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Kim, Jang-Hee Gallery Ihn is pleased to present Kim Jang-Hee's eleventh solo exhibition beginning September 7, 2001. She has once again appropriated the term American Icon and reinterpreted and recreated it in order to give birth to these all-new works. In terms of "Globalisation", the American influence has dominated not only business, but also the Mideology and culture worldwide. Particularly in the 1960's and 1970's, Minimalism and Pop Art, which were born in the peaktime of the New York art scene, have became symbols of modern art. The works of these periods have been spread all over the world through the development of reproductions, as pictures in art history books, catalogues, newspapers and magazines. Today, we are more or less familiar with these images without ever having seen the originals. At this point, Kim Jang-Hee's works start. She shrinks down the works of such artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselman, and repaints and over-paints them in Monochrome until we can scarcely see the originals. In a similar way the artist appropriates the love scenes of Hollywood romantic films which can be considered as symbols of the hottest popular culture. She chooses a scene and over-paints the surface with meaningless letters, and as a result the dramatic scene is blurred by the writing--only an ambiguous void remains. As a way of appropriating the past, repainting and over-painting is derived from Post-modernism of the 1960's. It allowed artists to break with the modernistic thinking of history in terms of linear progress, to eliminate the subject of art and to appropriate paintings of other artists. The post-modernists transformed well-known works using their own style, turning them into something new. Following her last exhibition "American Icons" in 1999, she entitled this exhibition "Butterflies in a Secret Garden". The very American and Hollywood-like icons are overlapped by Kim's drawings which lead us to an "Eastern" understanding of nothingness by producing a visual void. As the title of this exhibition says, the art might be a ephemeral, constantly shifting as it passes through our memory. Kim Jang-Hee studied in the College of Arts at Ehwa Women's University. In 1968, she went to Japan and studied printing at Kyoto University and aesthetics at Doshisha University. She has held several exhibitions in Japan and Italy since 1972. She lived and worked in New York for several years the 1980"s and 90"s, and now she lives in Munich, Germany.
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