Kang Contemporary is proud to present the exhibition Subliminal Icons: SoHyun Bae and Traditional Korean Art In Context. Curated by Mario Diacono, this show is the first of its kind, placing SoHyun Bae’s paintings within the context of Traditional Korean Art. Mario Diacono surveys SoHyun Bae’s works from 1998 to the present, casting her images as Subliminal Icons referencing a historic past. He writes, “If it were not for the titles of some of her works, . . . one would hardly perceive how deeply shaped SoHyun Bae’s iconography has been by Korean cultural history; a history lived from afar, therefore colored by the absence/presence of memory, doubts of otherness, longing, mythologizing, and an awareness of archetypal belonging.” SoHyun Bae is a Korean-American artist from New York. She was 8 years old when she and her family immigrated to the United States, and she was raised in America where she received her entire education. Her work is a distillation of her lived experience of being both of the East and of the West. Mario Diacono makes a case for SoHyun Bae as a practitioner of an “aesthetic code that inscribes history without naming it, that looks for art and finds the story behind the art.”

SoHyun Bae is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts, 2007; the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in the field of Painting, 2002; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. Grant, 2000; a Fellowship at The Corporation of Yaddo, 2000; the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in conjunction with Virginia Center for Creative Arts, 1996; and a full scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1993. SoHyun Bae received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from Boston University in 1994. She then proceeded to study religious philosophy at Harvard University where she received a Master of Theological Studies in 1997 having worked with the Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel. Since her move to New York City in 1997, SoHyun Bae’s works have been exhibited widely throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Her works are in the Permanent Collections of The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The Peabody Archaeological Museum at Harvard University, The Museum of Modern Art in Finland and in numerous private collections throughout the world. SoHyun Bae lives and works in New York.