Houston Museum Exhibits Korean Modernist Suh Se-Ok

Where Clouds Disperse is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on Suh´s unyielding approach to this medium. The show will be on view through April 20, 2008 in the museum´s Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street.

"This exhibition continues the museum´s initiative to bring a new emphasis to Asian art begun with the recent opening of the Arts of Korea Gallery," said Peter C. Marzio, MFAH director. "In the new gallery, traditional works are presented with works by important contemporary artists, visually connecting those artists to their cultural past. In much the same way, Suh Se-ok´s work bridges the past and the present. And his personal history is connected to the new gallery through the work of his son, Do-ho Suh, who has been commissioned to create an entrance gate to the gallery. All of these elements move us toward a greater appreciation of Korean art."

In his ink paintings, Suh Se-ok combines the elegance of traditional Asian calligraphy with the vigor of Western gestural painting. Each brushstroke, while responding to the previous stroke and advancing the composition, maintains its own pictorial weight and identity. Suh´s compositional strategies range from overall patterning to minimal gestures that divide the negative areas of the support in such a way that the handmade paper achieves aesthetic parity with the brushed line. In the painting Where Clouds Disperse, from which the exhibition derives its title, he empties out the center, the traditional focus of a painting, creating visual incident only at the sheet´s edges. Since most of the composition is unarticulated, the viewer comes to see the negative space, the "non-existing," in Suh´s words, as an element of equal concern to the artist as the area of his active marks. Overall, the works in the show range in date from 1959 to 2007, with most being from the 1990s.

"Suh operates within the conventional framework of traditional tools, forms, and techniques that have been used by artists for centuries, yet he moves this system forward by seeking its inherent qualities through his work," said Christine Starkman, MFAH curator of Asian art, who is overseeing the exhibition with Barry Walker, MFAH curator of modern and contemporary art and curator of prints and drawings. "The exhibition follows the development of his figurative structures from his initial inventive gesture with ink to the natural motif he established through repetition and rediscovery."

Suh Se-ok (b. 1929) graduated in 1950 from the School of Painting, Seoul National University. His abstract ink paintings first attracted attention in the conservative Korean art world in the 1950s. Suh, a teacher and artist, founded the progressive Mungnimhoe, or Ink Forest Group, and encouraged other artists to break away from tradition and to incorporate abstraction and simplicity in their work. Suh´s work has been exhibited in Korea, the United States, Western Europe, and Brazil. -- www.mfah.org