Review by Jonathan Goodman: "At the OLYAA Gallery"
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At the OLYAA Gallery, North Bergen, New Jersey
Nine artists participated in a very good show, titled, "Contemporary Discourse," at a public
art space named the OLYAA Gallery. The former home consists of a space with a tall ceiling. Within this ample room is a division between a large L-shaped space surrounding a series of smaller rooms, which showed the efforts of two or three of the artists.
The exhibition by curator Julie Jang and Annie Kim, an art dealer working with the space, resulted in an excellent show, one filled well with works that spoke to both abstract and figurative points of view. The large number of artists shown only underscored the extent of the variety of style being practiced today. Certainly, the skills of the artists, as evidenced by their broad range of expression, made it clear that we have been living in an eclecticism for a long time and that it continues. Therefore, the independence and originality of much of the work seen in the show stems from the visual, thematic, and even ethnic affiliations the artists take on.
Group shows like these bring many individual voices to life. In the hands of the curator, each of the artists were represented with three or four works each. The themes were large and did not necessarily point to any particular conclusion. One of the best points of the show stemmed from how different one artist was from the next.
Group shows can be difficult to write about in light of their large number of themes. If there is a lack of continuity between one image and the next, the overall presentation gives a necessarily narrow judgment, as it tries to find the smallest number of common meanings that would address the expansive drive of a large show in a large space.
We can look at a few of the participants in the show, then. Bethany Altschwager contributed a strong sweep of paintings, often structured with wide, wide swathes of color that are found superimposed on mosaic-like passages and other different, abstract backgrounds. In Altschwager’s presentation, she has been able to make use of this linear swathe of paint, nearly a ribbon if we decided to assign it a figurative form.
In Altscnwater’s fine painting, called “West 10th and LES” (2024), yellow-colored stripes slightly structure the white mosaic found beneath it on the lower right. On the right and toward the middle, the audience finds swathes of abstracted color, red and yellow and blue. Like much of this painter’s work, the piece resumes visual inclinations we still rely on from the heyday of the Ab Ex movement. Here Altschwager is good enough to transcend reiteration; the work is fresh, lively and energetic in ways that draw from but do not excessively appropriate from action painting.
Chunbum Park, an ambitious young painter living in Cliffside Park near the OLYAA Gallery, has taken the other direction—toward figuration. He has presented an extraordinary depiction of a tiger. The work is called “The Eye of the Tiger II.” The noble head of this distinguished, extraordinarily powerful rendition of a wild animal is given a forceful gaze. Black and tawny stripes are highlighted by dashes of black; the colors describe the tiger’s form wonderfully well. In more than a few cultures, the tiger is a symbol of wild, barely contained assertion — a representation of ferocity and power.
Park, a young man in his early thirties, must see a bit of himself in his very strong picture of one of the most feared animals in the wild, a stand-in for his own sense of pride and energy. The animal gives nothing up in this picture, being a purveyor of strength and force. We can only hope that he will find a similarly forceful role in our experience of Park’s representation, which moves easily from symbol to metaphor. A young artist like Park will not yield easily to the challenges of his field, being a person of determination.
In the work by Jina Kwon, two smaller square canvases consist of a painting in which one offers a yellow zigzag shape against a blue green background, with the other image consisting of a zigzag made up of thinner stripes of alternating dark green and a luminous pink. These images are splendidly done, and Jina Kwon’s sense of energy and open command of compositional space take over the designs and make them more striking than might at first seem. Some of this may well be related to Pop art, which was made when aesthetic expression was linked to free-willed color and extensive visual joy.
If we look at the white vases of Joy H. Kwon’s vases, which are short and fully round and with a thin lip at the top, their forms feel quite sturdy, almost to the point of undermining their beauty. But when set against striking backgrounds that include exquisite calligraphy so close to drawing, it is easy to enjoy them for their forms alone. Other images can be used to shape the curved sides of the jar, such as the blue rugs with fringe that form another beautiful white container. Yet another background, consisting of very thin black ink vertical lines, intensifies the Asian feeling of the fine grouping of works that we come across from Joy H. Kwon.
It is easier said than done to live as an active artist in an un-Asian place as New York, obsessed as it is on continuing the New York School. Not enough attention is given to young Korean artists, and that is problematic. Maybe in the future we can help turn the art world’s attention to a more diverse group of artists, but until then it will take effort to break into the art milieu.
Such as in the is show three out of the four artists in this presentation are Asian, although, as
happens with Jina Kwon, the work is clearly a version of American Pop art.
Jina Kwon must have deliberately turned to her bright, energetic style, least in part, she wanted to inform her audience that she had decided to follow a Western way of working but the other artists, Park and Joy H. Kwon, with their tiger and vases respectively, seek a tighter Korean presence, one which fits their accepted aesthetic but not entirely involved response to their art. It is impossible to maintain a lengthy enthusiasm if it is not genuine.
What this nicely hung show in an urban suburb of New York reveals to us may be inadvertently more telling than we think. We are living in a period now when the rules have been thrown away. This results in freedom without much needed structure. The Asians in the show understand this very well, but it may be quite true that the cultural differences between the Asian painters and the artists here is lost on the New York audience— experienced as it is in the eclectic.
So, nothing is real in the way it used to be. That is the artist’s complaint, even though the results today, from mixing and matching theme and form, adds powerfully to our conversation, much more so than if we had simply not examined what cultural shifts and contrasts in highly different traditions are capable of.
- Jonathan Goodman
April 18, 2025