“20 Years: Art Projects International” Exhibition
Art Projects International
This event has ended.
Art Projects International presents the gallery’s 20-year anniversary with a special exhibition entitled 20 Years: Art Projects International. The exhibition will open on December 10, 2013 at its ground floor space and a newly added adjacent space on Greenwich Street in the historic district of Tribeca in New York. In 2014, the spaces will be combined to create a single expanded gallery space.
This anniversary exhibition brings together a selection of key works by artists who have worked closely with the gallery over the years. It also will present a short history of Art Projects International, established in 1993 as one of the few pioneering galleries in New York dedicated to providing a platform for contemporary artists from Asia. The gallery’s longstanding relationship with many of its artists will be highlighted by focusing on important early solo exhibitions at Art Projects International: Jian-Jun Zhang: Water and Fire (1995); Gwenn Thomas: Recent Work (1996); Il Lee - Line and Form: Drawings 1984-1996 (1997); Pouran Jinchi: Recent Paintings (2000). The exhibition will be supplemented with a multimedia presentation of archival images including many previously unpublished photographs from past exhibitions, events and projects.
Twenty years ago, Art Projects International’s name, with emphasis on the word “projects” and exclusion of the word “gallery,” announced a bias for activity over locale and signaled a departure from traditional models. During this period, Art Projects International was at the forefront of introducing international artists with diverse backgrounds and remains focused on presenting new and significant artists from Asia. The gallery’s support of new and under-recognized talent has led to many artists having their first solo exhibitions in the United States, including the recent solo exhibitions of Seokmin Ko, Myong Hi Kim and Zheng Xuewu. The gallery continues to work in collaboration with institutions, large and small, developing partner relationships and initiating exhibitions and projects throughout the United States and abroad.
Included in the exhibition 20 Years: Art Projects International will be an early poetry painting by Pouran Jinchi, Untitled (Poetry #98-1) (1998), exhibited at The Vilcek Foundation in 2008, and a number of her sculptural prayer stone works, among them Prayer Stone 2 (2011), featured at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and similar to her work exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston earlier this year. Also featured will be several large-scale signature ballpoint pen works by Il Lee, including Untitled 978W (1998), a powerful and energetic drawing featured at Lee’s mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2007, and Untitled BK-1201 (2012), which was featured this year in Extreme Drawings - Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Among the works by Jian-Jun Zhang will be Sumi-Ink Garden of Re-Creation Installation Drawing #2 (2002), a sumi-ink drawing—a preparatory sketch of his major installation in The Fourth Shanghai Biennale at the Shanghai Art Museum—depicting his scholar’s rock sculptures, a variation of which was shown in Chinese Window at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2010 and will be featured in Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opening in December 2013. Also included are an etching by Tchah-Sup Kim from the Triangle series (1976), represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gwenn Thomas’ Kino III, (1994), from her seminal, black and white, photo-painting works of the 1990s and Long Dream (2006), from her color pigment print on canvas work; and several of Richard Tsao’s color-saturated mixed media works like Salty Sea (2010) and Nam Wan (2010), featured at Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea in 2011. Myong Hi Kim contributes a major new pastel on chalkboard work, Winter (2013). A grouping of works from Seokmin Ko’s acclaimed photographic series The Square will be presented, and new works by Filipe Rocha da Silva, Zheng Xuewu and Soo Im Lee will also be featured.
The book Art Projects International: Twenty Years is published in conjunction with the exhibition and provides an overview of the gallery’s mission, it’s artists and 20 years of exhibitions in its galleries, museums and other venues throughout the world.
Media
Schedule
from December 10, 2013 to January 25, 2014
Opening Reception on 2013-12-10 from 18:00 to 20:00
Artist(s)
Jian-Jun Zhang, Gwenn Thomas, Il Lee, Pouran Jinchi et al.