Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 1-7pm • Sun 1-5pm
Gallery Onetwentyeight is pleased to present Quartette, an exhibition of New York-based four Asian women: Fumiko Kashiwagi (mixed media), Jisoon Soh (sculpture), Soyeon Kim (printmaking), and Kazuko Hyakuda (photography). The artists, with their backgrounds of profound Asian culture, employ diverse methods in susceptibility, express their beauty of entity in ethnic and female identity, and compose a harmonized microcosm Quartette in Lower East Side.
While painting, Fumiko Kashiwagi tries to create new colors of her own. Exploring a combination of pastel and acrylic colors, she represents details of nature, especially the passage of the four seasons, in which, based on her unique colors, delicate use of tone, gradation, and shade is made sensitively. The scenes of time she has rendered include a breeze of early spring, a dazzling summer stream at the mouth of a river, scarlet-tinged autumn leaves, and heavy snowfalls onto an icy lake.
Artwork of Korean sculptor Jisoon Soh reflects her ideas and experience based on her ordinary life while she stays in New York City. The clay casting piece, Untitled, is about the relationship between individuals and society through language they speak. In this case, she used the Korean alphabet as the language. Untitled (6,885 Miles) is about her existence in the distance between New York and Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Untitled (After Bruce Nauman) is based on her experience in her college period in the United States about making artworks.
Soyeon Kim is a printmaker who works with woodcut and lithograph. Images of hands and gloves appear in her works frequently. She is making self-portraits with the images of her own hands and Hand gestures. The images of work gloves, which belong to the people around her, are portraits of the owners of the gloves. Knowing the people and what they do with those gloves help her to bring the owners' and her own sensibilities come out through the prints.
Kazuko Hyakuda, in photography and then printmaking, focuses on women in actuality and on women appearing in advertisements, from which she reads their psychological aspects including mental suffering and subconscious desire. Another motifs of her works are abstract patterns reflected in water surfaces and in architectural materials such as huge window glasses, steel doors, and shiny wall stones. She interprets that these reflections composed of nature and artificiality portray women’s complex mode of life, that is, instantaneous beauty of ambiguity and absurdity.
