Fantasy Pill
Fantasy Pill | Seunghwui Koo, Jake Seo, Haneui Kim, and SangHeon Lee
September 20 - October 20, 2016
266 W 37th Street
New York, NY
(between 7th and 8th ave.)
Nearest Trains: A, C, E, 1, 2, 3.
On view 24/7, through storefront window.
Open Hours: Monday - Saturday, 11am- 5pm
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 22, 6-8pm
The process of making art is like a Fantasy Pill.
It is both an addictive and therapeutic process—probably one of the main reasons why artists love making and continue to make art. Many artists dream of "making it"; especially, in New York. However, the life of an artist is seldom easy or glamorous. In order to make ends meet, most artists have to find side jobs and other forms of income to support themselves.
Many, who are not artists, might ask, "why suffer?" or "why continue to do something that is not able to provide a living?" Answers to these questions reside in the actual art making and creative processes. Acts of making and creation function cyclically: during acts of creation and making, artists feel most rewarded and satisfied; they are then motivated to continue creating.
In this vein, the show focuses on the creative and making processes. Throughout the month, participating artists will take turns creating work at a table set up in the middle of the space. Each artist, skilled in different crafts and interested in different media, will offer a unique window into a different process.
Take the Fantasy Pill--stop by during open hours, to observe the artists in their natural habitat, the creative process.
About the Artists
Seunghwui Koo's work draws inspiration from the daily happenings and intricate moments of her life in New York City. Her work is a commentary on the lives of New Yorkers, as she has witnessed. In South Korea, where she was born, Koo first had the idea of combining the pig’s head with the human body. Using resin, acrylic, plaster, clay, and mixed media, she explores the different symbolic meanings of the pig’s head in both Eastern and Western cultures--two very different connotations of the pig: good fortune (Eastern) and greed (Western). Koo has shown her sculptural works in a number of exhibitions including Monmouth Museum, NJ, Belskie Museum of Art & Science, NJ, Newark Museum, NJ, Azarian McCullough Art Gallery, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY, and Main Line Art Center, PA, among others. Currently, she part of chashama's Workspace Program in NYC.
Jake Seo is a Korean-born artist, currently residing in the United States. Having moved to the United States in 2002, to study arts administration at Pratt Institute, he received an MPS degree in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt in 2005 and a BFA degree from Dong-A University in Busan, S. Korea. Seo's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Fine Arts People Gallery, Exton, PA: Project Space 35, New York, NY: Bergen Performing Arts Center, Englewood, New Jersey; Nabi Museum of Arts, Teaneck, NJ : Catskill Art Center, Livingston Manor, NY: Arsenal Gallery, NYC: Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, NY: Hutchinson Gallery/Long Island University, NY: K-Gallery, Busan, Korea.
Haneui Kim, originally born in Korea, has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions since 2009, during her final year at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, New Zealand, when she was awarded a painting prize and chosen to submit her work to a gallery. Her works are surrealistic and most of them are figurative, often featuring "her-self" as a metaphor. Her works carry underlying meanings of communicative desire. Kim tends to tell secretive stories of daily lives. Kim currently resides in New Jersey and was recently selected to participate in Monmouth Museum's 2015 "NJ Emerging Artists Series".
SangHeon Lee is a sculptor who has, from his adolesence, consistently bought into the symbolic nature of sculpting as shaping human consciousness. Lee has worked with wood instead of fuel industry material, such as FRP, since adolescence. For him, "tree is a medium for his art and also it’s a medium for healing of life." SangHeon Lee has exhibited at galleries, museums, and art fairs around the world.
