and repeating it meditatively, my work seeks to provide a platform to reconsider the meaning of a given gesture and its potential to perceive the world through interactions that are derived from it.

My art does not simply transform a daily gesture into an art work nor does it emphasize the materiality of the body as opposed to the mind. Rather, it encounters the world through the body and the mediated gestures that I repeat throughout my work.

 

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Nara Park

Friday, May 8th @ 6pm – Facebook LIVE with Q&A

About the Artist
Nara Park is a sculptor and installation artist based in Washington, DC. She holds a BFA in General Fine Arts and an MFA in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she received the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award by the International Sculpture Center and Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship. She is a recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, the Young Artist Award from the Trawick Foundation, and the Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship. Park’s work has been on exhibit at numerous venues including Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, The Phillips Collection, Grounds for Sculpture, Baltimore/Washington International Airport, and American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center. Her work has been featured in Sculpture magazine, The Washington Post, and Artnet News. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, as well as The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.
Artist Statement
My work investigates our relationship to the landscape we inhabit and the imprint we leave in it when we are gone. I often use false materials such as stone-textured paint or Formica to create three-dimensional works. This trompe l’oeil effect alludes to sacred places that can range from graves to natural rock formations. My use of these materials is my way of connecting the transient nature of life to our surface-oriented and disposable culture. Stone in my work implies memorialization, stability and permanence. My newest body of work, Presence, features free-standing sculptures composed of painted Styrofoam beads imitating grains of sand. The tiny spheres form a mass evoking markers or monuments. I explore how monuments and sculptures mark space, time, and place. The accumulation of beads in multiple colors creates what appears to be disintegrating surfaces or the build-up of lichen, mold, or coral. The illusion of organic growth suggests the vulnerability of our physical perceptions. It also reminds us that there is a lifespan in any materialization whether it’s manmade or natural.

 

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About the KCC

The Korean Cultural Center Washington, DC, a branch of the Embassy of the Republic of Korea, was officially established in October 2010 to introduce Korean culture to American audiences and expand cultural exchange between Korea and the US, building strong ties between the two countries in the process. Through partnerships with key local institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Korean Cultural Center Washington, DC also presents a variety of co-hosted events in addition to our own regular film, art, education, and performance programs. LEARN MORE

 

Sister Cities

Hillyer is the recipient of a Sister Cities grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to facilitate artistic exchange between Washington, DC and Seoul, South Korea. This series of virtual artist talks is one part of this ongoing exchange.

About Hillyer

IA&A at Hillyer is a non-profit contemporary arts center based in Washington, DC dedicated to promoting cross-cultural understanding through exposure to the arts. Committed to serving the public and supporting artists at all stages of their careers, Hillyer was founded in 2006 and continues to provide significant support to both local and international artists, as well as presenting programs that reach a broad audience and create a platform for dialogue. LEARN MORE