Koh Myung Keun's Photo Sculptures at Frey Norris, S.F.

Thursday, 08 June 2006 10:42

San Francisco, CA – In galleries and museums from Spain to Seoul and Paris to Tokyo, the art world is talking about Koh Myung Keun’s photo sculptures.  When illuminated with refracted light, the sculptures take on substance and their metaphorical language blossoms.

Frey Norris Gallery welcomes the American debut of one of Korea's most innovative artists.  Opening June 29 through July 23, 2006, "Stone Body" unveils a series of photo sculptures Koh produced from his photographs of 17th to late 19th century marble and stone sculpture in Paris.  Koh transforms two-dimensional photography into a vehicle for holographic three-dimensional constructs through a process he has invented, using hot stitching and high resolution images impregnated in durable plastics.  The results are hypnotic, elegant and ghost like.

"Koh's photo-sculptures have completely fused the heterogeneous media of photography and sculpture to his world view, and have established their own autonomy… [they] violate the purity of sculpture and that of photography and to some extent, can be said to be the outcome of the artist's pure ardor to realize his speculations about human lives and spaces." - Ju-Seok Park (Korean art historian).

The exhibition also includes photo sculptures from a building series (portal photos from Brooklyn, Paris and Seoul) and an element series (water, fire and air photos).  "Stone Body" represents Koh Myung Keun's largest and most comprehensive exhibition to date.

Koh Myung Keun was born in 1964 in Korea and holds a BFA in sculpture from Seoul National University and a MFA in photography from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.  His early innovative approaches to photography earned him inclusion in a group show at one of New York's boldest and most eclectic galleries, Ivan Karp's OK Harris in SoHo.  With the exception of a group exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago.  His art was collected by six domestic museums in Korea and shown in Cologne, Germany, at the Sorbonne in Paris, in Hong Kong and Tokyo.