Opening Reception: Haunted May 20, 2004

Artists: Minjung Kim, Hae-Won Won, Samira Abbassy, Katrin Elvarsdottir, Hyun-Young Jung

Exhibit Runs: May 20 ? June 20, 200

Gallery Korea is pleased to announce an exhibition of painting, sculpture and photography, Haunted, which will be on view from Tuesday, May 20 to Friday, June 20.

This exhibition brings together art that reflects ways in which a dialogue with the past continually shapes the present. The photographs of Hyun-Young Jung have captions that interrogate the photographic subjects with questions. She pays attention to thoughts, usually unspoken, that betray an awareness of a disconnection from the Korean culture of her parents. The sculptures of Minjung Kim are made with objects such as hats and shoes that are identifiably traditional Korean artifacts. These are reproduced in different materials and represented as both solid forms (positive space) and empty forms (negative space). Her sculptures evoke a reintegration of the displaced past within the immediate present. A personal transformation is described in Hae-Won Won?s photographs of herself wrapped in burned fabric. These pictures record a dance that represents a shedding of old skin and the struggle for new life, as epitomized by the metamorphosis of larvae to butterflies.

Samira Abbassy juxtaposes Near Eastern and Western imagery and pictorial techniques in paintings that effect an idiosyncratic marriage of supposedly irreconcilable cultures. Combining mythological and personal references, her work resists easy categorization and offers a complex meditation on the heterogeneous condition of modernity. The photographs of Katrin Elvarsdottir reveal the mundane countryside of her native Iceland. Her interest is not the pictorial beauty of the stark landscape but rather an obscure atmosphere of the uncanny that stems from the traditional beliefs of folk religion. It might be the simple camera she uses, which produces out-of-focus enlargements, or it might be the abandoned farm buildings and cottages, but these pictures suggest places haunted by history and the lives of forgotten people.

There will be an opening reception on Tuesday, May 20 from 6 ? 8 pm.

For further information, please contact Gerard McCarthy at (212) 759-9550.
Gallery Korea is open Monday to Friday from 10am ? 7pm and Saturday 10am ? 4pm.