Andrew Bae Gallery, 300 W. Superior St., the only gallery in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary Asian fine art, is holding a special holiday season exhibition featuring six outstanding women artists Dec. 7 - Jan. 31. The artists, all born in Korea between 1946 and 1959, create a unique fusion of eastern religion and culture and western artistic styles and traditions.
All but one of the artists were fine arts students at the very elite Ehwa Women’s University in Seoul and all have traveled extensively in the United States. Today several live part of the year here—Young June Lew and Sandra Sunnyo Lee live in San Francisco and Yooah Park and Wonsook Kim in New York.
Wonsook Kim is a renowned artist in Korea, approaching legendary status, with her romantic figurative art in oils, acrylic and prints. Essentially a literary artist, she deals metaphorically with life’s deepest mysteries with compelling narratives that appear in printed books such as “Till We Have Faces,” which was inspired by the religious writer C.S. Lewis’ story of Aphrodite. The female form is featured in dream states, in legendary states, in a wide variety of settings, both real and dreamlike.
Yooah Park, a member of a powerful family in Korea, studied the art of calligraphy from early childhood and reverts to it in her multiples of black ink on handmade paper. She sees the calligraphic markings as fundamentally figurative in suggestions, though evoking a Confucian contemplative state as well as some of the bold strokes of Franz Kline and the American Abstract Expressionists who were highly influenced by Asian art.
Kwang Jean Park was a little known Korean printmaker when Andrew Bae discovered her work in Seoul and brought her to the attention of American audiences. Her abstract paintings are imbued with the Taoist beliefs in Yin and Yang, and the concept of the intermeshing of opposites receives very visible form in her diptychs in oils, acrylics and mixed media. These beliefs are also manifest in her limited edition woodblocks which, like the paintings, take the form of multiple panels.
Young June Lew creates sumptuous works which have a large following in the United States with their thick painterly impasto on canvas and paper breathing life and form to traditional feminist imagery, such as combs, roses, classic Korean cloaks and coats, often in multiple imagery. The warm monochromatic earth tones evoke the earth and a connection between cultures across time and space.
Soon Shil Baik was born and raised in southwest Korea, Cholla province, whose land is dedicated to the cultivation of tea, hence her fascination with Tato: the Tao of tea and the ceremony of drinking it. She drinks tea every day and has imbued it with spiritual significance in her acrylics and mixed media on rice paper. Baik’s work is characterized by evocative landscapes, inspired by tea growing fields, in a wide palette, their bold and striking colors that illuminate her landscapes and natural forms.
Sandra Sunnyo Lee, an American resident and not well-known in Korea, writes of “living an American life with an Asian mind.” Her thoughts and art are solidly based on the Zen tenet that form can be regarded as emptiness. In her diptychs and triptychs, in oil and acrylic, we see enigmatic faces emerging from the canvas blurring the distinction between solid form and surrounding space.
The gallery is open 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Tuesday - Saturday. For more information call (312) 335-8601.
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