Illusion and Materiality

2023 Group Exhibition

Taiwoong Kang

Riverside Gallery presents a group exhibition, titled “Illusion and Materiality,” in relation to the ideas of materiality and illusion in visual art. The exhibition opens January 6th to 27th, with an opening reception on January 14th, Saturday, at 4 pm. The participating artists are Tai-woong Kang, Sungmo Cho, Taemo Yang, Kyung Hoon Min, Lee Dae Sun Hwa, Mi Kyoung Yun, Sarah Shinyo Kim, Jin Yoo, Ruth Neustadter, Chunbum Park, Jan Dickey, Minseok Kang, et al.

What is the relationship between materiality and illusion? Does materiality challenge illusion and vice versa, or can they create a synthesis and/or symbiosis that result in a hybrid visual experience and/or meanings?

Materiality consists of surface texture and material quality, while illusion is the perception of a continuing, believable world within the image. They are both dictated by the internal logic of the medium and tendency towards abstraction or representation. Materiality can be said to be a door, while the illusion is equivalent to a window.

Tai-woong Kang expresses the unleashing of energy and tension in his paintings with the buildup of texture and the explosive use of acrylic paint. Kang depicts nature as the origin of humanity in his paintings.

Sungmo Cho creates semi-pointillist renderings of roads, mountains, and road signs as a way to comment on the wonders of civilization, and how the fate of the human civilization is connected to the fate of mother nature. The buildup of patterns of color and texture of his media application simultanesouly break up the illusion of his painting and also contribute to an alternate reality.

Taemo Yang makes collage and mixed media works that utilize different materials with tranlucent or opaque qualities as to demonstrate the density of air and to acknowledge the elements in nature and their importance to our human existence.

Lee Dae Sun Hwa utilizes mother of pearl as a material and builds up oil paint with impasto technique to depict nature abstractly while foregoing a literal representation. Her depiction of nature is a kind of internalized and processed re-interpretation, of its form, shape, and color harmony.

Jan Dickey builds up layers of paint, tempera, and other materials to create a metaphorical living organism that is his mixed media painting – the painting is a metaphor for many things, including the nation state, or the individual, each with boundaries that are abstract or political and imbued with signs and ideology.

Chunbum Park deviates from his usual figurative paintings by engaging with digital photography and abstraction. The long exposure technique with the camera and the digital manipulation tools avail him new kinds of abstraction that could not be achieved with painting. The result of this abstraction is an illusion of a new kind of world that is either microscopic (as in under the microscope) or macroscopic in nature (as in the larger cosmos).

Kyung Hoon Min

Jin Yoo

Mi Kyoung Yun

Sarah Shinyo Kim

Ruth Neustadter

Chunbum Park

Jan Dickey

Minseok Kang