NYAB Event - Sunhee Kim Jung "Camouflage"

Sunhee Kim Jung "Camouflage"

Elga Wimmer PCC

This event has ended.

Elga Wimmer PCC presents Sunhee Kim Jung: Camouflage an exhibition co-curated by Thalia Vrachopoulos and Suechung Koh.

Through her Camouflage paintings Jung comments on the state of the world; on life and death, on fairness and travesty, on honor and respect, on family, on the individual and his emotions. She honors life by acknowledging death in life’s cycle but also for those experiencing an untimely death; servicemen and women. Consequently, her Camouflage work references their suffering and death while serving their country dressed in camouflage garb to avoid danger.

A form of visual deception, camouflage is used in military battles for survival. It’s not about hiding so much as it is about camouflaging that requires a soldier wear the colors of the environment, so that he is seen but not recognized. This survival skill became popular beginning in the 19th century with the increasing accuracy of new firearms. Like the military technique of countershading, Jung takes her lessons from nature. This technique considers the distribution of light on an object within the background and counterbalances shading effects so that the object’s shape and projection are camouflaged.

Jung’s series can be discussed in terms of Darwinian theory and natural selection in which features such as camouflage aid animals in their survival allowing them to adapt and grow in their own and even other econiches. Jung’s Camouflage VIII, 2012 an oil on canvas is such a camouflage painting in which she depicts jungle greenery and camouflage patterns among which is a soldier also wearing olive and brown like the background. So that, even though he is visible, because he’s standing still and is behind bushes he is not obvious. As the artist says in her statement when discussing people’s dreams “These men and women are camouflaged in the battlefield of life to avoid physical danger but often they also hide their emotions; their anxieties, their trepidations, their vulnerabilities.” So that this series is dedicated not only to those men and women in the military serving their country, but also to the common man in the street who wears his own mask of disguise.

Sunhee Kim Jung earned her B.F.A at Corcoran College of Art and Design and also earned her M.F.A at American University in Washington D.C. She is the Vice President of the “US-Korea Arts Foundation” in Washington D.C. which is the only one promoted organization to the Korea Gallery in Natural Museum in Natural History of Smithsonian Institution. Jung was the President of the Korean American Artists Association – Washington Metropolitan Region from 2004 to 2006. Currently Jung is teaching art courses at the Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, MD since 2007. This is her first Solo Show in New York.