Jisook Kim & Hilda Shen “Orogenies”

Fou Gallery

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Fou Gallery presents Orogenies, a dual show featuring artists Jisook Kim and Hilda Shen. An artist’s talk and opening reception will be held on July 6, 4–8 pm. Traversing among various mediums and in their own visual languages, the two artists narrate the tales on a mutual theme: the formation of mountains, whose spectacularity is irrelevant to anthropic activities yet continuously gazed upon and delineated by humankind throughout history. Central to both of their practice is the reduction of landscapes into detached, isolated imprints of nature: an organic coalescence of both ethereal poetics and an allusion of eerie immensity.

Trained as a sculptor in its traditional sense in South Korea and experienced with wood, Jisook Kim offered a new shift in her oeuvre after her relocation to the U.S. and began to explore the potentials of lighter materials with more flexibility. Her recent body of work built with Hanji paper and steel wire orchestrate the entanglement of hypnagogic fine lines in an almost onomatopoeic manner, coating the pale skin of those monumental yet lightweight structures with condensed topographic patterns. The viewer can almost hear them whispering in the static serenity of the mountains, from which something mighty would emerge and announce its omnipresence.

While Hilda Shen’s sculptures resonate with the idiosyncrasies of Chinese scholar rocks, her prints are less concrete. The negatives of the traces that incorporate the movements of the artist’s own body resuscitate the long lost memories of time: a subtle suggestion of the overwhelming brightness at the end of the tunnel, a wormhole that withholds the enigma of the firmament. With a customized platform that is slightly higher than average, the artist invites us to observe her miniature ceramics with an estranged eye. The tiny mountain-like figurations present themselves in desolation, quietly yet assuredly, with a restrained palette, as if they were the prelude of rejuvenation on a post-apocalyptic land.

Through their diverse approaches yet with the shared characteristics of layered simplicity and reserved spontaneity, the artists on display query the viewer to interrogate their perceptions of nature, of time, in and beyond an ineluctably mortal context. Lacking the determinate, prominent, and complete boundaries, mountains evidence the chronic crustal movements of which the results are not yet final: in essence, the process of continuity that inhabits time at a different pace compared to ours.

Accompanying public program will be held on July 20th at 3 pm featuring theremin performance by Rafael Carrasquillo.

ARTIST - JISOOK KIM (b.1981, Incheon, South Korea) received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Sculpture from Sungshin Women’s University in South Korea. After moving to the United States, she completed residency programs at ARPNY and 4heads Artist in Residence Program. Kim has had solo shows in the U.S.A. and abroad including Gallery Sensei (New York, 2017), New York Minded (New York, 2016), Gallery A (Busan, 2016), Nabi Museum of the Arts (New Jersey, 2015), Kwanhoon Gallery (Seoul, 2008), She was selected for Diamond District Windows by ChaShaMa (2018), The Governors Island Art Fair (2018), Korean Cultural Center New York, Jersey City Hall, A.I.R Gallery, NARS Foundation, among many others. In her work, Jisook Kim represents the delicate coexistence of life, energy, and time with a marbling technique that embeds variating drawn lines throughout her multidimensional installations. The simplified abstract patterns embody the energy of nature in an artificial yet organic shape, signifying an ambiguous state of existence that blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, of human life and the cosmos.

ARTIST - HILDA SHEN (b. 1954, Minneapolis, United States) received her B.A. in Music and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College, and her M.F.A. in Sculpture City University of New York, Queens College. Currently she lives and works in Brooklyn and teaches at Parsons/The Newschool. Shen’s sculptures, prints, drawings, and installations have been shown in Brooklyn, throughout the New York City area, Seattle, and Beijing. She acted in Public Hearing, a film by James Kienitz Wilkins, which premiered in the USA at MoMA/PS1 in 2013, and more recently in Common Carrier a t BAMcinemaFest in 2017. Shen created large installations at WaveHill (New York), Tenri Cultural Institute (New York), China2000 Gallery (New York), and the Smithsonian Flushing Town Hall (New York). Her 30-foot wide wall piece, RecurrentRiver, is permanently installed at Riverdale Country School in New York. She received residencies at Willapa Bay AIR, The Bloedel Reserve, Millay Colony for the Arts, Yosemite National Park, and Platte Clove.

CURATOR - TANSY XIAO (b.1988 Nanjing, China) is an independent curator, artist, critic, poetry translator and founder of Raincoat Society: a non-profit media platform that helps artists with multiple cultural backgrounds better express their ideas. Xiao has lived and traveled in more than fifty countries while painting murals in exchange for food and accommodation during her sojourns as an experiment against the commodification of art. Her curatorial projects have been shown locally and internationally at NARS Foundation (New York), Radiator Gallery (New York), Gallery Sensei (New York), Walter Wickiser Gallery (New York), Chazan Family Gallery (Providence, RI), Areté Gallery (New York) et al. She also curated the Multilingual Poetry Reading events at Brooklyn Art Library (New York), as well as Game of Love x3, a crowd-sourced project for Queerskins at Tribeca Film Festival (New York). Considering her work a contribution to the archiving of globalization, Xiao has also published widely on the multicultural and cross-disciplinary practice of art.