Today we’d like to introduce you to Johee Kwak.
Hi Johee, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Growing up, my father would sit on the couch and I would bring him a piece of paper and have him draw my favorite animated character. I remember raising my chin and peeking through his elbows as I admired him mastering the most impeccable drawings in a matter of minutes. I would take the drawing back to my room and try to copy it. That is one of the most vivid memories I have of how I began to constantly draw everything I saw. I found myself mentally adjusting a pencil, calculating the angles and shadows in hopes of replicating and synthesizing my vision in a faithful and meaningful way.
I pretty much knew by the time I was in high school that I wanted to seriously pursue my career as an artist. I felt my best when I was granted a space to allow my creativity to flow and express what I thought and cared about through mark-making. I stuck mainly to landscape and realism in undergrad until I stumbled upon artworks by Yves Tanguy, Sue Williams, Julie Mehretu, and Jenny Seville, to name a few. This was the turning point of my art from realism to abstract painting. It inspired me to see landscapes and figures in a different way, with more complexities, contemplation, layers, and emotion (not to say that realism doesn’t achieve those things).
So, today I am an abstract painter and installation artist. In my work, I incorporate places I’ve been to/in and seen… places that made me feel something. Whether it be a topographical map, a mountain, a stream, or being underwater, I mutate these landscapes with my abstract figures that are solely drawn with lines, barely making these figures visible. It pushes the boundaries of what’s there and what’s not. That excites me. It allows viewers to contemplate the work through their own subjective lens. That’s liberating. What is healing to me are the ways in which as humans, we aren’t so different from nature, such as the way someone’s smile mimics the curve of an ear, the way a person’s waistline follows the shape of a mountain, and how human veins mimic rivers, streams, and ocean waves.
I’m passionate about what I do, and I’ve gotten to know myself a lot better. It excites me when I can create a painting that doesn’t make sense at first glance; a painting that invites the viewer to dive into the kinks of each mark, each stroke, and see how they are communicating with one another. It’s sort of like a language I’ve created on my own. It makes my experience of landscapes and people more personal, memorable, emotional, and psychological, all while defying the dimensions of time and space as we know it.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Transitioning from realism to abstract painting wasn’t a smooth road. My hands and brain knew only how to replicate exactly what I saw. It’s like being so comfortable in your daily routine that you can’t really escape it. But that doesn’t help your art practice grow… I was torn on whether to continue painting landscapes, something I thought I would be doing forever or to enter the abyss of what abstraction had to offer.
I had always loved realism and the process of painting landscapes always brought me joy–the way I could recreate and repaint a place that was special to me or that made me feel something was satisfying. To let go of that for a moment and enter the unknown was a little terrifying. While I had always appreciated abstraction, I was never pulled to that direction until one day, I spilled some ink over my painting and instead of starting over, I began adding more layers of what had been an accidental spill. This is when my curiosity peaked as I was entering a new world of language and communication between different mediums.
Despite the speed bumps along the way, this past year and a half was nothing but eye opening for me. With the whole world feeling like it was collapsing, it pushed me even more to go inward, to isolate myself in my 500 square feet studio and encourage myself to push paint. When will this pass? Where are we in the stages of the pandemic now? I became comfortable in not knowing. I surrendered and painted in my studio everyday.
This struggle led me to new ideas and pathways to recontextualize my discourse and sit with the unknown, disoriented, and uncomfortable feeling of simply just being. In retrospect, I’m fortunate of what this last year has given me as I was able to channel these struggles through an exhibit called ‘Boundless’, which showcased five large scale 6×8 ft abstract paintings individually harnessed from the ceiling with wire.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I have a background in production design where I built installations for mainly hotels, restaurants, and special events. Although I learned a lot from this experience such as learning to work with wide range of materials, I felt as though my personal story wasn’t fully being expressed through them. I have now shifted my focus onto my paintings which are all drawn on large scale paper. My work is inspired by landscapes and figures that transcend time and space by blurring obvious signs of linearity and horizontality. I employ mixed media on paper using acrylic, oil, sumi ink, graphite, and sometimes gold leaf. This transcendence is informed by my sense of my psychological, emotional, and physical experience in the ocean. I find that I can achieve multiple levels of complexity and detail through mixed media in my paintings.
It’s important for me to emphasize that my paintings are not literally of the ocean and landscapes but more so the feeling of what it is like to be on, in, and underwater. The open spaces, continuity, delicate markings, and thin and thick marks all hint at the strengths and fragility of being immersed in the water. Open spaces, whether it be the boundless sky when we look out of the airplane window or the ray of light when we look up from underwater, seem to go on for an infinite amount of time and space. We don’t know where we stand in these spaces. Blurring the lines of what’s real and what isn’t can be liberating yet uncomfortable. This concept fascinates and excites me and I push paint to capture this ambiguity as the only dimension of reality.
I would say the use of sumi ink is extra special to me specifically as it is reflective of my upbringing and roots. I apply sumi ink in all of my work as an ode to my home country of Japan, which is home to calligraphy.
I would say I am most proud of my recent exhibit, ‘Morpheus’, which I had the honor of curating and producing here in Los Angeles. It was a group exhibition of various artists coming together with different backgrounds and mediums, yet emphasizing the similar characteristics and connectedness of each other and nature. We had a fashion pop up, film photography, paintings, and installations. Coming out of a global pandemic, it was beautiful to see many familiar and new faces come together to interact with the work, artists, and the public. It was an exhibit filled with love and passion, and it reinforced the reason behind why I do what I do.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. I attended an international school from K-12 which allowed me the opportunity to travel the world, immerse myself in different cultures, and study multiple landscapes and people. In school, we would have an event called “Japan Day ” where we would dress up in the color of the Japanese Flag, wear a kimono, or anything with a cultural reference to Japan. Until I was 18, I took a calligraphy class where I learned to appreciate sumi ink and why I incorporate it into my work today because it also reflects my culture and roots. Pottery was another class I took where they taught ‘wabi sabi’, a Japanese philosophy where beauty is preserved in deliberate imperfection. Whether that be a cracked bowl, uneven glaze, or thickness, whatever came out of the kiln was exactly how it’s meant to be. I continue to incorporate wabi sabi in my daily life and allow myself to let things take its course without fighting back, and this idea has definitely reflected onto my work as well.
My work strives to push beyond the boundaries of just the physical and invites viewers to look at the paintings with the notion that we are all one, no matter who, what, or where we are and from. We are an extension of each other and an extension of nature. The energy that makes us in this moment continues to live on even when our physical vessel does not. Capturing that essence into every work I make is important to me, especially after going through what we did this past year. We need connectivity more than ever.
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.joheekwak.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johee.kwak/
Image Credits:
Christopher Stoltz, Clare Frances Lee
