Elementary

Bahk Seon Ghi | Kiduck Kim | Lee Bae

March 24 - May 22, 2015

CMay Gallery proudly presents Elementary, a three-person exhibition bringing together installation and sculpture by Bahk Seon Ghi, sculptural furniture design by architect Kiduck Kim, and stark charcoal on canvas works by artist Lee Bae. Emphasizing elementary materials such as charcoal and concrete, these artists take on the spatial and temporal givens that underlie their works of art, exploring these givens in ways that reflect, amplify, and poeticize their context. An opening reception will take place on March 24, 2015 from 5pm to 9:30pm at CMay Gallery’s Pacific Design Center location.

Through his work, artist Bahk Seon Ghi says, “I seek natural encounters between man and culture…I emphasize the materiality in its poetic shapes.” With concentrations of charcoal suspended on nylon, Bahk makes open-form representations of architectural objects and elements of the natural world. Included in the exhibition are six works from the series, An Aggregation, where his charcoal and nylon objects take the form of a liquid drop, picture or window frames, a vortex among other nebulous and beguiling forms.

Kiduck Kim presents a set of concrete seats that continue his search for new potentials in the use of architectural material. Kiduck Kim is a principal of Studio Kiduck Kim and taught at the UCLA graduate program in architecture with Frank Gehry. He holds a masters degree in architecture from Harvard University.

Lee Bae works solely within the visual vocabulary of charcoal on canvas to create hard-edged forms surrounded by negative space. His singular focus has yielded extraordinary complex cultural and historical resonances in his painting. Seemingly a formalist, Lee Bae explains that the unfolding of time is is the crucial element of his work, “as I cannot rework old ground, or go back on my tracks, as I complete each phase in the process in just one pass.”Elementary includes three of Lee Bae’s charcoal paintings.