DIFFUSION / COHESION

DIFFUSION/COHESION

GIL BRUVEL • EUNSUH CHOI • JAMES CULLINANE RODNEY DICKSON • KYUNG-AE HUR • YONG R. KWON TAEZOO PARK • RAPHAELE SHIRLEY

Cover image: Raphaele Shirley, Sky (Obscured and Revealed), 2021, 7-minute single channel immersive video installation

DIFFUSION/COHESION GIL BRUVEL • EUNSUH CHOI • JAMES CULLINANE RODNEY DICKSON • KYUNG-AE HUR • YONG R. KWON TAEZOO PARK • RAPHAELE SHIRLEY

September 10th, 2021 − November 10th, 2021 SWPK 1st and 2nd floor galleries 417 Lafayette Street, NYC

Curated and produced in collaboration with the Donghwa Cultural Foundation

Find @waldkimgallery at

D I FFUSION /COHESI ON The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed behaviors of society.

As people struggle to maintain a semblance of normalcy, the dichotomy of physical remoteness and virtual proximity has been intensified in a globally interconnected world. Despite the distance between us, communities have strived to create and adapt to novel forms of unity and cohesion, ushering in an era where we must re-evaluate the perceptions of our new reality.

Diffusion/Cohesion seeks to examine the two interdependent, opposing forces of diffusion and cohesion, and the role they play in our human experience.

Since the onset of the pandemic, both dynamics have had a profound impact on our individual and group experiences. Society has undergone a historically unprecedented degree of physical separation and isolation—diffusion—in order to slow the spread of the pandemic. At the same time, modern advances in digital technology have allowed us to sustainably function as socially-distant communities by enabling remote connection and collaboration—cohesion— with one another through the use of social media, online collaboration tools and video platforms. Yet, despite their virtues, these platforms provide virtual experiences that are by definition simulated.

The psycho-social impacts of the diffusion and cohesion caused by the pandemic are well documented: heightened feelings of detachment, isolation and impotence counterbalanced by a yearning for companionship, unity and agency in a world beyond our individual control. As the constant dynamic equalization of these two dichotomies accelerates within the current sociopolitical context, we see the increasing effects of ricochet societal polarization and the weaponization of identity politics. At the same time, the deconstruction of the pre-existing order has also revealed deeply-rooted social injustices in our system and engendered a widespread unified effort towards a radical restructuring of society that can lead to greater cohesion and human flourishing.

The artists presented in this exhibition explore concepts of cohesion and diffusion through video and digital installations, analog and NFT technology, glass sculpture, paintings and three-dimensional wall pieces. Raphaele Shirley’s video and sound installation Sky (obscured and revealed) showcases her ephemeral installation realized in 2019 in Talliin, Estonia, in which 200 simultaneously-ignited flares create a dense plume of pink smoke that diffuses into a nebulous colour mass temporarily masking the landscape in which it

unfolds. Shirley takes the work further in this site specific video installation created for Diffusion/Cohesion, transporting the transient outdoor experience, into an immersive environment intonating suspense and mystery, rhythm and euphoria. In a fusion of the “existent character” of older, analog technology together with modern digital media, Taezoo Park’s installation DIGITAL BEING: “Hello NFT World!” combines glitching flag images and NFT blockchain technology to investigate the revitalization of former systems in a world of increasing digital domination.

In Ultramarine-Light, Yong R. Kwon engages with light not as a medium, but instead regards light as the essence and expression of the work itself, which captures rays of light in hundreds of steel discs that distribute infinite luminous reflections across the canvas and beyond. Eunsuh Choi’s delicate glass sculptures composed of intricate organic forms issuing from within geometric structures recall the restrictions of isolation and the aspiration to connect with a world beyond our lockdown walls.

Gil Bruvel and James Cullinane go beyond the two-dimensional picture plane to create relief compositions that reveal the dualities of diffusion and cohesion in the experience of perception. Bruvel’s wall pieces composed of hundreds of individual wooden blocks fused together to create dynamic, unified surfaces, offer unique perceptions from diverse perspectives. Cullinane’s works on panel incorporate traditional and nontraditional materials, such as clusters of map pins that slowly separate and scatter throughout the surface, to visually recontextualize pre-existing conceptions of various images.

Rodney Dickson’s heavily loaded paintings render a visceral expression of the psychological weight of conflict and its aftermath through the overwhelming physicality and immediacy of thick masses of vibrant impasto juxtaposed with interspersed patches of thinly applied paint. Paintings by Kyung-Ae Hur, created through a constructive-destructive process of carving through layers of paint and reattaching the pigment fragments to the canvas, highlight the polarity of chaos and order while suggesting the potential for a regenerated post-diffusion landscape.

The dichotomies explored by these artists reflect the collapse and unity we experienced, and continue to experience, as a society and reveal the potential of ensuing cultural renewal and regeneration.

GIL BRUVEL b. 1959 Born in Australia, raised in the South of France and currently residing in Texas, Gil Bruvel explores the nature of perception in his Bending the Lines series through sculptures and three-dimensional wall pieces composed of hundreds of colorfully painted wooden blocks. By uniting a seemingly infinite number of miniature wooden cubes and rectangles, the artist creates a coherent whole that pulsates with the vibrant energy of its internal diversity.

The sense of dynamic fluidity within the work is further heightened by the radiant tones of its painted surface.

The intentional gaps and negative spaces found in Bruvel’s relief compositions reveal unique perceptions of each sculptural piece from various viewing perspectives, allowing the work to recreate itself through the agency of the viewer. Bruvel’s exploration of the distortion of realities, duality, and multiple perspectives is informed by his daily meditative practice, inspiring the artist to investigate the interaction between human consciousness and mystery within his works.

Gil Bruvel Bending the Lines: #16 2018 Wood, resin and acrylic

EUNSUH CHOI b. 1977 Eunsuh Choi creates sculptural works composed of intricately fused glass threads to visually express the spiritual essence of human aspiration.

Drawing on her background as a Korean-born immigrant to the United States, she relates the East-West cohesion found in her works with the unity of humankind through a universal sense of ambition and pursuit of personal fulfillment.

Employing flameworking techniques, Choi manipulates glass threads into complex arrangements of intricate organic forms issuing from within geometric structural patterns that evoke the textiles she studied in South Korea. Objects of everyday life—ladders, trees, clouds, boxes, houses and hybrids thereof—are recurring motifs found in her works, serving as juxtaposed metaphors for ascension and limitation that reference the psychological trajectory of human struggle and personal aspiration. The graceful diffusion of the sinuous, organic forms, delicately rendered in light and airy glass, imparts her works with a celestial, ethereal quality and creates a contemplative aura inviting the viewer into a moment of quiet introspection.

Eunsuh Choi Double Conscious 2 2008 Flameworked borosilicate glass 22 x 22 x 30 inches

JAMES CULLINANE James Cullinane’s works on panel featured in this exhibition incorporate a variety of traditional and nontraditional materials in the artist’s exploration of pattern through process and of the interplay between pictorial and physical space.

Cullinane goes beyond the two-dimensional picture plane in works such as Sudan, Hurricane Sunshine and The End of Owls, building up the surface with a complex pattern of layers—both physically and metaphorically— that visually recontextualize pre-existing concepts of images. Inspired by a book of architectural diagrams found in Cologne, Germany, the artist incorporates collaged layers of images of Gothic cathedral barrel vaults into these relief compositions. The structural physicality of the vault images is then accentuated through the addition of unexpected sculptural elements, such as a yellow jacket’s nest, with its hexagonal cells forming an architectural masterpiece of nature, or the globular forms of map pins arranged in clusters that slowly separate and scatter throughout the surface of the panel.

Another panel work in the exhibition, Storm Tossed Banner, is from a series of diptychs marked by interconnected lines, dots and sprays that condense and diffuse across the entire surface to create a unified whole. These compositions are visual representations of Cullinane’s meditative exploration of form and meaning. In a slow process of intensely focused awareness of his mind, hand and breathing in the making of each mark, the artist creates a network of lines and dots that fill the panel surface. The resulting pattern of various gradations of tone, value and density optically alters the perception of form and space, creating an improvised, yet structured composition that brings the viewer James Cullinane, Sudan, 2012, map pins, paint and into an awareness of the present. paper on panel, 36 x 30 inches.

RODNEY DICKSON b. 1956 Exploring themes of conflict and its aftermath, Rodney Dickson’s heavily loaded paintings render a visceral expression of the psychological weight of conflict through the overwhelming physicality of thick masses of vibrant impasto juxtaposed with interspersed patches of thinly applied paint. Born in Northern Ireland in 1956 and now based in Brooklyn, Dickson’s practice is influenced by his experiences of the civil disorder in his homeland during his childhood years and the indiscriminately brutal aftermath of conflict in Cambodia and Vietnam that he witnessed later in life.

Dickson often creates his paintings through a series of multiple, physicallyintense sessions, during which he constantly reworks the surface in a process of creation and destruction. Through this method, layers of built-up paint form a pastose terrain of color that has been mixed directly on the canvas, producing a powerful tension between the physicality of the congealed paint and the dispersal of the intense range of colors. The rhythmic interplay of colors and textures reveal Dickson’s confident approach to his canvas, creating a deeply sensitive expression imbued with an underlying sense of violence and a range of human emotions that is both unifying and cathartic.

Rodney Dickson Untitled 2012 Oil on board 96 x 60 inches

KYUNG-AE HUR b. 1977 Based in Paris, Korean artist Kyung-Ae Hur creates paintings in which both chaos and order coexist within a single surface. Recognized as one of the artists from the younger generation of the Korean Dansaekhwa art movement, her artistic practice involves a unique constructive-destructive process that breaks apart and reshapes pre-existing orders.

Hur first applies a series of 30 to 70 layers of acrylic paint of various colors to the canvas. After letting them dry, she carves through the bonded layers using sculpting knives, surgical scalpels or kitchen knives, breaking up the smooth surface with rough markings and revealing a “trace” of the array of colors hidden beneath. She then reunites the carved-out pigment fragments by attaching them to the canvas, creating a completely new, regenerated landscape.

Every step of Hur’s process, from the choice of color to the placement of the “traces” is methodically planned and documented. Drawing on her practice of etching on copper plates, the artist describes the physicallystrenuous, yet meditative process of scratching through the numerous layers of dried paint as an awakening, which she relates to archeology in its disclosure of histories that are destined to resurface and be seen through new perspectives.

Kyung-Ae Hur N°FRP0821BP1 2021 Acrylic on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches

YONG R. KWON b. 1964 In his practice, Korean artist Yong R. Kwon engages with light not as a medium, but considers it to be the essence and expression of the work itself.

Creating paintings of dancing light, the artist employs a process of grinding and polishing stainless steel to create a highly reflective, mirror-like surface, which he cuts into smaller units and hammers into discs. He then affixes the stainless steel discs to the canvas in order to capture the light and allow it to linger on the surface.

Diffusion plays a key role in Kwon’s work. In conventional lighting conditions, his constructions resemble completely empty spaces. Upon activation of strategically-placed spotlights, rays of light are then transmitted into the discs that disperse infinite luminous reflections across the canvas and beyond, conveying the essence of light in all its contrasts—intangible yet captured, massless yet formed, uncontainable yet directed.

Yong R. Kwon Ultramarine-Light 2014 Stainless steel on canvas 57 1/8 x 89 3/4 inches

TA E ZO O PA R K b. 1979 Born in Korea and based in New York, Taezoo Park is a digital artist who explores analog and digital technologies. Park pushes new art forms through his unique use of digital codes, emphasizing the “existent character” of abandoned, forgotten technology. He calls this character “Digital Being,” which is a sentient electronic creature, an unknown artificial intelligence born from man-made technology.

Referencing the history of “Hello, World!” programs, Park’s latest addition to his Digital Being series, DIGITAL BEING: “Hello, NFT World!” presents the essence of an analog technology reborn within the context of the emerging world of NFT blockchain technology. The installation displays images of national flags that glitch at unexpected intervals on LCD screens and the surrounding walls. The glitching flag images are from the artist’s NFT art collection “Hello, NFT World!” and are simultaneously accessible through the internet, thus taking the Digital Being beyond the physical installation of the work and into the decentralized, everlasting world of NFT digital assets. Park believes that the Digital Being can have its own, unique identity through NFT technology.

Taezoo Park DEGITAL BEING: “Helllo, NFT World!”

2021 15 four-inch LCD screens on stands, micro SD card, raspberry pi computer, USB power adapter, NFT art from the internet, 5 HD video projectors Dimensions variable

Park’s practice investigates the revitalization of former systems in a world of rapidly expanding digital domination, where humans increasingly experience a gap between our connection to and comprehension of technology.

As the pandemic has rapidly accelerated the digital transition of our daily lives and the resulting disconnection, Park searches for the Digital Being that bridges the gap between technology and the human experience.

RAPAHELE SHIRLEY b. 1969 Based in New York, Raphaele Shirley is a French-American multi-media artist whose practice ranges from sculpture, photography and painting to immersive audio-visual and light installations, public art, social interventions, collaborative works and performance.

The video Sky (obscured and revealed) presents the culmination of Shirley’s series of aerial installations initiated in 2016 consisting of 100 to 200 pink smoke flares lit simultaneously, creating an ephemeral sculpture in the sky and temporarily masking the landscape in which it is realized. The video follows, from start to finish, the final installation in the series, 100 Pink Smoke Flares (twice), which took place at the Kai Art Center, in Tallinn, Estonia in 2019.

Presenting several perspectives of Shirley’s completion of the series, Sky (obscured and revealed) combines the subjective and the objective and captures transient states of the installation from expectancy to realization. Blooming like a flower, the work grows, slowly and imperceptibly, culminating into a sky-borne kinetic sculpture of painterly nature as the nebulous color mass, created upon full ignition of all the flares, merges into the landscape. Finally, as if taking leave of its audience, it drifts out to the sea and disappears.

The original music score, created and performed live during the event in Tallinn, by Katariin Raska and Anna-Liisa Eller accompanies the artwork and underlines the emotional framework of the piece.

In the 100 Pink Smoke Flares series, Shirley reflects on landscapes in distress, nature’s beauty and timelessness and general states of emergency in the age of the Anthropocene. The artwork marks the appearance and disappearance of natural and urban settings as they are affected by man’s hand and by environmental and societal changes.

Opposite: Raphaele Shirley Sky (obscured and revealed) 2021 7-minute single channel immersive video installation

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Clockwise from top left: Taezoo Park, DEGITAL BEING: “Helllo, NFT World!" (detail); Yong R. Kwon, Ultramarine-Light (detail); Eunsuh Choi, Double Conscious 2 (detail); James Cullinane, Storm Tossed Banner (detail); Kyung-Ae Hur, N°FRP0821BP2 (detail); Raphaele Shirley, Sky (Obscured and Revealed) (detail); Gil Bruvel, Bending the Lines: #34 (detail); Rodney Dickson, Untitled (detail)