SoHyun Bae

Wind, water, stone: SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim

Opening Thursday, November 19, 6 - 8 pm

September 19 - November 2, 2024

Skoto Gallery - 529 West 20th Street, 5FL. New York, NY 10011

SKOTO GALLERY 529 West 20th Street, 5FL. New York, NY 10011

212-352 8058

info@skotogallery.com www.skotogallery.com

SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim

Wind, Water, Stone

September 19 – November 2, 2024

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Wind, Water, Stone, a two-person exhibition of recent works by Korean American artists SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim. This will be their first two-person exhibition at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, September 19, 6-8pm.

This exhibition encourages us to think expansively about the creative process and takes its title from a 1979 poem “Wind, Water, Stone” by the celebrated Mexican poet Octavio Paz, first published in English in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987 and put together by the poet’s English translator Eliot Weinberger. The poem, as summarized by the poet Roger Caillois explores the interconnectedness and transformational qualities of water, wind, and stone. Each element interacts with and influences the others in a perpetual cycle of change. Water erodes stone over time, wind disperses water, and stone provides a barrier to the wind. These interactions illustrate the dynamic and fluid nature of existence, where each element takes on roles of creation, containment, and movement in a continuous cycle. The poem reflects on the philosophical idea that everything in the world is inter-connected and constantly evolving despite their apparent solidity or permanence.

Despite their varied experiences working across different time periods, SoHyun Bae and Choong Sup Lim manage to engage in an intergenerational dialogue while continuing their long-standing commitment to the exploration of a completely personal and original style of abstraction whose true meaning lies not merely in formal arrangement but in spiritual meaning that fuels intangible ideas around human nature while simultaneously meditating on the human condition. As artists who continue to live and work in New York over several decades, they have developed a highly experimental approach to making art that combines acute awareness of the role of transnationalism in the creative process with a deep passion for exploring the nuances of their Korea America heritage to create works of universal resonance that often defy easy categorization.

SoHyun Bae is Korean by birth, American by upbringing and cosmopolitan by experience. She creates mixed media works on canvas that address issues of personal and cultural identity. Her rich complex compositions draw on the visual traditions of both Asian and Western art in a manner that is neither superficial nor eclectic but rooted firmly in her belonging to both cultures. There is a lyrical beauty evocative of shifting interior and exterior spaces that belies the surprising seamlessness between the spiritual and physical worlds. There is value for spontaneity and improvisation in her work that engages the viewer directly and viscerally as ideas are distilled into swirling or meandering marks that heighten their perceptual subtlety. Bae’s work approaches a perspective universal enough to include all of us. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in Fine Arts, 2007; She was a resident artist at The Corporation of Yaddo and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. Her works were exhibited worldwide in galleries and museums including the Asian Art Museum of SF, Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Seoul Arts Center Hangaram Museum, Museo Nacional di Visual Artes in Montevideo, Sotheby’s, NYC, and Philips de Puny Luxembourg.

Choong Sup Lim is a versatile artist whose work in diverse media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation and video draws on past wisdom and future possibilities to create relevant dialogue across time. Embracing improvisation and experimentation as an ongoing conceptual approach, his work strives to reveal the subjectivity and individuality of the artist, and seeks to strike a balance between nature, object and composition. There is an intellectual rigor in his work that reflects subtle understanding of context and total control of the material he uses which makes possible an intimate integration of vision and matter. The beauty of Lim's art lies in its ability to tell stories that transcend borders and speak to universal audiences. Born 1941 in Jincheon, Chungcheong Buk-do, Choong Sup Lim graduated from Seoul National University in 1964, and moved to New York in 1973, where he continues to live and work ever since. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Korea.

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Asian-American Abstraction: Historic to Contemporary

Opening: Thursday, July 11, 5 - 8 pm - through September 7, 2024

Hollis Taggart Galleries - 521 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

SoHyun Bae at 375 Hudson Street - through march 2025

375 Hudson Street: SoHyun Bae
Through March 2025

375 Hudson Street is pleased to present 12 works by American painter SoHyun Bae on view in the lobby gallery through March 2025. Bae’s ethereal works straddle abstraction and representation, drawing upon influences from disparate sources such as Jewish mysticism, classical antiquity, and traditional Korean arts to convey a deep sense of spirituality. The artist has said that she seeks silence in her work, and that her practice “is about making a gesture, a secret sign on the surface of the canvas, opening up possibilities.”  One can see this idea in paintings such as So Wang Mo’s Garden, and Jasper Lake I and II, which mix focused passages that seem to describe fruits or rocks or water alongside more diffuse washes of color that suggest a vast pictorial space.  Bae evokes a sense of landscape in many of the other canvases on view, like in Sikussak and I Penitenti, where a horizon line set low along their bottom edges provides the setting for ethereal shards which read as rocky outcrops emerging from the ocean.

The process used by Bae is quite unusual. The artist shapes and tears pieces of rice paper which are incorporated into the surfaces of the paintings. Bae allows the paint to soak into the canvas, pouring and manipulating the viscous medium. The fragments of rice paper maintain their shape but wrinkle in response to the fluid paint and absorb it in a different way, creating texture, depth and variation of light, adding drama.  Bae works with highly concentrated pigments rather than standard oil or acrylic paints, generating an extraordinary intensity and luminosity of color.  The results, as seen in the displayed paintings which cover over a decade from Bae’s career, are at once transcendent and contemplative. 

SoHyun Bae holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in from Boston University as well as a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University.  She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Please direct any inquiries about these works to  artinfo@sohyunbae.com

The show is open to the public from 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday through Friday.

SOHYUN BAE AT MATTATUCK MUSEUM - THROUGH MAY 19, 2024

SoHyun Bae will be participating in (Re)Work It!, a museum exhibition curated by Cecilia Keffie Feldman, Chief Curator and Natalie Dequarto, Assistant Curator at the Mattatuck Museum from January 21 - May 19, 2024.

SoHyun Bae: Exploring the Universality of Imagery in Visual Art, 2023

In this episode, SoHyun Bae (@sohyunbaestudio) a painter living and working in New York, discusses her journey as an artist and how her Korean heritage impacts her work. SoHyun's works have been exhibited in North America, South America, Europe and Asia and are in the permanent collections of The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. She is a 2007 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts.

CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE WORLD THROUGH A HYPHENATED LENS WITH DANA TAI SOON BURGESS.

On The Slant Podcast, prolific Asian American artists, writers, and thinkers explore questions about race, identity, and creating in America.

Blue Air Premieres at New York City Electronic Music Festival

June 24, 2022 @ 8:00 pm

Blue Air is a video collaboration by artist SoHyun Bae and composer Judith Shatin. They first met at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts where they were studio neighbors who were moved by each other’s art. The current project began with a conversation at SoHyun’s studio, with Judith recording her painting as well as their voices. Blue Air itself began as an extended conversation with SoHyun sending paint marks to Judith, to which she responded with digital music, with the earlier recording as a key sonic source. She also drew on additional recordings that reflect her ongoing exploration of the enveloping sonic world, from chance encounters such as the clink of glasses she recorded in Arezzo, to the spoken word, to delicate sounds of violin harmonics and a variety of extended techniques. SoHyun in turn arranged paint marks that responded to the sounds as she worked on her Nature of Water series exploring the precariousness and fragility of life. The process was collaborative and iterative, finding ways to speak to one another through image and music. Finally, they merged, as described in Edith Wharton’s poem, A Meeting, where they “. . . drink the blue transcendent air together. . . “

The New York City Electronic Music Festival is a remarkable annual showcase of innovative music ranging from those with digital elements to those that are exclusively digital, as in this case. This wide-ranging concert also includes music by Maurice Wright, Hubert Howe, Andrew May, Akira Taoka, Benjamin Broening and more! For more about the program visit NYCEMF.

DETAILS

Date: June 24, 2022

Time: 8:00 pm - 10:30 pmhttp://www.iobdb.com/Theatre/314

Venue: The Loreto Theatre at the Sheen Center - 18 Bleecker ST., New York, NY, 10012

Phone: 212-219-3132

SOHYUN BAE

THE NATURE OF WATER

13 SEPTEMBER - 23 OCTOBER 2021

See the Exhbition in Skoto Gallery Viewing Room: https://skotogallery.viewingrooms.com/viewing-room/23-sohyun-bae-the-nature-of-water-2015-2018/

SoHyun Bae’s Nature of Water series celebrates the creative process imbued with an organic structure that thrives in the space between art and life. As an artist who consistently explores new themes and techniques, her work is governed by a visual and conceptual complexity, combined with a clarity of vision that responds to and signifies current expanded parameters of abstraction. She brings together color, structure, balance and shapes with a rigorous attention to composition as well as an awareness of art historical precedents to construct evocative abstract works suffused with expressive brushwork on subtly modulated planes of pure pigment and rice-paper on canvas. There is also value for spontaneity and improvisation in her work that engages the viewer directly and viscerally as ideas are distilled into swirling or meandering marks that heighten their perceptual subtlety.

 This series, from 2015 - 2018, is a continuation of the Wrapped Shards series begun by the artist in 2002 that draws on aspects of Jewish mystical thought and belief system as well as references to Korean feminine identity. They also reflect the influence of her teacher and mentor, the Romanian-born Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016), who introduced her to elements of Jewish mysticism. This encounter with the writer, philosopher and humanist had a profound impact on her as a human being and an artist with a conviction in the ability of abstract art to be experienced in emotionally meaningful terms. As stated by the artist in her own words: In the Nature of Water series, I continue to examine the precariousness of life, its fragility and the strength in vulnerability through depicting shards found in our natural world. Despite the fact that her work is never overtly literal, they still manage to tell stories of love and courage, of compassion and resilience that speak to the triumph of the human spirit.

 SoHyun Bae is an American painter living and working in New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts, 2007; The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, 2002; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. Grant, 2000; and The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1996. She has been a resident artist at: Montalvo Art Center, 2019; The Corporation of Yaddo, 2000; Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 1996; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1993 among others. SoHyun Bae received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, 1990; a Master of Fine Arts from Boston University, 1994; and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 1997 having studied with the Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel. Her works have been exhibited world-wide in galleries and museums including the Asian Art Museum of SF, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Seoul Arts Center Hangaram Museum, Museo Nacional di Visual Artes in Montevideo, Queens Museum, Sotheby’s, NY and Philips de Pury & Luxembourg. Recently, she has collaborated with Martha Graham Dance Company. She was invited as a guest artist for Graham + Google, 2018 where she drew the dancers in 3D using Google’s latest technology. She was also invited as a guest artist in the first of the Studio Series – Graham Deconstructed: Steps in the Street with SoHyun Bae, 2019. 

Bearing the Burden

October 15 – November 15, 2020

Press Release

NAVA Contemporary is pleased to present, Bearing the Burden, a new online exhibition of artwork by SoHyun Bae: https://www.artsy.net/show/nava-contemporary-bearing-the-burden?sort=partner_show_position

Featuring 10 paintings from the last decade, Bae continues her examination of the human condition through the lens of the female experience. Beginning in 2009, Bae embarked on this series of depictions of common Korean women of the Joseon Era who carried items on their heads such as bott-ari (objects wrapped in cloths), hang-a-ri (ceramic vessels), and ppar-lae (buckets of laundry). Women from the region of Gaeseong in Hwanghae Province placed large, rectangular wicker baskets on their heads to form shields like turtle shells when going on outings as seen in Bae’s painting Gaeseong Women. She painted them in the sepia tones that capture the light of a distant world. 

When Bae was in her 20s, she encountered a photograph of two Korean women dressed in traditional Joseon attire, carrying vessels on their heads, at a photography fair in New York City. Bae was drawn to this bygone era of turn of the century Korea, familiar, yet distant. It evoked the world of her grandparents and served as a reminder that she had never had the opportunity to meet them. She wanted to learn more. She felt a need to give presence to these ordinary yet extraordinary women; women who were often neglected and trapped in the Neo-Confucian hierarchy dominated by men. She felt compelled to put forth the qualities she herself valued, splendor in simplicity, distance, and reserve.

Now, more than ever, these works speak to the weight that society places on women. Although the items carried are literal, they serve as metaphors for the responsibilities of domestic life, caregiving and both the physical and emotional unpaid labor women overwhelmingly bear the burden of. In the painting Harmoni (My Grandmother in Korean), Bae tells the story of her father, who lost his mother when he was still a child. As a way to ease the pain of this loss he attempted to draw her face, but never succeeded. Bae, for his 88th birthday decided to help and create this portrait in her memory. This work stands as a tribute to the importance of a woman’s labor. Although these loads are often carried without recognition, the impact of a woman’s sacrifice and love is felt by those they cared for long after she has left this physical world.

SoHyun Bae lives and works in New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. Grant, and The National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has been a resident artist at Montalvo Art Center, The Corporation of Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. SoHyun Bae received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, her MFA from Boston University, and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her works have been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums including the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, Seoul Arts Center Hangaram Museum, Museo Nacional di Visual Artes in Montevideo, and the Queens Museum. Recently, she has collaborated with Martha Graham Dance Company and was an invited guest artist for Graham + Google, where she drew the dancers in 3D using Google’s latest technology.

Martha Graham Studio Series

GrahamDeconstructed: Steps in the Street with SoHyun Bae

September 24 - 25, 2019

The Martha Graham Dance Company and SoHyun Bae have partnered on several experiments that combine interaction, technology and improvisation. In one of these collaborations, SoHyun created spontaneous sketches during a performance of "Steps in the Street," a Martha Graham masterwork from 1936 that is considered a seminal work of modernism. A larger-than-life image of SoHyun’s sketching was projected behind the dancers so that the audience could witness her images coming into being.  The evocative drawings are imbued with the immediacy of SoHyun's capture and the bristling energy and haunting expressiveness of the Graham women.   

Janet Eilber, Artistic Director Martha Graham Dance Company