C(K)URRENT
A young Yu
Chang-Jin Lee
Cheon pyo Lee
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C(K)urrent The 2020 AHL-T&W Contemporary Visual Art Award Exhibition
C(K)urrentDecember 10, 2020 - January 10, 2021
A young Yu
Chang-Jin Lee
Cheon pyo Lee
Curated by Bill Carroll and Dahye Kim
Organized by
Sponsored by
Today’s visual art world is highly competitive and increasingly more global. In this context, Korean artists have established themselves with a clear and strong voice, none more so than the three talented recipients of the 2020 AHL Contemporary Visual Art Awards. We are pleased to present this online exhibition of the chosen artists, A YOUNG YU, Gold Prize, CHANG-JIN LEE, Silver Prize, and CHEON PYO LEE, Bronze Prize. Working in video, installation, performance, and sculpture, each expresses their highly individual vision with great confidence and assurance. All are conceptually grounded and technically sophisticated. Often Incorporating aspects of their traditional Korean culture and concerns, they make art that transcends to speak to universal themes. The works in the exhibition show the strength of each artist, and between them, covers provocative social Issues, spirituality, cultural identity, and a playful sense of humor. All visually stunning.
Chang-Jin Lee
Cheon pyo Lee
A young Yu
There were over one hundred applicants for the 2020 AHL Award. The work submitted was extremely impressive in its range of methods, mediums and the level of quality and accomplishment. I thank my fellow Jurors, Marshall Price, Curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, and Stephanie Jeanjean, Art Historian and Curator based in New York. It was a pleasure working with these colleagues, and to share insights and opinions as we evaluated the extraordinary group of submissions. In the end, we all agreed that the three winners clearly stood out. I also thank my Co-Curator, Dahye Kim, Interdisciplinary Artist and Researcher who was so generous with her time and input, and wonderful to work in making the final selection of the works for the exhibition.
The three winners are artists to be watched through the future. The AHL Foundation is performing an important role in supporting these artists and the entire Korean visual arts community through this award, and their extensive cultural and educational programming. I thank them.
Bill Carroll
Director EFA Studio Program
A young Yu
A young Yu is a Korean-American artist based in New York. She works primarily in performance-based film and installation. A young received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the AIM fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant. Her work was also recently featured in the Christie’s Educational annual journal. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; LeRoy Neiman Gallery, New York; Time Square Space, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Vermont Studio Center.
In the past year, I have performed shamanic rituals at architectural ruins and abandoned rice fields in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, buried urns filled with mourning flowers at American national parks, and roleplayed folklore characters in absurdist installations.
Through performance-based films, I explore Korean folk traditions and precolonial spiritual practices. Passed on generationally, they connect me to my family and to a land whose absence I feel palpably. I question what it means to carry on this history and culture.
In my work, however, I am not faithful to historical canon. I am interested in how older traditions and practices can be transformed. I am interested in how they can be transgressed, feminized, queered — how they can exist in new, more personal contexts. The rituals I perform are reimagined to reflect current social and political concerns within diasporic Asian American perspectives. They are meditations on land, trauma, diaspora, and race.
Dream of a Willow Tree, 2020
Video, 5:00
Dream of a WIllow Tree, 2020
Video still, 2.28X6.4 Inches
Dream of a WIllow Tree, 2020
Video still, 7.2X19.91 Inches
Genesis, 2020
Video, 3:01 min
Genesis, 2020
Video still, 22.4X14.93 Inches
Chang-Jin Lee
Chang-Jin Lee is a Korean-born artist and lives in New York City. She has presented nationally and internationally, including at The Queens Museum of Art, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; The World Financial Center Winter Garden, NY; The Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Korea; The Comfort Women Museum, Taiwan; The Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; The State Museum of Gulag, Russia; 1a Space Gallery, Hong Kong; The Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, and as Public Art at NYC major sites (Times Square, Chelsea, Lincoln Center), in collaboration with the NYC Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program.
Selected awards include The New York State Council on the Arts Grant, The Korean Ministry of Gender Equality Award, The Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, The Asian Women Giving Circle Grant, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s MCAF, The Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship, The Franconia Sculpture Park Jerome Fellowship, The International Video Art Festival Prize, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.
Selected features include The NY Times, The Huffington Post, Art Asia Pacific, Public Art, Time Out NY, The Daily News, NY Arts, The LA Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The World Journal, The Korea Times, The Taipei Times, The Associated Press, and The BBC.
Chang-Jin Lee’s multicultural background and experiences are reflected in her investigations of diverse cultural and social issues. Her artworks deal with subjects that include “comfort women,” 9/11, gender, identity, individualism, sweatshops and globalism, North Korea and nationalism, and religion.
Her series of artworks, ”COMFORT WOMEN WANTED" and “Re-creation of a Military Comfort Station” bring to light the memory of 200,000 young women, referred to as “comfort women,” who were systematically exploited as sex slaves in Asia during WWII, and increase awareness of sexual violence against women during wartime. The projects are based on her research and interviews in 7 different countries in Asia, with Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Filipino, and Dutch “comfort women” survivors, and a former Japanese soldier.
"UNFORGOTTEN SONG" is a “comfort women” multimedia performance, in collaboration with musicians, such as gamin (Korean Piri & Saenghwang), The Lydian String Quartet, Adam Robinson (Japanese shakuhachi), KiYoung Kim, and Yoon-Ji Lee (composers). The video art consists of the survivors testimonies and their favorite traditional songs, former military comfort stations in China and Indonesia (including “Dai Salon,” the first comfort station ever in Asia, established in 1932), photos of the women and their homes, and B&W abstract drawings.
"Floating Echo,” an aquatic sculpture, is a transparent inflatable Buddha floating on water. It was inspired by her visits to Buddhist temples in Korea and Zen gardens in Japan. The translucent presence reflects both the surroundings and the self, while subtly evoking intangibility and infinity.
Re-creation of a Military Comfort Station
at The National Museum of Korean Contemporary History (Korea, 2017)
Multimedia Installation, 8 ft (H) x 10 ft (W) x 5 ft (D)
Floating Echo
at Socrates Sculpture Park,, (New York, 2012)
Transparent Inflatable Buddha floating on the East River
10 ft (H) x 10 ft (W) x 10 ft (D)
COMFORT WOMEN WANTED
at Glendale Central Library (CA, 2017)
4 Banners in multiple languages, each 5 ft (W) x 11 ft (H)
Floating Echo
at Socrates Sculpture Park,, (New York, 2012)
Transparent Inflatable Buddha floating on the East River
10 ft (H) x 10 ft (W) x 10 ft (D)
COMFORT WOMEN WANTED
at Glendale Central Library (CA, 2017)
4 Banners in multiple languages, each 5 ft (W) x 11 ft (H)
Floating Echo
at Socrates Sculpture Park,, (New York, 2012)
Transparent Inflatable Buddha floating on the East River
10 ft (H) x 10 ft (W) x 10 ft (D)
Cheon pyo Lee
Currently residing in Brooklyn New York, Cheon pyo Lee’s practice involves both the creation of discreet artworks such as film and installation as well as curatorial projects through the group AGWF. These projects tackle a variety of themes, stylistically marked with absurdity, play and experimentation. Lee’s installations have exhibited in Europe, Korea and the United States. Her most recent shows included in Seoul Museum of Art, Queens Museum, Art Basel, and held residencies with Atelier Mondial, Swiss, Swansea Canal, Wales, and ISCP, New York.
The artist who doesn’t produce primarily for the market, the artist who wants to maintain a certain autonomy in his or her artistic production, or if the artist is from a culturally poor country is dependent on ‘residencies’ or grants in order to produce new work. Residence is also an obligation to move to another place. In this sense, Artist is in the first place a migrant.
I am an international artist, an Artist who was forced to embrace the fate of migration as a mode of artistic production. I’d like to remember that the history of the practice is the history of the struggle against selectivity and inclusivity. An identity of a person or a group is about change and temporality, we exist in time. and an art piece is a slice, a moment of it. As an Artist I am inclined to produce ephemeral situations or experience that is truth to the transient nature of my practice.
Alibi of Autonomy Part II
2019. Single Channel HD video 22:49
Untitled Piece for Copenhagen, 2018 Mixed media installation. Variable dimensions
Untitled Piece for Copenhagen, 2018 Mixed media installation. Variable dimensions
Medium is the same, 2012
Mixed media installation. Variable dimensions
Medium is the same, 2012
Mixed media installation. Variable dimensions
Curator, Bill CarrollBill Carroll has been involved in the New York art world for over thirty years. He was the Director of the Charles Cowles Gallery in Soho, and the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea. Bill has also worked in non-profit at the Dia Art Foundation, the Brooklyn Museum, the Nancy Graves Foundation and presently as the Director of the Studio Program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. He has curated numerous exhibitions that included artists Donald Baechler, Chakia Booker, Mark Dion, William Kentridge, Philip Taaffe, and Kara Walker, among many others. Bill teaches a course for MFA students at Pratt Institute titled Art World & Professionalism, and has lectured at the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cornell University, New York University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bard College, Columbia University, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and F.I.T. His work has been reviewed in Art in America and he had his fifth solo exhibition with the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea in January 2019.
Curator, Dahye Kim Dahye Kim is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, curator, and college educator. Her artwork utilizes computer software, sound, and light to create the video installation, which explores the idea of the real and unreal intertwining memory, dream, and phantasm. She has presented her research and curriculum at national conferences and symposiums, including Foundations in Art, Theory and Education (FATE), College Art Association (CAA), and Art Education Research Institute (AERI). In addition to teaching and research, she has curated and organized diverse themes of contemporary exhibitions and art/educational events, including the exhibition/symposium: “Constructing A Praxis of Artist/Educator” at Columbia University. She is currently designing a new exhibition in NYC in 2021, collaborating with artists, film music composers, and singers.
