Sublime at Artcore

            Tae Ho Kang has a show at LA Artcore in Little Tokyo through the end of this month. All the works are paintings on canvas varying in size from small to wallpaper. The paint surface is the great attraction of these pieces and they are very different from Kang’s paintings from years ago. Colors and textures swirl on the surface in granular patterns, inviting close inspection. These are abstractions with occasional linear elements that hint at objects playing on the surface or trying to pass between the textural layers. A few paintings with horizon lines reference a landscape but the surface activity breaks any direct connection to nature other than on a microscopic level. The swirl of color and shapes viewed at a distance break down to ever intricate combinations that reveal themselves fractally as one moves nearer. The push and pull of the colors and their emulsified patterns drive the compositions.

            These new paintings also differ from earlier efforts in their attention to non-objectivity. Eggs and orbs occupied previous paintings evoking connotations of mortality and human frailty. Those paintings, although heavily patterned, were very static in their compositions allowing the shapes and objects command the stage. The current paintings appear to be random wanderings through space and color but they actually allow for simultaneity of readings. The small paintings can be taken as a whole instantly but the use of a color serving as a border references a video screen and natural impulse cause the viewer to search the screen for extra movement and more detail. The largest paintings can be read as broadly patterned decorative wall coverings because any gestures are immediately subsumed by the overwhelming scale of the support in respect to the artist’s mark. The effect is similar to a tapestry or royal screen.

            Mr. Kang’s paintings show an attention to detail while considering the overall picture as an interpretive statement. The vibrancy of the colors and the grainy structure of the patterns recall video images comprised of pixels. The difference is the viewer can access the magnification of detail within a physical experience. The structure of the pieces plays with issues of dualities. Objects and patterns or objects made of patterns are some of the readings. The occasional definite markings that appear in a few of the paintings bring up concerns of their relationship to the miasma they bisect or intrude upon. It always comes back to the structure of the materials laid on the canvas and this point is what separates Tae Ho Kang’s newest production from earlier studies. These paintings demonstrate more than a mastery of materials; the cohesive nature of the concepts contained within the compositions reveals a clinical inquiry into the ability to combine scaled narratives.