NYAB Event - Veronica Juyoun Byun "Common Ground

Veronica Juyoun Byun "Common Ground – Uncommon Visions"

hpgrp gallery

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The first solo exhibition in New York of Korean-born sculptor Veronica Juyoun Byun will be on view at hpgrp Gallery. Common Ground – Uncommon Visions will feature seven large wall reliefs as well as intimate-sized figures and abstract constructions. Veronica Byun was born in Seoul, Korea, but has spent the better part of her adult life studying in the United States and this East/West divide has fueled a diverse visual culture and provided fodder for her visions as a young sculptor.

Borrowing visual themes from traditional ornamental craft geometries and color, Byun playfully expands and layers them into bursting and bubbling abstractions that dazzle the eye. It is clear from this exhibition that Byun embraces color and unabashedly shiny surfaces, which is somewhat rare in contemporary ceramics. Primary colors are deeply rooted in Korean and Buddhist traditions as sources of protection and enduring paradise on earth, and are at play here in Byun’s work. She seemingly stirs up her sources, and like most post-modern American artists, creates her own visual vocabulary.

Separate but playfully equal are Byun’s choices for titles. “Misty Dawn”, “Serenity after Sunset”, and “Shimmering Sea at Sunset” suggest naturalistic themes while “Lotus Saint Prayer”, “Passion Series”, and “Exotica” seemingly bow respectfully to the spirituality and the meditative state practiced by Zen masters. “My Shoes” contains a certain pop art quality in its serial imagery of common objects. “Passion Series #1” and “Exotica” are composed of abstract “nests” of forms, charged with an array of colors, as if their components were dashed against the wall or floor and are suddenly blossoming in the artists’ own “garden of delight”.

Byun’s “ever modular large scale wall works can ambitiously stretch out in unlimited formations or can contract to accommodate an appropriate wall space,” says Ronald Kuchta, former director of the Everson Museum and a current ceramic curator. This format bringing together traditional and non-traditional schemes and symbols confers a certain metaphorical aspect to Byun’s work as if the artist is on a journey to investigate the human condition.