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| Sook Jin Jo's China Black at Black & White Gallery April 6 - May 13, 2018. Gallery Link Art Historian Margaret Richardson writes, " Pairing the fluidity and transparency of ink drips and washes with the hard, used wooden boards provides an apt visualization of the contradictions of modern China, where the new is quickly displacing the old. As China has raced to modernize its cities, old wooden historic areas have been razed and wiped away with little trace, with futuristic skyscrapers left looming in their place. The organic and the natural are further obscured and degraded by the terrible pollution that adds a tangible weight to the air. The assemblages in "Shanghai Black" make that pollution and lost past palpable." |
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| Here, Margaret Richardson with Carol Salmanson at the opening reception for Shanghai Black. |
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| These works were created in Shanghai in 2014, when Sook Jin Jo was in residence at Swatch Art Peace Hotel. I was her studio neighbor and witnessed these works develop. How succinctly they capture the multiple construction sites near the residency, displacing compounds developed over many years for luxury housing. |
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| The link above provides images of many of these works revealing urban transition through the materials we most frequently experience them: walls of wood and ephemeral ink. For more about Jo visit her website: Sook Jin Jo Website |
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| Yun Fei Ji at James Cohan's Grand Street LES location in Rumours, Ridicules and Retributions through June 2018. Gallery Link |
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| This is his first show in a while, which shows a solidity of structure revealing sources in scroll painting and Italian shards, perhaps, from the 2006 Rome Prize period. Ji remains true to stories of misplaced residents of small rural villages in the wake of political and urban changes. |
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| In addition to various paper works Ji created a scroll. |
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| Detail |
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| The scroll in its entirety. For more information on Ji's work and concerns read an interview with Lilly Wei here: Lilly Wei and Yun Fei Ji interview |
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