NYAB Event - Kim Dong Yoo “Living Together”

Kim Dong Yoo “Living Together”

Hasted Kraeutler

This event has ended.

HASTED KRAEUTLER presents Living Together, an exhibition of new paintings by Korean artist KIM DONG YOO (b. 1965).

Marking the global debut of a stunning suite of new works to which the artist has applied his signature wry vision, Living Together features a range of formal techniques used to give new life to the familiar and to update the outdated. Rather than exploring contemporary subjects—as he did for his Faces series of global cultural icons, begun in 1980— Korea’s preeminent painter here provides fresh and compelling takes on canonized art historical works of art and religious iconography, drawing them into the present with clever additions and manipulations.

Offering the illusion of wholeness from afar, they reveal complex surfaces when viewed up close, suggesting the subjectivity of visual perception. He also explores the potential reproducibility of an image — his appropriated subjects have been reproduced millions of times throughout history, on posters and in art-history classrooms — but the artist challenges the idea of the “iconic” image by composing them of well-known motifs in his intricate, one-of-a-kind compositions. These issues have been touched on by artists from Andy Warhol to Pictures Generation producers, but Kim Dong Yoo delves with new interest.

Eros and Psyche, 2015, provides the opening to the exhibition, depicting the hallowed pair from classical Greek mythology; Kim Dong Yoo’s composition operates as a double entendre, punning on the Greek definition of the word “Psyche,” which means both “soul” and “butterfly.” Butterflies have made recurrent cameos in his work over the decades, operating as symbols of transcendent immortal life after death and representing the artificiality of image making—and they re-appear here, encircling the protagonists in an illusory halo of colored butterflies. In other works, the overall composition can only be perceived from afar, and dissolves into a whimsical sea of smaller motifs— bugs, flowers, or butterflies—when seen up close. Butterflies - Andy Warhol, 2014, for example, seems to present the iconic Andy Warhol self portrait, Self-Portrait (Fright Wig), 1986. As a viewer approaches the canvas, however, they observe that the perceived “image” is in fact comprised of a sea of butterflies, and the form is all but lost in a compelling fluctuation between negative and positive space.

To further emphasize the material physicality of the works on view, Kim Dong Yoo has introduced another illusion: that of cracked paint, which graces the surface of numerous works in this series, including a trio of vanitas skull still-lifes, and evokes the decay of oil paintings over time. “This technique has become a way of invoking the past,” the artist explains. “The three skulls are the remains of human from primitive times to the present…it is as if I have stacked the time from now with the distant past.” Throughout the exhibition, Kim Dong Yoo employs technical illusions to suggest connections between eras and even species—building a virtual bridge between the past, present, and future in the ongoing human pursuit of image creation.

Kim Dong Yoo received his B.F.A and his M.F.A. in painting from Mokwon University in Korea, and he has exhibited widely in his native country and internationally since 1988. He most recently had a solo exhibition at The Daejeon Museum in Daejeon, Korea (2015.) His painting Queen Elizabeth II and Diana, 2011, was part of the monumental 2012 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, “The Queen: Art & Image.” Many museums have had solo shows of his work, including, the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul, Korea (2010), the Seoul Arts Center (2009), and the Savina Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (2007.) His work is included in the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, the Sungkok Art Museum, the Samsung Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the 93 Museum, the Savina Museum, the Kumho Museum of Art, the Daejeon Municipal Museum of Art, the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the Busan Metropolitan Art Museum.