Suh Jeong Min

"Some Space XXII LOTUS" 3D wall sculpture in paper, 39 x 59x 2 inches

2015

Nancy Genn, American (b. 1929) Marshfield 25 (1977) Handmade paper collage Hand signed verso Dimensions: 20 1/8 x 22 inches Utilizing what is now known as the 'Genn Method,' Nancy Genn created three-dimensional abstract works of handmade paper, gaining international recognition in the 1970s Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions. Nancy Genn was born in 1929 in San Francisco, California. She recognized early that she would pursue a career as an artist. Her mother, Ruth Wetmore Thompson Whitehouse, was a painter and UC Berkeley alumna who played a leadership role in the San Francisco Women Artists organization. Genn studied at San Francisco Art Institute (then California School of Fine Arts) with painter Hassel Smith, and at the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1948–49) with Professors Margaret Peterson and John Haley, and fellow students Sam Francis and Sonya Rapoport. In 1949 she married Vernon “Tom” Genn, an engineer raised in Japan, with whom she had three children. Career Genn's first noted solo exhibition was in 1955 at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. She received international recognition through her inclusion in French art critic Michel Tapié’s seminal text Morphologie Autre (1960), which cited her as one of the most important exponents of post-war informal art. In 1961, Genn began creating bronze sculptures using the lost-wax casting method. Influenced by noted sculptor and family friend Claire Falkenstein, who used open-formed structures in her work, Genn cast forms woven from long grape vine cuttings, and produced vessels, fountains, fire screens, a menorah, a lectern, and, notably, the Cowell Fountain (1966) at UC Santa Cruz. In 1963 her sculptural work was exhibited with Berkeley artists Peter Voulkos and Harold Paris in the influential exhibition Creative Casting curated by Paul J. Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York. Genn was one of the first American artists to express herself through handmade paper, first receiving wide recognition via exhibitions at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, beginning in 1977, and in traveling exhibitions with Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis. In 1978-1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, she studied papermaking in Japan, visiting local paper craftspeople, working in Shikenjo studio in Saitama Prefecture, and exhibiting her work in Tokyo. She also learned techniques from Donald Farnsworth...

Cheung Yee, Cast Paper painting, wall sculpture, black, edition CHEUNG YEE (1936–2019) The Chinese artist Cheung Yee, a pioneer of the contemporary art scene in Hong Kong, died in Los Angeles on December 4 at the age of eighty-three. The Hong Kong Museum of Art confirmed his passing. Best known for his paper castings; bronze relief; and wooden, stone, and bronze sculptures, which mixed Western modernism, traditional Chinese aesthetics, and elements of folklore and ancient philosophies, Cheung cofounded the avant-garde Circle Art Group with Hon Chi Fun, Wucius Wong, and several other peers. The group was active from 1964 to 1971. Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1936, Cheung was raised in Hong Kong but was forced to leave the region when the Japanese invaded China during the Second Sino-Japanese War; his family relocated to Guangzhou. When the conflict ended, Cheung returned to the region and began learning Gongbi, a realist brush technique in Chinese painting. In the 1950s, he studied art at Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, where he met his wife. Throughout his schooling, Cheung pursued his interests in archaeology and began experimenting with different materials and with approaches to copperplate etching, welding, and modeling. In 1964, Cheung’s first major retrospective was organized by the City Museum and Art Gallery at Hong Kong City Hall. The following year, he received a grant from the Institute of International Education to study in the United States and Europe. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, AO Vertical Art...