Making It New: Perspectives on Korean Heritage in Art

Exhibition Opening Event:

Friday, March 3 @ 6:00 pm

On View: March 3 - 27

Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C.

2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW

Making It New: Perspectives on Korean Heritage in Art explores the modernization and reinterpretation of traditional Korean motifs, designs, and sentiments within a contemporary artistic framework. Featuring 30 evocative painting, sculpture, and installation works by four distinct women artists (Donghee Goh, Han Sol Lee, Hey Sun Lee, and Jungwon Ko), Making It New reflects on the importance of traditional culture that still exists deep within lives and minds of Korean heritage people today. These four artists present their unique, creative attempt to find where the traditional and the contemporary coexist in our modern world. 

Donghee Goh seeks to recreate Korea's representative traditional patterns in unique and modern ways: the phoenix, crane, beast, fish, bird, and butterfly in her work are symbols of ancestral hopes and desires. Han Sol Lee bases her works on personal experience as a contemporary person in conflict with her cultural identity, and examines the process of rediscovering it through harmony of West and East. Hey Sun Lee imbues traditional Korean objects such as multicolored silk, rice bowls, and wooden door gratings with new aesthetic value, each object embodying both past and present with a contemporary approach. Jungwon Ko begins her work with traditional Korean dance, which embodies the joy, anger, sadness, and excitement of life; she fills the canvas with this philosophy using the traditionally Western medium of oil painting. For more about each artist, see the complete artist profiles on our website here. 

Join us for the exhibition opening reception event on Friday, March 3, including talks by the artists at 6pm!