JEAN RAH
나 진 숙
A Pilgrimage to Space and Time to Contemplate Past Memories and Future Hopes
By Ha, Kye Hoon, Art Critic
Jean Rah majored in sculpture at college, and then quit work for a long time due to her marriage and caring for her child. Thinking that she had to resume her work, all of a sudden, she went to America. Embarking on her work in the new atmosphere there, Rah found herself reviving her creative will and breathing unrestricted freedom.
The artist encapsulates her own stories in the form of a chessboard, by putting together a number of square wooden panels. Appearing on these wooden plates is a wide variety of images chronicling her consciousness and experience in bas-relief (low-relief). Based on the tactility of wood, these images are symbols for her ideals and hopes, necessary for her to live her life.
Rah studied sculpture and video in America, exploring fluid images within three-dimensional and two-dimensional spaces. Consequently, she extended the sphere of her activities broadly through her sojourn in America. These works have enabled her to overcome the past, reflect on the present, and set future directions of her work, overcoming the fossilization of her conventional sculpture work, and work of accumulating or recording individual experiences, memories, and emotions.
After returning to Korea, Rah changed her materials, taking part in diverse artist-in-residence programs, such as the one at the National Art Studio Changdong, a short-term studio program at the Stichting Atelierbeheer LSAK, Arnhem in the Netherlands, and a program at the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeonggi-do. Although the fundamental structure of her work, composing an entire work by linking many square panels underwent no changes, the materials she used began to include hanji(traditional Korean paper), rubber plates, and paraffin.
Rah demonstrates her memories, thoughts, and experiences three-dimensionally through the overlap of hanji-paste in relief, embossed on plates with images, video and sound. With these she chronicles a rainy afternoon emotionally on rubber plates bearing traces of raindrops she has explored for a few years, after returning to the country. Recently, Rah focused on creating archetypal images by drawing thin lines with paraffin on blue and pink panels, or casting three-dimensional forms reminiscent of coral. The artist accumulates layers of her memories and emotions by using these materials. Rah’s work, based on individual experience and emotion, develops into talks with herself, while her attitude toward expanded life in the future addresses discourses about creation.
Rah’s work is born through a process of observation and thinking. Accordingly, her work demonstrates both figurative and abstract qualities simultaneously, and can be interpreted in terms of form and content. In pieces on display at the show, Rah shows a process of seeking truth and peace through archetypes of human life, plants and coral, to extend her themes she has reflected on in her work. Enlarged floral forms on a blue ground are depicted so delicately that the veins of leaves are visible. Integrated forms of leaves exude a mystic atmosphere in accord with lighting effects. Grains glitter in light, like waves of cursive beauty, provoking a fantastic mood.
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter of the 19th century, said blue is the color of heaven. In Rah’s work, blue panels recall a mystic space like the heaven of van Gogh. In this space, she accumulates her ideas and experiences through time-consuming, labor-intensive work. Her work also shows a process like a pilgrimage into space and time, encapsulating her memories and traces. Her work, completed through this process, demonstrates her reflections on and introspection of her personal life, consideration and analysis of reality, and the exploration of and attempt at future directions.
Rah provokes another kind of emotion through thatched roof-shaped work made up of round curves. This three-dimensional work entails her thought and imagination with an accumulation of time. The artist recalls the space of peace and repose in this form. Hoping to attain self-purification and peace through her work, Rah exerts her creative will to complete her expressive form in two-dimensional and three-dimensional work as well as video. The reason why we feel sympathy with her work is she visualizes her experience and idea, based on her universal sensibility, through a candid, constant effort.
2009.11
The works of Jean Rah, in which large flower petals are meticulously drawn with glue on a cobalt-colored display, is quite labor intensive. The artist draws the lines one by one using a glue gun to tell the story and the memories of her life. The audiences are able to understand the inner side of the artist and share her experiences and the traces of her life, giving them the impression that they can breathe along with the artist. Her works are consisted of the small pieces of displays which created by the detailed linear arrangements of the glue and the combinations of those small pieces of displays become a whole piece of work. However, through the collision of such arrangements, the original image is disintegrated, and the fragmented abstract image of an organism is presented on a blue background, similar to the wavy motions of a jellyfish. The artist projects a faint video over the display using a beam projector and causes diffused reflections on the glue surface. Through this, an effect of a twinkling movement is created on the display, and a feeling of the artist’s innermost consciousness being slowly coming afloat is expressed.
2008