KIAF Seoul

Zoé Blue M. is known for her vibrant paintings that address characterizations of Asian women in both western and eastern popular culture. Evidence of a cross-cultural upbringing plays heavily in her work, as she draws upon a range of source materials from Anime, advertising, art history, and ukiyo-e, as well as personal memories as a way of making sense of her own multicultural identity. Her fantastic portraits of ping-pong players elevate the central character by presenting an open narrative, through which she considered complexities of emotional burdens, family history, and adolescence. Blue M. lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Jordan Nassar meticulously embroiders imaginary landscapes by hand, with each composition made up of hundreds of thousands of individual stitches. By incorporating craft and traditional forms—particularly Palestinian tatreez techniques—Nassar’s unique interpretation continues the ways in which  these traditions have changed over time. Fraught with emotional entanglement and personal longing for place and permanence, the artist considers these landscapes, “versions of Palestine as they exist in the mind of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.

Gwen O’Neil’s vivid abstract paintings comprise of wave-like color shifts of stippled brushwork, crashing and swirling across the raw canvas. The luminous compositions take inspiration from nature, specifically bird murmurations, with gestures opening and closing, expanding and collapsing upon themselves. O’Neil listens intuitively to the workings of her process, maintaining a balance between steady systematic dabbing and a looseness through her palette. Formally and conceptually the works hearken to California and west coast tradition of exploring light and color. O’Neil lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Joshua Petker draws inspiration from historical works, which are intentionally kept anonymous. His paintings rely instead on their ability to evoke the familiar and uncanny, teasing and tantalizing viewers. Rather than draw specific conclusions from these juxtapositions, his work unleashes an exhilarating proliferation of meanings and pictorial puzzles. His use of color plays a powerful role in heightening the drama and dreamlike qualities of his subjects. The artist offers the history of art and visual culture reshuffeld—Picabia, Bronzino, soviet era cartoons. Petker makes these his own and the outcome is a timeless dreamlike mix of perspective and emotionality. Petker lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.