"Dyadic" at the Korea Society

 Hayoon Jay Lee, Eternal Mother: Knowing/Not Knowing, 2024, 60 x 40 x 3 1/2, rice, modeling paste, 24K Gold, acrylic on wood panel

By JONATHAN GOODMAN December 1, 2024

The Korea Society moved to its current location on Madison Avenue in mid-town New York. Part of the space’s attraction comes from a strong fine arts exhibition program, directed by Jay Oh, the Senior Director of Arts & Culture who also curated “Dyadic, ” a show involving two gifted women artists, Annette Hur and Hayoon Jay Lee. Both are originally from Korea; both have made the decision to stay, perhaps the result of their interest in and curiosity about an international art milieu in the city. In fact, the presence of East Asian artists downtown and in Brooklyn has grown large enough to spawn a community that can confidently maintain an esthetic sharply Asian in its practice, even as it picks up Western influence.

With a wider range of an audience, including East Asians, curious persons from the West, and visitors from all over the world, questions of influence tend to become important in a good way. Part of Hur’s and Lee’s attraction stem from their willingness to create imagery indicative of a world outlook, rather than art that is specifically Korean. Annette Hur is a good example of a Korean artist taken with a Western modernist, abstract idiom that is thoroughly set in American terms—her highly attractive works consist of horizontal bars, placed rather like abstract waves riding a monochromatic background.

Hayoon Jay Lee, Eternal Mother: Watching, 2023 - 2024, 36 x 48 x 2 3/8”, rice, modeling paste, 24K Gold on wood panel 

Wave and the background behind the wave are not necessarily the same color, a decision that would emphasize the rectangular forms as abstractions, rather than single color of the sea. These seascapes merge the ocean with an abstract vision, but the art does not fully give way to either. It makes sense that Hur’s education, at Ewha in Korea and Columbia in New York City, would help her keep her going, Hayoon Jay Lee, who studied for her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, now lives and works in New York City.

Her contribution, composed of four paintings: one on the outside wall before the gallery, and three in the gallery itself. All four contributions consist of a round image with a gold-leaf usage at the base. On the left image, whose background is colored red or pink, the golden symbol is triangular, with two thin, extended tubes ending in small round circles. The construction is a close copy of an image of a womb with Fallopian tubes leading to ovaries. In The Eternal Mother: Watching (2023-24), we come across a white sphere on the white wall leading up to the gallery space. The circle is rough with ridges of rice, and at the lowest part of the rice sphere, an elongated version of the golden womb looks like it might be supporting the rice above it. All four works have the phrase “Eternal Mother” as part of their title; it is a way for Lee to connect with as large an audience as might be possible. At the same time, The circle or sphere becomes a profoundly basic emblem indicating unity and wholeness: the form is complete, and does not need anything more.

Hayoon Jay Lee, Eternal Mother: Contemplation, 2024, 60 x 40 x 3 1/2, rice, modeling paste, 24K Gold, acrylic on wood panel
 

The combination of the sphere, a world symbol, and the rice, a food tying the work to Lee’s Korean homeland, manages a combination as large as can be and as specifically Eastern as might be understood. In the last work, done in 2024 and titled “The Eternal Mother: Knowing/Not Knowing, ” the womb and ovaries are the same color as the rice surrounding the image. Food and maternity, surely close enough in symbolic meaning, join in the work’s statement of feminine strength. Lee is not immediately understood as a feminist artist, but maybe, in some deep sense, the rice, the womb of gold, and the emblematic titles evoke different readings. The next two works refer to Contemplation: Yellow and ”Fortitude: Blue.” In these two works, it is harder to read the womb image than in the “Contemplation” circle, that is not of great matter.

Instead, what stands out as being the most important element in this sequence of works is the symbolic meaning given to art. Lee makes sure we understand this by nudging us in the right direction using words, by employing implicit insight in the forms she uses, and by invigorating her work with her idiosyncratic materials–24 carat gold and rice. In good art, implications can be generated by associating forms and materials with a meaningful composition. In Lee’s case, beyond the pale of the specific forms there is also the broad sea of the background, which appears to support the sphere at the top of the painting. By using rice, a basic food source; 24-carat gold leaf; and titles with strong mythic/suggestive insights, the art begins to carry literary overtones that we would not always associate with visual art.

Hayoon Jay Lee, Eternal Mother: Fortitude, 2024, 60 x 40 x 3 1/2, rice, modeling paste, 24K Gold, acrylic on wood panel

In a way, then, “Dyadic,” the name of the show, moves us in the direction of literature: a meaning to be read as much as to be seen. Depths of water, a true vision in Hur’s work, becomes the kind of depth we might see in a liturgical text Lee could be reading. One cannot make too much of this, but images she uses–the womb, the sphere, the actual written support of works’ names–quite easily tie to written tradition. If we keep that insight in mind, suddenly Hur, at least from a Western point of view, becomes biblical (by incorporating a flood into her imagery), while Lee’s symbolic use of the womb moves the imagery into mythology before the Bible, both of which began as literary concepts. While we cannot be certain the interpretations we give will be accurate; in both Hur’s and Lee’s suggested annotatioins, it feels as if the two women’s works are meant to instruct us in meanings that can be stretched in a number of ways. And that is the implicit meaning of what we see; the image connecting from one genre to the next. Both Hur and Lee are excellent artists in a technical sense; their work conjoins several suggestions at once. Lee looks to the particulars of her imagination, and finds that she speaks across the span of what can be seen or written. This is her breadth of appeal, the sharpness of her understanding, at a time when such knowledge is necessary. WM