Mirang Wonne

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Mirang Wonne is a prolific artist who uses innovative media and techniques. Her work is about the visual interpretation of the fragility of life. For the last two decades, Wonne has embodied natural forms in unexpected mediums. She uses primarily industrial materials that paradoxically amplify the organic intensity of those forms, capitalizing on their physical and optical peculiarities. Her work, in the words of Peter Frank, “forces us to marvel not just at what she’s done, but to marvel at nature itself—the nature not only of organic forms such as Wonne renders but of inorganic substances such as she manipulates in her rendering.” The images are spiritual, “both in the sense of something metaphysical and in the sense of some presence made of ghostly plasma.” In her recent screen work, Wonne “draws” on fine stainless steel mesh with a blowtorch. By transforming a material more associated with industry than with art, Wonne achieves results that are unpredictably subtle and intimate, as alluring as gemstones and as transcendent as thoughts.