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KIWHA LEE
Light Punch
January 19 - March 9, 2024
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CHART is pleased to present Light Punch, a solo exhibition by KIWHA LEE. Featuring a suite of new paintings, her work poses questions about what painting is in the 21st century, complicating the viewer's reading of pictorial hierarchy by engaging pattern as a narrative tool. Taking ancient Asian printmaking processes derived from craft traditions and reinventing them with oil paint, Lee explores notions of intersubjectivity between vision and immersion in the physical world. The exhibition, Lee’s first solo show in New York, will open with a reception on Friday, January 19, from 6–8pm, and remain on view through March 9, 2024.
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Kiwha Lee expresses a desire to transgress artificial and arbitrary boundaries. Having lived and worked around the globe, Lee's densely patterned abstractions reflect the artist's own multi-layered identity. Seeing painting as "a construct born of cultural imagination," Lee decentralizes European modes of pictorial composition and linear perspective, and instead embraces Chinese and Korean landscape painting and original patterning to create a sense of spatial depth.
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Bringing one's attention to this decorative motif is not unintentional, with Lee drawing a contrast between portals and how cultural perception of visual information might be altered. Instead of the canvas acting as a wholly transparent metaphorical window to look through, concentrated patterns of light pierce through the obfuscating designs, flooding the viewer's space with parcels of partial details from the outside world.
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The painting Noble Discontent is emblematic of Lee’s turn away from classical European pictorial traditions. Not only is the piece a meditation on subtractive and additive application of paint through resist techniques traditionally found in textiles, in this case with oil paint, it also employs intricate tiling logic found in architecture. Her “about-face” radical approach may best be exemplified by her proposal of a new framework through which to see painting: the ornamental “jali”—latticed stone screens in ancient non-Western architecture—as an alternative to the Western glass window.
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Available WORKS
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All copyright reserved to the artist.