Orogenies

About

New York - Fou Gallery is pleased to announce Orogenies, a dual show featuring artists Jisook Kim and Hilda Shen from July 6 to August 11, 2019. An artist’s talk and opening reception will be held on July 6, 4–8 pm. Traversing among various mediums and in their own visual languages, the two artists narrate the tales on a mutual theme: the formation of mountains, whose spectacularity is irrelevant to anthropic activities yet continuously gazed upon and delineated by humankind throughout history. Central to both of their practice is the reduction of landscapes into detached, isolated imprints of nature: an organic coalescence of both ethereal poetics and an allusion of eerie immensity.

Trained as a sculptor in its traditional sense in South Korea and experienced with wood, Jisook Kim offered a new shift in her oeuvre after her relocation to the U.S. and began to explore the potentials of lighter materials with more flexibility. Her recent body of work built with Hanji paper and steel wire orchestrate the entanglement of hypnagogic fine lines in an almost onomatopoeic manner, coating the pale skin of those monumental yet lightweight structures with condensed topographic patterns. The viewer can almost hear them whispering in the static serenity of the mountains, from which something mighty would emerge and announce its omnipresence.

While Hilda Shen’s sculptures resonate with the idiosyncrasies of Chinese scholar rocks, her prints are less concrete. The negatives of the traces that incorporate the movements of the artist’s own body resuscitate the long lost memories of time: a subtle suggestion of the overwhelming brightness at the end of the tunnel, a wormhole that withholds the enigma of the firmament. With a customized platform that is slightly higher than average, the artist invites us to observe her miniature ceramics with an estranged eye. The tiny mountain-like figurations present themselves in desolation, quietly yet assuredly, with a restrained palette, as if they were the prelude of rejuvenation on a post-apocalyptic land.

Through their diverse approaches yet with the shared characteristics of layered simplicity and reserved spontaneity, the artists on display query the viewer to interrogate their perceptions of nature, of time, in and beyond an ineluctably mortal context. Lacking the determinate, prominent, and complete boundaries, mountains evidence the chronic crustal movements of which the results are not yet final: in essence, the process of continuity that inhabits time at a different pace compared to ours.

Accompanying public program will be held on July 20th at 3 pm featuring theremin performance by Rafael Carrasquillo.