NYAB Event - Sangbin IM "Spectacle"

Sangbin IM "Spectacle"

RYAN LEE

This event has ended.

Ryan Lee presents its inaugural exhibition, Sangbin IM: Spectacle, an exhibition of new works by artist Sangbin IM (b. 1976, Seoul, Korea). Best known for his composite photographs – vibrant works composed of hundreds of images taken over a series of days and embedded over painted surfaces – IM’s works seamlessly blend painting and photography, integrating the two mediums to create a hyperrealist vision. Exploring the relationship between fantasy and reality, IM begins with the subject of the urban environment, and then manipulates and idealizes it, creating a utopian vision of a place. Altering scale, exaggerating color saturation, and combining digital images with a painterly surface, IM creates works that challenge viewers’ perception and conflate illusion and reality.

Sangbin IM: Spectacle will feature works from the artist’s “People” series, a collection of constructed photographs created during the last two years, which portray crowds of people at notable cultural destinations and tourist hubs around the world. To create each work, IM photographed a single location over a series of days and then combined cropped digital images with painted textures to create a unified study of a single location. By taking as his subject major tourist destinations, IM explores the way these sites have become global spaces, transcending their national identity and instead becoming truly international sites. Among the works on view will be Palace of Versailles, a study of Louis XIV’s castle in Versailles, France. Featuring a crowd of people gathered in front of the palace’s main entrance, the work depicts a distorted Palace of Versailles, with the sprawling building compressed into a single frame, and dwarfed by a painted vibrant blue cloud-filled sky. The dramatic clouds and the teeming crowd energize the site and enhance the artist’s vision.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Ryan Lee, collaborated with PKM Gallery in Seoul, to publish Sangbin IM: Works, a 228-page monograph. The catalogue will feature an introduction by Nan Rosenthal, the former senior consultant in the Modern and Contemporary Art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as essays by Aden Evens of Dartmouth University, and Hanseung Ryu, curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea.

Sangbin IM lives and works in New York, NY and Seoul, Korea. He received his MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale University as a Fulbright scholar and currently teaches at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul. He has been included in notable group exhibitions, including at: the Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Royal Academy of Arts, London, England; Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea; Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn, Alabama; and The Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii. His work is also included in major public collections, including at: the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea; the Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Álava, Spain; and the Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea.