Hidden Stories
Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute graduate students
Seulhwa Lydia Eum Mido Lee Hyeyoung Maeng Janice Suhji October 23–29, 2011
Mido Lee Ones (Installation View) – 2011 – Mixed media Dimensions variable Seulhwa Lydia Eum The Most Mundane Epic – 2011 – Monoprints on silk 100 x 200 x 200 inches
Hidden Stories was an exhibition of contemporary female, Asian artists: Seulhwa Lydia Eum, Mido Lee, Hyeyoung Maeng, and Janice Suhji. The works in the exhibition explored how Asian women deal with oppressed emotions and contained memories resulting from the conservative and secretive nature of traditional Asian culture. For this exhibition, the artists pushed beyond their comfort zones with the creation of works that spoke to intimacy and secrecy, the personal and the public. In Hidden Stories, nostalgia, love, and personal anecdotes, once set aside and labeled insignificant, were transformed as art and brought to light in a public setting. Eum dealt with the idea of secrecy and
memories contained within the home environment, with the display of a sculpture of a house patched with silk monoprints; Maeng exhibited three oil paintings and a 10-foot-high friendship bracelet, as a means to address the relationship she has with her 10-year-old daughter; Lee unveiled images she has made over the course of her life that had never previously been shown to others; and Suhji presented six white frames with white doors that concealed evocative scenes within—staged photographs of a man in a seedy motel room in California. The works in the exhibition were quiet, yet assertive, and pointed to the complex nature of secrecy, memory, and emotion.
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