Kang Contemporary is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sung Hee Cho, who lives and works in Seoul and New York. The exhibition will be on view from April 27 through May 18.
Sung Hee Cho is a visionary artist, who captures the essence of her identity through her art-making process of Korean paper, so called hanji in Korean. Cho successfully combines traditional Korean sensibility with her unique visual imageries and narratives from her own life. She explores the complex relationship between colors and texture through her laborintensive, time-consuming process.
Her works share the tradition of searching for Korean identity, harking back to Monochrome Art Movement, which lasted from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Her works recall artists like Seo-bo Park (b.1931) and Young Woo Kwon (b.1926). Monochrome Movement Artists are generation of artists who combined Asian philosophies with Western training to create art that explores color, examines surface, expresses texture and nuance, and holds a wide variety of emotions, intentions, and meanings.
“Often Ms. Cho’s paintings appear as a monochrome surface, a single uniform color, such as bright red or subtle gray or pure white. Pure white is also a color from the East Asian point of view. In fact, white is the processed color of hanji (rice) paper, originally made from the ground leaves of Mulberry trees. In constructing the surface of her paintings, the artist uses a collage method in which each circle is hand-cut or gently torn, then layered with oil pigments and placed one atop another.” says Robert C. Morgan.
Cho Sung Hee’s works have been exhibited and collected in various prestigious private and public institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul), Sejong Art Center (Seoul), Telentine Art Center (Chicago), L.A. Korea Cultural Service (LA), New York Cultural Service (NY), Mutual Saving and Finance Company (Seoul,) Domino Foods, Inc (NY).