Art Basel 2024: BOOTH P22

10 - 16 June 2024 

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to announce our major debut presentation at the Galleries sector of Art Basel, taking place at Messe Basel from June 10-16, 2024. The gallery presents a focused exhibition of female artists who stitch, knot, and intertwine unconventional materials to respond to our contemporary moment. The booth will feature works by Pacita Abad, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Mire Lee, Maia Ruth Lee, Lee ShinJa, Minouk Lim, and Jennifer Tee, a group of intergenerational Asian diasporic artists whose practices span the feminine, the domestic, and the erotic, acting as catharsis, remembrance, and empathy in times of internal crisis and broader social dystopia.

 

The booth will include large-scale works by Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad (1946- 2004), who is the subject of a major North American retrospective, currently open at MoMA PS1 through September 2. Pacita's practice draws from the work of craftswomen and artisans she encountered throughout her extensive travels, using traditional sewing and embellishment techniques to respond to the postcolonial conditions of the GlobalSouth. The works on view in our booth reveal a whimsical facet of her oeuvre, with paintings that explore the expressive power of abstraction. Abad is also included in the 60th Venice Biennale exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa.

 

Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977) is recognized for her multimedia practice, which reinterpretstraditional Korean art forms and materials in the context of contemporary society. Most recently, Kang opened a solo exhibition at our New York space, following a major solo exhibition in 2023 at Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art, titled Willow Drum Oriole. Our presentation showcases works drawn from series that debuted at Leeum; these bodies of work utilize materials like silk, wool, and woven mats to transcend the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and textile art.

 

Mire Lee (b. 1988)'s practice transforms industrial materials like hoses, motors, silicone, cement, and clay into visceral yet intimate sculptures resembling the flesh, organs, and excretions of a living organism. Our booth willfeature The Liars, a large hanging sculpture by Lee that showcases the artist's long-standing interest in the symbolic, sensual, and affective properties of skin. Lee was selected to create the 2024 Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, set to open in October. For this year's edition of Art Basel, Lee is participating in Art Basel Conversations on June 12 at 3–4pm, joined by curators Alvin Li and Mohamed Almusibli.

 

Busan, Korea born, Colorado-based artist Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983) will present paintings born out of her long-standing concerns on migration, diaspora, and borders. These new works are a continuation of Lee's BondageBaggage series, which explores the ways in which migration bears weight on individual and collective memory. Her process-based paintings, which are made by first binding her canvases in the knots used by Nepalesemigrant workers to transport their belongings, carry the imprints of the rope long after they have been cut free, unfurled, and stretched.

 

We are especially pleased to present for the first time works by Lee ShinJa (b. 1930), a pioneering female textile artist who recently had her retrospective at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Korea. Lee's career is defined by an experimental approach to fiber art, turning to unconventionalmaterials like burlap sacks and used sweater yarn, and adding texture to works through the pulling, twisting, and unraveling of threads. Masterfully fusing figuration and abstraction, Lee's tapestries express the natural beauty of landscape paintings while also embracing the materiality of her medium.Since the 1980s, Minouk Lim's (b. 1968) work has challenged the neoliberal rhetoric of contemporary SouthKorean politics and its language of growth and development. Her work focuses on "the ghosts of modernization," engaging with the stories of those who experienced trauma from military policing forces throughout the war and reconstruction.

 

Through her empathetic artistic practice, Lim mourns for the many unidentified victims of this violenthistorical period, advocating for the broader recognition of their families' grief. This year, Lim was honored as a recipient of the 2024 Asia Arts Game Changer Award.Included in our booth is a selection of tulip petal collages by Amsterdam-based artist Jennifer Tee (b. 1973), who had a solo exhibition at our New York space this year. Tee's Tampan Tulips series takes its title from the traditional tampan cloths of Lampung, a region in Sumatra, Indonesia. Using pressed petals sourced from Dutch tulips, these works have a personal tie with the artist's mixed ancestry of Chinese-Indonesian andDutch heritage, also linking to the legacies of colonialism, trade, and migration.

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