“K - Surrogates” Exhibition
(Art) Amalgamated
This event has ended.
K – Surrogates is a group exhibition presenting a selection of paintings, digital illustrations, 3D animation and sculpture by three Korean contemporary artists; Jihee Kim, Mari Kim and Hye Rim Lee. These artists, some being exhibited in New York for the first time, address questions of idealized concepts of women and femininity valued in Korean and broader Asian society.
Each work in the exhibition engages with various social and cultural codes, which inevitably reflect cross-cultural references such as Asian manga/anime, dynamics in cyber culture, music videos, Eastern and Western notion of ideal beauty, and the recent boom in plastic surgery in Korea and in other Asian countries.
All three artists have created their own fictional characters to present their narratives.
In case of Mari Kim, “Eyedolls,” digitally rendered Korean/western hybrid maidens with huge eyes, are playing roles of the artist’s surrogates and alter egos. Hye Rim Lee’s digitally animated character “TOKI” is an example of the hyper perfected female body promoted by advertising and the media. TOKI directly refers the social phenomenon in South Korea, a country with the highest rate of plastic surgery in the world.[1] On the other hand, Jihee Kim’s young girls with the seemingly bright but unnatural smile and odd eyes represent the contradictory situation where people display a happy façade, while privately dealing with loneliness, peer acceptance and consumerist desires.
Each character’s distinctive sensibility comes from the artists’ post feminist dissection of the current cultural moment, in which they engage in as participants, observers, critics and active anthropologists. Not rejecting, nor conforming, the artists themselves engage in the transformation and re-imagining of Korean culture.
Artists
Mari Kim received a Master’s degree in creative media at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Most of her works present her own digital creations ‘Eyedolls’, rendered in a variety of media, Mari has exhibited widely inside Korea and internationally including National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Art Seasons Gallery, Singapore, and Opera Gallery, Dubai. Her work is included in the collections of the Seoul Museum of Art and the Gyeongnam Art Museum. Mari also received international acclaim for her film Religulous and has collaborated with the famous K-pop group, 2NE1, creating the cover for their single album as well as the music video for I Hate You, released in 2011. Currently she lives and works in Seoul, Korea.
Jihee Kim is an emerging Korean artist whose signature style depicts unnaturally frozen smiling girls’ faces, with a variety of painterly embellishments. Having completed her MFA in Oriental Painting at Ewha Womans University, Korea, she keeps using traditional Korean painting method to present her sensibility. Jihee has exhibited widely both in Korea and abroad including such venues Ilmin Museum of Art, Korea, Song Zhung Artistic District, China and HANCOCK art & design center, Long Beach, California.. Jihee also collaborated with K-pop girl group, Girls Generation, Currently she lives and works in Seoul, Korea.
Hye Rim Lee, a Korean-New Zealand artist, questions new technology’s role in image making and representation. She completed a BFA majoring in Intermedia at Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland, New Zealand in 2002. Since 2001 she has developed and evolved her animated character TOKI, which parodies the obsession with beauty created by phallic motivations in cyber culture and gaming, with the work referencing critical contributions from contemporary mythology, psychoanalysis, technology, cybernetics, aesthetics, plastic surgery, feminism, consumerism and eroticism. Her work has been exhibited widely in major solo and group exhibitions at international museums and galleries including Kukje Gallery Seoul, Max Lang Gallery NY, Gallerie Volker Diehl Berlin, MoCA Shanghai, National Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea and etc. She also won the artist residency of Ssamzie Space Seoul and ISCP New York. Currently she lives and works in New York, Auckland, and Seoul.
[Image: Hye Rim Lee “Bunny Luv, pink” (2010) C-print, Edition 1/5, 36 x 36 in.]
Media
Schedule
from September 26, 2013 to November 09, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-26 from 18:00 to 20:00