Opening Reception: Saturday, October 7, 3-5pm
AHL Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting contemporary artists of Korean descent, is proud to announce the opening of its 2023 AHL – T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Awards Winners Exhibition, featuring artists Soeun Bae, Dana Davenport, and Mija Jung.
This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum. The curator highlights how three artists take refreshingly unique approaches to answering some of the most challenging questions facing artists today, namely, what does it mean to be human in a world with radically shifting material realities. The exhibition brings together installations, sculptures, video and painting works by Soeun Bae, Dana Davenport, and Mija Jung, and explores how meaningful relationships between individuals can be facilitated through objects and images.
About the Artists
Soeun Bae (Gold Award) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses sculpture, performance, and technology to question what it is to be living inside of a body. She focuses on the impossible desires and persistence within the disappearing skin and dissociating body. With these themes, she creates pleasurable objects that present a reductive and depersonalized way of relating to our bodies. Her work has been performed or exhibited in the RISD Museum, Gelman Gallery, Red Eye Gallery, Woods-Gerry Gallery, Memorial Hall Gallery in Providence, RI and L.A.D., Geunwonji, and Projectspacewip in Seoul. She received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Dana Davenport (Silver Award) is a Korean and Black-American interdisciplinary artist raised in Seoul, South Korea, and currently based between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. Her work shifts between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Within her practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority conflict as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. Davenport’s work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally including Gibney Dance, New York, NY; Watermill Center, Water Mill, NY; NYU Skirball, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Cultural Center Recoleta, Buenos Aires, AR; and Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, AUS, to name a few. Davenport was selected for the Recess Session Residency in 2021 and received the 2018 Chashama ChaNorth Fellowship. She was awarded the 2023 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship from the Center for Craft and is currently a Bandung Artist in Residence with MoCADA and Asian American Arts Alliance.
Mija Jung (Bronze Award), born in Korea, is a painter based in New York. Their abstract paintings color human emotion in a social and cultural space based on gender-neutral aesthetics. Mija’s education began with the Korean minimalist masters of Hong-ik University, where they received an MFA and BFA in painting. They later received a second MFA in painting from Rutgers, where they studied with American cultural activists. Mija’s work has been exhibited internationally in galleries like the New York Arts Center, Robert Miller Gallery, and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York; Hyundai Gallery and Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul; Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Galerie Nord, and Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin; and Galerie ARTQ13 in Rome. They are recipients of the Ellis Elizabeth Scholarship in the United States and the MBC Grand Art Award in South Korea.
About the AHL-T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Awards
Established in 2003, the Contemporary Visual Art Awards is an annual competition open to all contemporary artists of Korean descent active in the United States and is part of AHL Foundation’s core program. The awards recognize the work of exemplary young emerging contemporary artists of Korean descent and provide them with a monetary prize and the opportunity to have their work presented at a group exhibition in New York. Since 2016, the award has been generously supported by the T&W Foundation, established by Wonsook Kim and Thomas Park Clement.
You must be logged in to post a comment.