CulBeat Express
2019.10.18 00:52
김원숙씨 개인전 '선물'(The Gift)@시카고 앤드류배 갤러리(11/1-30)
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WONSOOK KIM
THE GIFT
NOV 01 - NOV 30, 2019
Andrew Bae Gallery · Chicago, IL
Opening Reception - Friday, November 1, 5-8 pm
Wonsook Kim, Till We Have Faces, Lithograph on Paper, 22" x 30", 1995
'The Gift' is the story of her own life.
Wonsook Kim came to America to study art further in 1972 at Illinois State University. She was 19. Adjusting to a new land was challenging, not to mention being an artist. She took time nurturing her endurance, searching her own labyrinth, escaping from her own tradition and yet confirmed her identity back there again. Knowing Wonsook and her husband Thomas for more than two decades, I witnessed how she transformed herself through her art, how giving became her second nature.
Many years ago Wonsook forced me to read a lesser-known book by C. S. Lewis "Till we have Faces" which became one of my favorite book lists. She had produced hundreds of images from this story, she said she still could go on. It tells a modern-day version story of Aphrodite and her sister who encounters how a selfish love could be and examines what true love is. Above all, how to share the love you believe in with others. The book touched her deeply.
Wonsook Kim, Burning of Flowers, Oil on Canvas, 30" x 24", 2008
Wonsook's image is poetry and a diary before it became a painting. Her spontaneous calligraphic brush strokes are not about the East or West, her fairy-tale-like stories are not about the past or present and the deceivingly simplistic images are not about the dream or reality. When painting and a life engaged through the unselfish mind, we can communicate with others crossing those boundaries. One of her other series "Happiness by Emptying" was an unprecedented major exhibition that took place in triple galleries in Seoul simultaneously in 1998 expressed poetically on this topic, all in monochromatic colors.
Wonsook Kim is a giver who feels the most natural "Giving by Emptying."
Please join us to celebrate life and "The Gift".
-Andrew Bae
