Jason Haam presents ‘Karma’, featuring works by four celebrated Korean painters: Jungwook Kim, Minjung Kim, Mike Lee and Moka Lee. It’s the gallery’s second exhibition in collaboration with Frieze No.9 Cork Street.
The four artists in ‘Karma’ represent different eras of Korean identity, heritage and generational zeitgeists. Born across four decades from the 1960s to 1990s, all four artists are technically accomplished and employ laborious and repetitive layering processes.
Minjung Kim‘s works are an assemblage of the East and the West that recall the visual sensitivity of Arte Povera yet predominantly use hanji, a Korean mulberry paper. Her works are products of highly disciplined meditation and reductive performance. Jungwook Kim has been making ink-on-paper works for more than 30 years. Steeped in the traditions of Asian painting, Kim expands the aesthetic boundaries of ink. The only Korean-American artist in the presentation, Mike Lee makes graphically charged paintings with a wide range of subject matters in a stylized black-and-white palette with skills he learnt from his training as an animator. Finally, Moka Lee represents a generation of young Korean artists who grew up with the internet and social media. Her work reflects conflicts between identity and fabricated persona and touches upon generational traits and tensions.