Meeson Pae: Permeate

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Meeson Pae: Permeate on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from September 21 through November 2. This is Pae’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and presents biomorphic paintings, sculptures, and multimedia installations. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 21 from 6-8pm.

Anat Ebgi is part of PST ART as a Gallery Program Participant. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art

Evoking the body and its ongoing relationship to technology, Korean American artist Meeson Pae’s work explores the sensual architecture of organic and mechanical forms. With the assistance of 3D sculpting software, Pae renders her muscular mechanisms and fluid flesh virtually. This process allows her to exploit a limitless potential of scale, gravity, perspective, and to boundlessly ‘undo’ or ‘redo’ her subject matter until she has arrived at a moment of climactic transformation.

This work explores the interplay between machine and body, complicating distinctions through the translation of these digital processes into physical objects. Across media, whether oil painting or sculptures fabricated through industrial processes, such as 3D printing and laser-cut steel,  Pae’s work examines how shifting states can alter our perceptions of the abstract and representational, the organic and architectural, the internal and external.

Drawn to the visceral, Pae’s protuberances and cavities, lumps and spills form mechanical organs creating entangled compositions that function symbiotically. Pae builds worlds that are invisible, fanciful, and futuristic—her objects seem aware of their own fragility oscillating between micro and macro spatiality. In paintings such as Formations or Phase (all works 2024), Pae’s imagery occupies an unfamiliar landscape; the dark strangeness of these settings heightens the alien origins of these processors, atoms, motherboards, or molecules. Across her multifaceted practice, the works speak to a desire for exploration of spaces that extend beyond human understanding.

Pae’s sculptures are constructed of disparate materials including aluminum, stainless steel, resin, glass, halite, and other organic matter. These materials are chosen for their inherent dualities, and the contrasts and tensions they activate—such as the rigidity and strength of steel juxtaposed with the softness and malleability of resin. Rounded flesh-like forms begin as abstract ideas, sensations which are given volume, density, and texture, achieving uncanny and metaphorical effects. For example the sculpture Accretion comprises bulbous forms of opaque resin and shiny steel tripod poles that act as a type of support, alluding to the relationship of bones and muscles which require each other to generate movement.

In the adjacent gallery Pae has installed a video composed of animated 3D models. The pulsating forms morph through digital processes—revealing the infinite possibilities and iterations her works take before they are realized physically. The videos are projected onto a centrally hanging web of laser-cut stainless steel tendrils. A twisting network of reflective neurons bounce light and cast shadows about the gallery as they gently sway. Equivocal and enigmatic, Permeate dissolves our sense of the internal and the external, together the works suggest something expanding, tangible, and alive as if these objects might mutate and breakaway spontaneously.

Meeson Pae (b. 1979, Indianapolis, IN) received her fine art degree from University of California Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States, including K11 Musea, Hong Kong, China; Carl Kostyal, London, UK; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrence, CA; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; and Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Pae has completed numerous public projects and commissions including Le Meridien Hotel, Zhengzhou, China; Royal Caribbean International Ltd, Papenburg, DE; Internet Brands, El Segundo, CA; WebMD, Newark, NJ; Phoenix Biomedical University Office of Arts and Culture, Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission, Los Angeles International Airport, Ontario Airport, Ontario, CA; and Mobile Exhibits Arts Council, Long Beach, CA. Pae’s work has appeared in The New York Times, the Korea Times, the Los Angeles Times, Metal Magazine, New Scientist, Art & Object, and Prestige Hong Kong, among many others. Pae lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.