Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks at the Korean Cultural Center, NY, NY October 21st-November 30th 2020

Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars’ Rocks will feature artwork by ten contemporary artists who have cultural ties to China, Korea, Japan, Argentina and the USA. Informed by each artist’s passion for ancient scholars’ rocks or viewing stones, the exhibition will include ceramic forms by Laura Cannamela, wood carvings by Andy Moerlein, wax works by Laura Moriarty, concrete castings by Chris Frost, mixed media sculptures by Susan Meyer, drawings by JooLee Kang, paintings by Mark Cooper, assemblages and textiles by Woomin Kim, digital works by Furen Dai and painted stones by Elisa Pritzker. This exhibition is curated by Donna Dodson.

Recent artwork by each artist will be shown in dialogue with a few authentic stones from the Thomas Elias and Hiromi Nakaoji collection and the collection of Kemin Hu. This contrast of traditional scholars’ rocks with contemporary interpretations will create a dynamic that encourages reflection on our enduring relationship with nature. As we confront the current pandemic, and respond to the natural imbalance challenging our global society, we seek contemporary art that is able make sense of the current moment.

Stone collecting is a universal human pastime. Throughout Asia, scholars have cultivated distinct traditions: in Korea, Suseok; in Japan, Suiseki; in China, Gongshi. According to Dr. Kyunghee Pyun, an art history professor and scholar, historically, the practice of collecting and appreciating oddly shaped rocks developed from scholarly walks alone in nature. Particularly nuanced stones were appreciated as mementos and displayed reverently. The most prized “bones of the earth” were created by water or wind carving away the geological structure until only the essence is left behind. These unique stones were understood by Daoist practitioners as icons of harmony with nature. As the stones were passed from generation to generation, they signified an authentic connection to the landscape and an aesthetic reminder of that spiritual connection.

An appreciation of these stones came to represent cultural value for Chinese, Korean and Japanese collectors. With new affluence came increased demand for such ancestral heritage. Merchants would often find or carve natural stones and sell them in the marketplace. Commercial availability enhanced their popularity. With the rise of new wealth in Korea and China in the past 50 years, scholars’ rocks have become more sought after. They signify a connection to the ancient past, and they express the collector’s prosperity and hopes for the future.

Today, scholars’ rocks continue to resonate with viewers. They present a spiritual medium between modern consumerism and a transcendental one-ness with nature. Similarly, the Hudson River School of painting envisioned the grand landscape that dwarfed the American pioneer in response to the industrialization of the early United States. The surge of interest in scholars’ rocks or viewing stones in the art world, and in pop culture, such as in the movie Parasite, can be understood as a response to things being out of balance with nature, the environment, and society.

The artists in this show are all responding to this moment, where a reverence for rocks, and nature, is needed, now more than ever. Laura Cannamela’s ceramic sculptures explore the relationship of form and color that focus the viewer on her intimate scale. Andy Moerlein’s woodcarvings are highly manipulated. He explores the intersection of accident, intervention and the natural grain patterns. To be in conversation with the landscape, Laura Moriarty pushes painting into the third dimension using wax and pigments. Movement defines Chris Frost’s approach to making cast concrete sculptures in response to the geology of the ancient stones. Susan Meyer’s use of scale and unexpected materials defines the irreverent aesthetic of her mixed media sculptures. JooLee Kang’s ballpoint pen drawings bring to life the visions she breathes into the viewing stones. Mark Cooper’s painted constructions take a maximalist approach to this minimalist tradition. Woomin Kim uses textiles and mixed media sculptures to illustrate natural mineralogical structures and interrogate the geological integrity of contemporary life. Furen Dai’s digital drawings explore the conceptual history of the appreciation and commodification of the ancient stones. Elisa Pritzker’s magic stones use indigenous patterns to evoke a meditation on the genocide of the Selknam people of Patagonia.

Guest Scholars, Authors and Renowned Rock Collectors: 

Thomas Elias and Hiromi Nakaoji, https://www.vsana.org/
Kemin Hu, http://www.spirit-stones.com

Artists in Interpreting the Natural:

Laura Cannamela, http://www.lauracannamela.com

Mark Cooper, http://www.markfcooperart.com/  

Furen Dai, http://furendai.squarespace.com/

Christopher Frost, http://www.christopherfrost.org

JooLee Kang, http://jooleekang.blogspot.com

Woomin Kim, https://www.woominkim.com/

Susan Meyer, http://susanmeyersculpture.com

Andy Moerlein, http://andymoerlein.blogspot.com

Laura Moriarty, http://www.lauramoriarty.com

Elisa Pritzker, http://www.elisapritzker.com

For more information, visit Korean Cultural Center online, www.koreanculture.org

Watch a video with installation images and interviews by the curator and each artist in this show:

Update: The exhibition was featured online: "Korean Cultural Center in New York, Group Exhibition of Selected Artists in 2020 Competition" on Oct 15, 2020 in New York and New Jersey- Korean Society News and "Korean Cultural Center in New York, Group Exhibition of Selected Artists in 2020 Competition, Oct 15, 2020 by Eun-sook Lim, for Korea Daily News. Interpreting the Natural was featured in Artnet Editor's Picks: 16 Events for Your Art Calendar This Week, by Tanner West on October 19, 2020. KBTV News9 featured Interpreting the Natural on Oct 21, 2020, "Korean Cultural Center in New York opens 'Exhibition of Call to Artists 2020 Competition Winners'" Karen Chernick mentioned this exhibition in the Art Newspaper on Jan 8, 2021 in her article,  Moderna vaccine billionaire Timothy Springer explains his love for Chinese scholar rocks.

Background reading: "Collecting Guide: Scholars’ rocks" by Robert Mowry, posted Nov 23, 2015 on Christie's website. "Chinese Scholars' Rocks an Appetite for Significant Form," by Mia Fineman, posted Aug 26, 1996 on Artnet. 

Expressionism and Abstraction: from Scholars’ Rocks to Contemporary Art, Wednesday October 21st @ 5pm

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom, and each one will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of the event on youtube.

 L to R: Timothy Springer with his Scholar’s Rock, Mark Cooper “Stone Soup IV,” Laura Moriarty “A Unitary Phenomenon”

“Expressionism and Abstraction: from Scholars’ Rocks to Contemporary Art”

Wednesday Oct 21st @ 5p with special guest, Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA (see her recent “Art for this Moment” blog post about “ Scholars' rocks, https://www.mfa.org/article/2020/taihu-rock) Tim Springer, scientist, entrepreneur and rock collector, and two artists in the show: Mark Cooper and Laura Moriarty. This talk will focus on the history of collecting these prized stones and their expressive aesthetics in calligraphy, painting and sculpture including contemporary art. Each guest will address how they first discovered Scholars ’ rocks and viewing stones and what influence they have on their practice/artwork. 

Dr. Nancy Berliner is the Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass. She is the curator of the largest and most significant gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in the MFA’s history from Wan-go H.C. Weng. Dr. Berliner is the former Curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), where she conceived and developed the landmark Yin Yu Tang House project, which brought a 200-year-old rural Chinese merchant home to the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2010, she curated at PEM the much-lauded exhibition Emperor’s Private Paradise, Treasures from the Forbidden City, which traveled from PEM to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Milwaukee Museum of Art. A native of Boston, Dr. Berliner received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, and completed additional studies at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing. She is fluent in Chinese.

Timothy Springer, PhD, is a renowned scientist, entrepreneur and rock collector. He is an immunologist at the Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Medicine at the Boston Children’s Hospital. A recent winner of the Gairdner Prize for his discovery of integrins, a class of transmembrane receptors. As an entrepreneur, he was a founding investor of Leukosite. Recently, he co-founded a pair of Boston startups that have gone public- Scholar Rock and Morphic Therapeutic. His current philanthropic venture is Institute for Protein Innovation, which is advancing the field of protein science. Tim’s passion for rock collecting is connected to his ongoing research of protein molecules. Tim finds a connection between the bizarre shapes of Scholars’ rocks that have been hollowed out by water or wind to reveal the inner strength of the rock and the molecular structure of complex proteins.

Mark Cooper is an internationally recognized artist known for large-scale and site-specific installations. His has won Artist Fellowships through the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a Gund Travel Grant for research in Japan and Korea. In 2013, he was a Foster Prize Finalist at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA.

Mark Cooper had major exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts Hanoi, Vietnam, (2015), the University of Fine Arts (Hanoi, Vietnam 2015), the Doris Duke Mansion Museum (2015), the Yuan Art Museum (Beijing, China 2016) the Kemper Museum , Kansas City (2016). He has participated in group shows at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the City Museum of Paris, France, and the Westlicht Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Laura Moriarty makes process-driven sculpture and works on paper whose forms, colors, textures and patterns result from the same processes that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering, slippage. Born in Beacon, New York, Laura Moriarty received training through an apprenticeship in hand papermaking (1986-1990), and is otherwise self-taught. 

Moriarty's work is held in many permanent collections, including The New York Public Library, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History and the Progressive Art Collection. Laura’s honors include an Individual Support Grant from the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, a residency at the Baer Art Center in North Iceland, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. She is the author of an artist’s book, 'Table of Contents', self-published in 2012. 

Portals: Collecting and Interpreting Evocative Rocks, Thursday October 29th @ 5pm

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom, and each one will be approximately 1 hour. Watch a live recording of the event on Youtube.

  

L to R: Chrysanthemum Stone from the Collection of Thomas Elias and Hiromi Nakaoji, Siblings by Andy Moerlein, Magic Bird of Peace and Hope (Detail) by Elisa Pritzker

"Portals: Collecting and Interpreting Evocative Rocks" Thursday Oct 29th @ 5p with Dr. Thomas Elias, Founder of the Viewing Stone Association of North America, who will lend one of his Korean viewing stones to the show, Dr. Virginia Moon, Associate Curator of Korean Art at LACMA and two artists in the show: Andy Moerlein and Elisa Pritzker. This talk will focus on the art of stone collecting, both as an historic tradition and as a contemporary practice.  Why contemporary artists have translated this aesthetic into new art forms and how each individual rock speaks about a larger landscape will be addressed in this talk.

Thomas S. Elias is Chairman of the Viewing Stone Association of North America and Honorary Vice Chairman of the View Stone Association of China. He is the former Director of the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington D.C. and Professor of Botany at Claremont Graduate School in Claremont, California.  Elias has been researching the Asian art of stone appreciation for over 20 years and has traveled extensively throughout Asia.  He and his wife, Hiromi Nakaoji, have authored or co-authored over 50 papers and the book Chrysanthemum Stones, The Story of Stone Flowers in 2010.  Elias authored four additional books, Viewing Stone of North America (2014), Spirit Stones with Kemin Hu in 2014, Viewing Stones of Yunnan Province (2018), and Contemporary Viewing Stone Displays with Richard Turner and Paul Harris in 2020.   Elias has lectured on viewing stones and served as a judge for stone exhibitions in seven countries.  Their website, www.vsana.org, established in 2012, attracts about 10,000 visitors each month from 115 countries. See his recent article, Native South Korean Stones (Seen from the West) History and lore of Korean Viewing Stones.

Virginia Moon is the Associate Curator of Korean Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Prior to LACMA, Moon attended the Pre-College Division of Juilliard College in New York City and performed as a classical pianist for 26 years, including venues such as Carnegie Hall.  At LACMA, she curated the traveling exhibition Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910 (2014) and a solo exhibition of works by Korean-American artist Young-Il Ahn, Unexpected Light (2017–2018).  Her research interests and lectures range from ancient to contemporary arts.  She holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and USC. She co-curated the major exhibition, Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing (2019), which was the first in a series of three shows supported by “The Hyundai Project: Korean Art Scholarship Initiative,” a global exploration of traditional and contemporary Korean art. Beyond Line was the first writing exhibition of its kind outside Asia and the award-winning exhibition catalog is the first contribution published in English on the subject. Her next upcoming shows will include a solo show for contemporary Korean ink master Park Dae Sung in fall 2021 and a major exhibition on modern art, the first in the U.S, The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art scheduled for fall 2022.

Andy Moerlein is an internationally exhibited sculptor. His work has been shown in museums, sculpture gardens, and galleries from Alaska to New York, Switzerland to Peru. Mr. Moerlein has an extensive resume of public art works and site-specific monumental outdoor sculptures.

In October 2020, he completed his second commission for Crystal Park, a private sculpture garden in Holmes NY. His work can be seen at Contemporary Arts International, Acton MA, Verbier 3D Foundation in the Swiss Alps, Haskell Public Gardens, New Bedford MA, Andres Institute, Brookline NH, Fruitlands Museum collection, Harvard MA, and private locations nationally.

The work included in this show features sculptures informed by Moerlein’s enthusiasm for scholars’ rocks. This Chinese tradition of collecting scholars’ rocks involves the elegant presentation of precious and adored stones for contemplation and enjoyment. The story presented is ancient.

Elisa Pritzker is an artist and independent curator based in Ulster County, New York. She has exhibited at MoMA, Queens and Dorsky Museums among innumerable group and solo exhibits. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Dorsky Museum, Jean Cherqui Art Collection, Paris, France & New York, Brooklyn Library, Hammond Museum, Argentine Consulate in NYC, Wiseman Gallery/Rogue Community College and the Luz & Alfonso Castillo Foundation. Elisa Pritzker has been featured in many publications such as Hyperallergic, CNN, Chronogram Magazine, The Huffington Post, and the PBS Channel. Her "Eclectica Store" was showcased in the New York Times.  

She finds the Scholars’ Stones fascinating and related to her art. Since she paints the stones as she finds them, her own hand-painted magic stone installations have analogous virtues with the Scholars' Rocks. They also have a vibrant luster and suggest numerous shapes, landscapes, animals, vegetation or simply abstractions like the Viewing Stones.

Nature’s Representation, Interpretation and Enculturation in Viewing Stones

 During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom, and each one will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of the event on Youtube.

 

L to R: Cleofan by Laura Cannamela, Viewing Stone by JooLee Kang

“Nature’s Representation, Interpretation and Enculturation in Viewing Stones”

Tuesday November 10^th @ 5pm Eastern with Dr. Kevin Greenwood, Joan L. Danforth Curator of Asian Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College (see his recent video essay on Chinese Scholars' Rocks), Ms. Yao Wu, Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art, and two artists in this show, Laura Cannamela and JooLee Kang. This talk will discuss the importance of nature in Asian art and culture, and how that relates to the traditions of Suseok, Suiseki, and Gongshi.  Viewing Stones appear in contemporary art work as a representation and symbol of nature, time, and the human connection to the environment. The value of the rocks themselves as well as their meaning has changed throughout history and the artists will address their significance in their artistic practices now.

Kevin R. E. Greenwood is the first Joan L. Danforth Curator of Asian Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and he joined the museum staff in 2014. His current exhibitions include "Ukiyo-e Prints from the Mary Ainsworth Collection" and "Monkeys, Apes, and Mr. Freer." His most recent publication is “A Lasting Legacy: The Mary A. Ainsworth Collection,” in Ukiyo-e Prints from the Mary Ainsworth Collection, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (2019). Dr. Greenwood received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, and prior to his appointment at Oberlin he taught Asian studies and art history at Willamette University in Oregon. Greenwood's research interests include art of the Chinese imperial court of the eighteenth-century, and more broadly, Buddhist art, Chinese painting, East Asian contemporary art, and Chinese and Japanese garden architecture. 

Yao Wu is the inaugural Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA), where she oversees the museum’s growing collection of approximately 2,000 objects from East, South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. Wu has received graduate training in art history from Williams College and Stanford University, and she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Wu served as the inaugural Asian Art Curatorial Fellow at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City from 2007 to 2009. During her time at Stanford, she served as the Mellon Fellow for curatorial research in Asian art at the university’s Cantor Arts Center. Since her appointment at SCMA in 2015, Wu has organized more than a dozen exhibitions, featuring subjects ranging from Buddhist art to export lacquer, from Korean contemporary video to Japanese 20th-century prints. Her 2018 exhibition at SMCA, "体 Modern Images of the Body from East Asia," was met with critical acclaim. Wu has recently published in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society, Trans Asia Photography Review, and contributed to an edited volume, Xu Bing: Beyond the Book from the Sky. Wu is a participant in the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) Foundation’s 2019-2020 Mentorship Program.

Laura Cannamela received her MFA from Queens College of CUNY before moving to the Hudson Valley area of New York. Her artwork has been featured in numerous exhibitions at galleries around New York and New England. Within the past year, she has shown her artwork at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY and at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. Her ceramic sculpture installation was selected for the Hudson Valley Artists 2017 Purchase Award and has been added into the Dorsky Museum’s permanent art collection. She has received recognition for her artwork through the Platte Clove 2014 Artist-in-Residence Program, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) 2009 SOS Grant Program, and the NYFA 2008 Mark Program. In 2010, she was awarded a grant by the Freeman Foundation, along with the Five College Center for East Asian Studies, to travel to Japan. She has taught art courses at Queens College of CUNY, the College of St. Rose in Albany, and Sage College of Albany, and at Ichabod Crane High School in Valatie, NY.

JooLee Kang received her MFA from Tufts University - School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA and her BFA in Painting from Duksung Women’s University in Seoul, Korea. She had numerous exhibitions including solo exhibitions at Gallery NAGA (USA, 2020, 2017, 2014), Korean Cultural Center in Madrid (Spain, 2018), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (Korea, 2018), Harvard Medical School (USA, 2018), Museum of Art at Univ. of New Hampshire (USA, 2014) and group exhibitions at Amorepacific H.Q. (Korea, 2019), Newport Art Museum (USA, 2019), Suwon Ipark Museum of Art (Korea, 2018), Fitchburg Art Museum (USA, 2018), and Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan, 2017). Kang also received Suwon Cultural Foundation Artist Grant (2019), Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture Artist Grant (2018), SMFA Traveling Fellowship (2013), St. Botolph Club Artist Award (2012), and Massachusetts Cultural Council Award (2012).  She was invited as an Artist-in-Residence at Gyeonggi Creation Center (Korea, 2018), Cheongju Art Studio (Korea, 2017), Willapa Bay AiR (USA, 2015), and Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum (China, 2014).

Strange Bedfellows: How Found objects, Mineralogy and Ancient Viewing Stones Deliver a Relevant Message, Friday November 13th @ 5pm

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom. Each dialogue will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of this event on Youtube.

 

L to R: Furen Dai, “How to Move a Scholar’s Rock from A to B,” Woomin Kim, “Minerals in Use”

"Strange Bedfellows: How Found objects, Mineralogy and Ancient Viewing Stones Deliver a Relevant Message"

Friday Nov 13th @ 5p with Dr. Kyunghee Pyun, art historian and faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology (see her recent interview about the Suseok in Parasite in Artnet), Dr. Aida Yuen Wong, art historian and faculty at Brandeis University, and two artists in the show: Furen Dai and Woomin Kim. This talk will address how the concepts of viewing stones and scholars rocks have influenced popular culture in movies, such as Parasite, and interior design, such as Feng shui. The artists will address the multiple interpretations of these stones, including their irreverent and very relevant approaches.

Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on the history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. She was a Leon Levy fellow in the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection. Pyun is the co-editor of the book Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan) which surveys modernized dresses in the early twentieth century. Since 2013, Pyun has collaborated with contemporary artists in New York as an independent curator. Her trilogy featuring Korean American artists are Coloring Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part One 1950–1990 (2013): Shades of Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part Two 1989–2001 (2014); and Weaving Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean Artists in America, Part Three: 2001–2013 (2015), held at the Korean Cultural Center New York and Queens Museum.

Aida Yuen Wong is a Professor of Asian Art History at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who has written extensively on transcultural modernism. Among her major publications are Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006) and the edited volume Visualizing Beauty: Gender and Ideology in Modern East Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2012). Wong is the author of the chapter on Chinese modernism in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (2014). Her book, The Other Kang Youwei: Calligrapher, Art Activist, and Aesthetic Reformer in Modern China (Brill, 2016), explores the art theory and legacy of the late Qing-early Republican reformer whose paradigmatic thinking about painting and calligraphy cast a long shadow on modern/contemporary Chinese art discourses. Wong is the co-editor with Pyun of the volume, Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is currently researching 20th-century ink painting in Taiwan and its intersections with gouache and oil painting.

Furen Dai’s practice has focused largely on the economy of the cultural industry, and how languages lose function, usage, and history. Dai’s hybrid art practice utilizes video, sound, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her years as a professional translator and interest in linguistic studies have guided her artistic practice since 2015. She has presented her work at the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Greece. She has participated in residencies, including International Studio and Curatorial Programs, Art OMI, NARS Foundation, and has received public art commissions from The Art Newspaper (2019) and Rose Kennedy Greenway (2020). 

Dai focuses on the transportation of the Scholar Rock rather than the rock itself. Tracing Scholar Rocks' history, she is interested in thinking about the fluctuation in the stone's value when moved from a natural environment to someone's garden. For this show, Dai decided to make a series of drawings proposing possible approaches for moving these massive rocks from one point to another.

Woomin Kim is a South Korean artist currently based in Queens, NY. Kim’s recent solo shows were exhibited at the Boston Sculptors Gallery (Boston, MA) and Maud Morgan Arts
Center (Cambridge, MA). She has participated in several residency
programs including the Queens Museum Studio Program, Ox-bow School of Art and Studio MASS MoCA. Kim has received fellowships and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Korean Cultural Center. Her works have been featured in The New York Times and Hyperallergic. Kim holds a B.F.A from Seoul National University an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Through making sculptures, she reveals what things are made of. “Minerals in Use” is a series of fictional minerals she made from daily objects such as toilet paper, box tape, plastic nails, kitty litter, used soaps, that she soaked, melted, or broke into pieces, then clustered, reassembled, and wove together creating sculptures that resemble mineral samples in natural history museums.