Ran Hwang: Blossoms and Spiders

Ran Hwang’s latest show at Asian Artworks Gallery in Busan, South Korea includes the artist’s two-dimensional works, three-dimensional sculptures, and site-specific installations whose subject speaks to the artist’s engagement with the life cycle. 

Both Hwang, and the Asian Artworks’ owner Cristal Kim, have strong ties to New York City; the former having been educated and maintained a studio in Soho, and Kim having owned 2x13 Gallery in Chelsea, while also establishing and twice mounting the Asian Contemporary Art Fair. Hwang and Kim began spending more time in Seoul and Busan about ten years ago when a considerable sector of Korean avant-garde artists repatriated as the Asian market expanded. More recent events such as the reabsorption by China of Hong Kong have proven providential for Hwang and Kim, as a large part of this art market moved to Seoul.             
Hwang’s art is embedded with the idea of transient ephemerality in living beings as seen in Buddhism as well as the philosophies of Japanese wabi–sabi or mono no aware, and the Korean aesthetic of Mak and bium. The artist’s lifelong practice of Seon Buddhism infuses her delicate and meticulous hand-work with an evanescent beauty of bittersweet impermanence. Her use of buttons driven almost endlessly into the surface of her works is akin to Seon Buddhist meditative practice, for it espouses the idea that through repetition of ordinary labor, one can find enlightenment or nirvana. 

Hwang’s large pieces at the Asian Artworks Gallery sublimate her iconography of fleeting forms even further. Consider for example her archetypical work “Healing Forest”; a floating gust of scattered red-white plum blossoms --– a typical symbol of impermanence –-- that gently spill onto a milky white plane of colorlessness. The twisted branches, artfully made of delicate paper buttons, snake delightfully onto the white substratum. In Beyond the Winter Wind, Hwang’s stylized flowers are fused with embroidered images of traditional dwellings juxtaposed against vast surfaces of vivid color.  In this work, Hwang beautifully externalizes her deep microcosmic vistas of fading nature into breathing artworks of a dreamlike multi-dimensionality. 
The multimedia installation “Dreaming of Joy”, is comprised of a caged life-size red bird made of buttons, more densely situated in its upper body and less so towards its tail. The placement of buttons that disperse gradually very effectively conveys ephemerality. At the same time, the image itself confounds the perceptual power of the viewer like a post-modern trompe l'oeil. The related 2-dimensional wall sculpture Becoming Again, whose cerulean ground is blanketed in white and violet flower petals, over a maze of cobwebs, can be understood as a mourning tableau of nature’s impending fragility and passing.