NYC Art Shows- Sung Hwa Kim at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 022025
 

Sung Hwa Kim‘s beautiful paintings for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring at Harper’s, celebrate the seasons with jars containing nature scenes and elements that glow.

From the gallery-

Throughout Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the traditional Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to study the passage of time. He refers to these paintings as visual haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that tend to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim uses color liberally: brilliant pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes wherein urban greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the night.

Works like Still Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated only by a crescent moon. But indoors, behind a vast window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Beyond the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the two worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a gentle glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted grey flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo across this ethereal work—the artist expertly stages diverging cycles of life and death.

Kim continues to explore existential proximities in Still Life with Jar, Pencil, and Notebook, where time folds in on itself, and reality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral warmth over quiet rooftops—an ending and a beginning intertwined. Within an interior space, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in eternal bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A notebook and pencil await just outside of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.

Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal yet precisely rendered compositions, he captures the subtle transformations that flow between opposing forces. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting harmony. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to consider the perpetually converging realities that inform life. Through these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that define both the tangible world and the great expanse of the cosmos.

This exhibition closes 4/5/25.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Shyama Golden at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 282025
 

“Blood Orange Moon”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Daydream of a Nocturne”, 2023, Acrylic and oil on linen

The two paintings above are from In My Mind, Out My Mind, Shyama Golden’s exhibition at Harper’s last year. Golden, along with Narsiso Martinez was recently selected by LACMA to be the Art Here and Now (AHAN) Studio Artists of 2024.

From the Harper’s press release for Golden’s 2024 exhibition-

Across the paintings that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, Golden depicts universal cycles of rebirth as told through her personal biography and cultural memory. The artist derives inspiration from her neighboring Los Angeles landscapes and the figure of the yakka in Sri Lankan folklore, a demon or trickster spirit. Plummeting into the belly of the beast, Golden unravels her subconscious turmoil and is then reborn. In the biomythographical series, the artist transcends binaries of good and evil while meditating on the psychic, social, and ideological fissures that inform cyclical transformation.

Like a cinematic storyboard, each painting presents a different scene in Golden’s speculative odyssey. The narrative begins in the cemetery: eerie green hues resound, invoking the unsettling terrain where the living greet the dead. From there, Golden’s protagonist travels through gopher holes and subconscious highways where she collides with an imagined yakka and plunges into its wound. Golden’s avatar concludes her expedition at the Los Angeles River. Here, she emerges from a tree reborn, mirroring the river’s regenerative journey.

Repeatedly, Golden faces troubled interiority directly within this visual retelling of internal affliction. In works like Daydream of a Nocturne, which marks the beginning of the series, the artist’s fictional self sits beside a yakka alter ego among a ring of graves. On a padura, or traditional reed mat, Golden’s avatar presents an offering to the hybrid creature who bears a toothy grin: fish, served on a banana leaf, a clay oil lamp, and an all-American corn dog. These miscellaneous treats appease the yakka while gesturing towards diasporic hybridity.

In Blood Orange Moon, Golden represents herself after she’s ejected from a tree trunk following her expedition through psychological space. As if Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland, Golden’s protagonist shimmies out from the world of her inner demons and happens upon an optimistic landscape. This surreal work, like the rest that comprise In My Mind, Out My Mind, beckons a curiosity for the unfamiliar—a desire that dwells at the pith of the exhibition. Across these scenes, Golden invites the onlooker to be gentler with all that is flawed and foreign. It is these perplexing yet dynamic differences, within ourselves and among others, that make us human.

 

NYC Art Shows- Ho Jae Kim at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 042023
 

“Day 11: Flight Simulator”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Carousel”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Day 5: In Praise of Shadows”, 2023 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

“Day 3: Janitor”, 2022 Oil, inkjet transfer, enamel, and paper on canvas

Above are some of Ho Jae Kim’s enchanting mixed media works from his exhibition, Carousel at Harper’s gallery.

From the press release written by the artist-

The centerpiece of this exhibition, its namesake painting, depicts a carousel with 31 horses signifying the days of the month. For each of these “days,” I built a unique narrative in honor of liminal spaces, the mundane, and the quotidian. Just as life continues regardless of our psychology, the carousel will turn whether or not there is a rider. While I prepared for this exhibition, I thought of the displacement I’ve experienced by tragic events out of my control. One summer night in 2022, my stepfather committed suicide. He left a brief note for my mother before driving to a nearby railroad where he waited for a train to take his life. Since then, I have been plagued with a vision of the train’s headlights—a magnificent bright light that dissolves the contours of everything in its path. I became a prisoner to this light that exists within my dark fantasy.

We rely on fleeting moments of significance to define life, but the majority of our lives are shaped by non-moments of transition, endurance, and dormancy. For this reason, I chose to create representations of less significant moments in order to build a body of work that can paint a better picture of reality. Luxurious portrayals of life as depicted in movies and pop culture cultivate dreams of becoming a character in a fantasy, but these dreams are quickly shattered by the constraints and circumstances of daily life. We become psychologically displaced and rejected by the fantasies that once served as our vitality. We begin to live in a state of purgatory, caught between reality and our dreams.

In The Divine Comedy, during the transition from the Inferno to Purgatory, Dante turns right to see the light from the east on Easter Sunday, a day of resurrection. With this new orientation, Dante’s purgatory becomes a place of hope, where lost souls can choose to repent or find redemption. The horses on my carousel face to the left, in the direction of the spiraling Inferno, but if the audience chooses to imagine the mechanism rotating, the horses will eventually turn right as they continue their clockwise journey. Similarly, as the halos, arches, circles, and light in my paintings become juxtaposed with the mundanity of the subjects, they transform those quiet non-moments into divinity, and the prisoners of my narratives are granted redemption.

This body of work began as a tragedy, but it has the potential to become a comedy. And just as I wish for my loved ones to see the beauty that is within their souls, I hope that my divine scenes of nothingness can become a vehicle for others to redeem themselves in purgatory and indulge in the beauty that is inherent in every life.

This exhibition closes 5/6/23.

 

NYC Art Shows- Joani Tremblay at Harper’s

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Mar 092023
 

Joani Tremblay “Untitled (naphthol red)”, 2022

Joani Tremblay “Untitled (Death Valley), 2022

Joani Tremblay “Untitled (violet mountains)”, 2022

Closing on 3/11/23 is Joani Tremblay’s exhibition of paintings, Intericonicity at Harper’s gallery in NYC.

From the press release-

Tremblay presents twelve oil paintings made since April 2022 that largely depict the landscape of rural Pennsylvania. In contrast to the chromatic levity of recent work portraying citrus fruits or the American southwest, here Tremblay hews to a darker palette of rich greens and blues inspired by farmland valleys just thawing at the start of spring. This is what she saw driving from New York City through the Laurel Highlands to reach Fallingwater, the iconic house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed as a nature retreat for a wealthy retail magnate.

How we use the land lies at the heart of Tremblay’s work. A road’s placement, a water reclamation initiative, or the machinations of land ownership matter for Tremblay not so much for their factual circumstance as for the power relations that structure them. Behind the myths of the untouched landscape or nature as a fierce inevitable conqueror over human ambition lies a question about our standpoint when we approach a particular vista. Will we simply look? Take a photograph, or retrieve a rock to carry with? Commission a plan to shape the earth this way or that? Wright erected Fallingwater over a waterfall so that it literally straddles but symbolically surmounts the tributary’s onrush. Even its windows are unframed, the better to create an illusion of coextension with the same nature it tames. Built from 1935–39, at the height of the great economic depression, Wright used nearby laborers, supporting the local economy to forge an elaborate private gem amid the picturesque.

In this vein, contradictory impulses about our treatment of the land fuel Tremblay’s paintings, which are, for the most part, each made of three constituent components painted in the following order: sky, ground, and internal frame that focuses our vision like an aperture on the landscape beyond. In Untitled (rain), ice blue shards interpose themselves between roiling clouds anchored by the slender arcs of an emerald frame, while a flaming sky tops amethyst buttes seen through the undulating rays of a cobalt-green opening in Untitled (violet mountains). Tremblay works in oil, building up the texture of certain parts of her internal borders through varying degrees of thickness applied with a loaded sponge, in contrast to the smooth finish of those borders’ flat gradients and the medium texture of her landscape’s painted fields. But as her framing devices and the near-realism of her depictions of earth suggest, the discourse of photography undergirds her work conceptually.

In the nineteenth century, government-funded photographers such as Timothy O’Sullivan spread westward, scrutinizing the earth. One of his images records a measuring stick alongside a text left on Inscription Rock by a Spanish invader, literalizing the human desire to regulate nature. Though Tremblay’s landscapes at first seem to aspire to such precision, she deploys lossy processes in the studio that encourage a departure from the indexical, supposedly truthful exactitude of landscape photography. Tremblay projects a digitally-mocked-up composition onto her canvas, but by using a poor-quality projector, she ensures that the image is too grainy to copy fastidiously at close range. And although she initially sourced one of her favorite skies—visible here in Untitled (rain)—from John Constable, she has painted it so many times that it has become her own via the minute changes materialized through repetition. She looks to her own work, not Constable’s, when she paints this sky anew. Thus, Tremblay charts a middle path between photography’s documentary dream and landscape painting’s glorification of subjective experiences in nature, drawing on these themes to surface accrued ideologies latent in the very notion of the landscape view.

Although Tremblay’s vistas arise from her personal travel, they seem uncannily familiar because they draw from a cultural imaginary rather than from specific locales. To wit, Tremblay conducts research on Instagram, where curated landscapes are already shot through with aesthetic codes long established by artists from Ansel Adams to Lawren Harris and Arthur Dove. Photography’s indexical referentiality is at a remove twice over in Tremblay’s work, first through the interpretive act of painting by hand, and second by encoding within it a whole set of images and conventions for their appearance that encircle us in the digital realm.

Unlike a palimpsest, in which a first layer of representation is covered over by a second, Tremblay’s work operates through intericonicity, a term derived from semiotics. Intericonicity offers a way to understand a relation of copresence between two or more images which may appear eidetically or actually as one image within another. This realm of infinite reproduction and false memory offsets a more straightforward mood each painting’s chromatic scheme seems to deliver. The smooth, inky valleys of Untitled (sunset and trees) might suggest placidity, for instance, the sheer height of Untitled (Laurel Highlands) soaring power. But because each work signals allusions to so many art historical or geographic references alongside their ideological effects, that mood resists resolution. Said differently, these are not easy paintings to decode. Their sharpness of focus functions on multiple strata at once.