Plants, Window, Cloud, Tails
You Ni Chae
November 4 - December 3, 2016

Adds Donna is pleased to present new works by You Ni Chae. Plants, Window, Cloud, Tails opens on November 4th and runs through December 3rd, 2016 with an opening reception on Friday, November 4th from 6-9 p.m.

Plants, Window, Cloud, Tails is a continuation of Chae’s investigation of early western modernist and northern European genre painting as well as Korean buncheong ceramics and dansaekhwa painting. These cross sections, besides betraying Chae’s split cultural and political experience as a long time South Korean expat living in the United States, emphasize tensions between subject and object, skin and body, interior and exterior.

In this new body of work, Chae has begun allowing more personal and domestic subjects to enter her practice. Though deeply embedded in the language of abstraction, these paintings are far from non-objective. As if rehashing the old figure-ground disputes so conspicuous throughout the whole western modernism, Chae’s paintings frequently admit a kind of reckoning between the two. Working somewhat circuitously, Chae unearths various subjects- small details from everyday life- then buries them again.

The lack of hard lines or geometry in these paintings is also significant. Chae purposely avoids nameable components like recognizable shapes and colors. Instead, her layered hues and amorphous forms record a state of mind in flux- a process as much about revision as it is about completing any single work of art. Her insistence on ambiguity is consistent with a desire to work within a contemplative mode that permits fluidity over time, rather than an expressive or static one.

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