Emotionally Coded
Exhibition dates: March 11th to April 10th 2020
Gallery: LES Gallery
Participating Artists: Curt Ikens, Eun-Ha Paek, Yukiko Nakashima
In this exhibition, three mid-career artists bring diverse approaches to voice political and personal issues regarding class, gender and the history of East/West relations. Coming from very different backgrounds, Curt Ikens from The United States, Eun-Ha Paek from Korea and Yukiko Nakashima from Japan, these artists use highly individualized, enigmatic visual language through installation, sculpture, drawing and painting, yet the threads running within and between their works reveal that they are not foreign to one another. Whether using scrapes and scribbles on the surface of wood, veining coils of clay to construct figures, or capturing emotion in layering gestural strokes of oil paints, all three artists use coded marks and forms to relive and reveal hidden emotions. In these times of intensified nationalism, and racial and gender injustice, the artists pursue a mission to heighten awareness of personal suppression and repressive tendencies, giving it voice, so that these dishonored pieces of our identities do not fall into oblivion.
While the ideas, mediums and approaches of these artists vary, the origination of their creation derives from one common place, childhood. They explore the distinct and at times traumatic stories enveloping their upbringings that have lingered as unverbalized recollections still looming within themselves. Ikens, Paek and Nakashima also share the language of abstracted and even deformed mark making. In Ikens’s work, misshapen parquet patterns and wood grain commingle with childlike colors and enigmatic scrawls; Paek’s figures are ever morphing creatures of feminist narrative degenerating into nameless organic beings; and Nakashima’s seemingly random, energetic brush strokes recollect fading personal messages against the passage of time.
The artists’ works proudly proclaim freedom through revelatory expressions of vulnerability and acknowledgement of personal turmoil. They provoke viewers to ponder the internal voice, and to challenge everyday indifference regardless of personal history. Their codes claim: there are no boundaries between us while standing before works that engage our deepest inner feelings.
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