‘The Language of Painting’

Kate Bae & Taehee Kim
11.07–01.08.2015

Kate Bae makes paintings and drawings. With Socratic Method and Zhu Xi in mind, Bae absorbs the tradition of both eastern and western thoughts into daily practice. This personal interpretation and re-examination of the past tradition is important as an act of meditation.

Her paintings deal with the identity and the question of how subtly they can be told within the language of the painting. Multilayered images investigate in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By limiting the perimeter of the way to approach, she carefully weaves her personal philosophy into the painting by means of rules and omissions. Almost always filled with the questions rather than the answers, her works are ongoing investigation of her constructed reality. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she tries to develop forms that follow her own subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make familiar yet new personal associations.

To investigate the nature of language of the painting, Kate Bae decided to strip down the identity of painting into three conditions: 1) separating paint as object and its form; 2) painting with and without brush strokes; and 3) paint as object with tension. She has left elements of form mostly unpremeditated, colors monochrome and the medium open. By playing with deconstructing of the property of painting, the investigation led to the current series: the Language of Painting. Bae has used acrylic, spray-paint, oil to express the drips, spray-paint, gradation, fold, squeeze, pressed, splash, representational and conceptual. Bae is systematically approaching painting by mixing elements and creating combinations.

Artist Intro:

Bae has graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA and earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Painting along with a collegiate teaching certificate from Brown University. Among many honors, Bae is the recipient of Edward E. Ryerson Graduate Fellowship for the Excellence in Art, RISD Painting Department Teaching Assistant Stipend, RISD Grant Fellowship, President’s Education Award in Art, and Contemporary Artists Center Residency Fellowship. She has exhibited in Albany, Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, LA, London, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont, and participated in artist residencies in 2005 and 2011. Kate Bae currently lives and works in New York, New York.

With a background in electronic engineering, Taehee Kim studied Robotics and Artificial Intelligence to obtain his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. He worked as a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for S&T Information until 1999, where he supervised a number of projects: from information systems to supercomputing. He then joined Youngsan University in Korea, and is now a professor in the Department of Computer Games. He earned an MFA degree in Digital Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010.

Taehee Kim's research has been into the characteristics of relationships and interactivity, particularly situations where materials and the morphology contribute to computation. His current work involves creating new fine art works using tools suggested by Artificial Intelligence and robotics, with an emphasis on discovering new perspectives by using sensing in conjunction with motion.

His study to discover meanings between material and relationships in the context of interactive art makes an assumption that whatever is perceived by humans is abstracted, thus phenomenological and virtual. His work criticizes emergent characteristics in interactive art works in the context of phenomenology. In creating multi-modal and multi-perspective situations, his work makes on aware of virtuality in criticism, in order to focus attention on the characteristics of mediation of meanings.