Layers of Invisibility
Kakyoung Lee / Young Min Moon
Curated by Hyewon Yi
April 5 – April 27, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 5th, 6 – 8 pm
Artist Talk & Closing Reception: Sunday, April 27th, 4 – 6 pm (Artist Talk: 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm)
Layers of Invisibility introduces works by two first-generation Korean American artists who have lived in the US for more than half their lives. Characterized by figurative images, Kakyoung Lee’s printmaking, animations, and installations and Young Min Moon’s paintings explore the realm of the ‘invisible’ and Otherness. Motivated by their desire to resist social marginalization and address the lack of recognition of the value of their artistic contributions, they have turned their invisibility into visible art. The title of the exhibition is partly inspired by Kakyoung Lee’s working method, which leaves a trace of hundreds of layers of lines appearing and disappearing, a metaphor for revealing shared narratives of invisibility and injustice. Lee’s acute powers of observing her daily surroundings coupled with her experience of motherhood and her noting the invisibility of immigrants, Lee visualizes female figures, including herself, her bi-racial daughters, and elderly Asian female victims of hate crimes. Young Min Moon’s recent painting series, The Share for Those Who Remain, which draws on his memories of the Jesa ritual, a Confucian practice for honoring ancestors, combines vibrant depictions of the ritual within the hidden trauma of violence during South Korea’s military regimes. Moon paints two kinds of subjects, one depicting elaborate ritual tables of food arrangements and the other representing a sole male figure who plays the ceremonial roles in Jesa, bowing to ancestors, ghosts, the unknown, or the invisible. Moon also explores the invisible labor of women and the cultural tension between traditional Confucian practices and modern and Christian values. The exhibition invites viewers to consider the disappearing traditions of Korea, gender roles, and the common struggles and invisibility of immigrants.
Kakyoung Lee, trained in printmaking and stop-motion animation, has merged her media so that the act of drawing, erasure, re-drawing, and re-erasure of human figures repeats the quotidian scenes she has observed. For this exhibition, Lee presents Moving Day, a selection of nine individual media works presented as an installation giving the impression of a hectic relocation day, which experienced as an immigrant and as an artist. Lee’s painstaking process of drawing and erasure in Sisyphean repetition reflects the invisibility of an immigrant as well as the labors of motherhood. Lee’s post-Pandemic work introduces something sinister while exploring the hidden layers of seemingly mundane scenes. The Passerby Series presents surveillance camera imagery addressing hate crimes. Partly obscured as the stop-motion images were drawn using brewed coffee as paint, Passerby 2 (2022) depicts the violence by a perpetrator against a victim, and then pans out to reveal spectators who failed to intercede. Expanding her personal experience of invisibility to encompass larger BIPOC communities, Lee deepens her social engagement through visualizing injustice against the powerless. Through this exploration, her aim is not only to capture personal invisibility but also to unveil the narratives that connect us all.
Young Min Moon presents his recent oil painting series The Share for Those Who Remain, pertaining to Jesa, a Confucian ritual performed as remembrance of the spirits of ancestors. The series draws upon the artist’s earliest memories of his upbringing in South Korea. Most of the 20” x 28” paintings present elaborate Jesa with offerings set against traditional screens. For the artist, the trauma of violence under the oppressive Korean military regimes of the 1970s and 80s lies beneath the colorful arrangement. Jesa allowed Moon to recognize moments of peace in silence, protected from the violence under the military regime, and engage with the unknown, the realm after death. Visible in these paintings are the variations of table set-ups (before attendees have touched the food), the result of the invisible labor of women. Also invisible are calligraphies of the screen (edited out for the painting) and attendees to the ritual. Part still-life and part genre painting, these works were born of nostalgic memories, alluding to the conflicting values and hybridized cultures between Confucian traditions and Christianity, and generational shift around the issues of women’s labor and choices to have heirs or not. The Radiologist and the Crucifix (2020) reveals a modified practice in which a crucifix is added to the table as the family embraces Confucian tradition and Christianity. By representing this form of mourning and celebration of life, Moon intends not so much to depict exotic culture as to open a space of Otherness amid the Western tradition of oil painting.
Artist Biographies
Kakyoung Lee is a Brooklyn-based artist with a background in printmaking. Her interdisciplinary practice centers on print, drawing, and time-based media to explore the invisible identities of Asian American and other marginalized communities. Lee has exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queens Museum, MASS MoCA, Drawing Center, Kunsthalle Bremen, Seoul Arts Center, and ArtSpace C in Korea. She has participated in residencies, including Marie Walsh Sharpe, Yaddo, McDowell Colony, ISCP, Omi, and Brandywine Workshop. Her work has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and NYFA. Lee’s work has been featured in Art in Paper, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, and Printeresting.com. Her prints and animations are held in public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asia Society Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Jeju 4.3 Memorial in Jeju.
Young Min Moon is an artist, critic, and curator who engages with the violent legacy of the Cold War, trauma, remembrance, mourning, and East Asian traditions of death rituals. Moon has shown his art in many exhibitions in South Korea and North America, including KADIST San Francisco, the Korea Society New York, Smith College Museum of Art, Incheon Art Platform, Sansumunhwa, Kumho Museum of Art, and Gyeonggi Museum of Art. As a critic, Moon has published over thirty essays in a wide range of publications, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader(MIT), A Companion to Korean Art (Wiley), and The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Rethinking Marxism, and Trans Asia Photography. His curatorial projects include the traveling exhibition Incongruent: Contemporary Art from South Korea. Moon is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a professor in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Curator Biography
Hyewon Yi is Assistant Professor of Art History at SUNY Old Westbury and Director of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, where she has mounted over fifty exhibitions of Contemporary US and international artists. She writes often about Contemporary art and artists and has conducted interviews with artists from around the world. Career highlights include winning the Fund for Korean Art Abroad 2021–2022 in support of the exhibition Sung Rok Choi: Great Chain of Being(February/March 2022) and receiving the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service in May 2022. Born in Seoul, Yi earned an MA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.