Art Ltd. Magazine Profiles Ian Harvey + Koo Kyung Sook
By David M. Roth
Published May, 2010
Art Ltd. Magazine
Collaborations all too often entail self-canceling compromises. But in the case of Ian Harvey and his wife, Koo Kyung Sook, such compromises, whatever they may be, showcase their respective strengths: Harvey’s as a paint-pouring alchemist whose pictures resemble snapshots of geological processes; Koo’s as an explorer of biological destiny who uses her own body as a jumping off point for sculptures, photographs and installations. Koo earned an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Harvey got his MFA from Columbia University.
The couple met in 2002 at the Vermont Studio Center Press, where he was development director and Koo was a visiting artist on a Freeman Fellowship. They married in 2004 and have since worked in the U.S. and in Koo’s native South Korea where she has taught at Chungnam National University for the past 20 years. Their meeting point, artistically, is a shared interested in the body: “the movement of cells and functioning of the organs and all the things that support them: water, lymph, blood and electrical impulses,” explains Koo, 49, who will emigrate to Sacramento this fall from her native South Korea to join Harvey, 56, a professor of painting at Sac State. “Both of us,” explains Harvey, “like to work with materials that we cannot control, materials that transform into things we don’t plan.”
In his solo work, Harvey creates abstract landscapes. Koo has focused on the biological and cultural essence of being female. She’s made totemic structures from seaweed and bamboo and “photograms” from imprints of her body. She’s also been known to “spend days throwing buckets of water” on Sumi ink drawings (“to keep moving the ink”) and to splash mixtures of black tea and red pepper—a staple of Korean cooking—onto her artist books. “Neither of us had done any collaborative work,” Harvey notes. “It was a huge risk.” A breakthrough occurred when the couple realized that Harvey’s painting pouring technique could be harnessed to make figurative works whose shapes are derived from projections of Koo’s “bodygrams” on to paper.
Their collaboration began with a 2006 residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, where after five months of 15-hour days, they produced two large-scale (9′ x 11′) works built from thousands of individual abstract paintings, each executed on blank business cards. The artists created more than 4,000 cards for each painting—about twice as many as actually wound up in the finished pictures. The prototypes made at Bemis launched an ongoing series that has been shown in New York, Sacramento, Seoul and Chicago. The cards are dipped, poured and sprayed with shellac, enamel, polyurethane, graphite and various pigments that interact and recombine according to their relative weight and viscosity. “Each represents a reaction between two or three different kinds of materials,” says Harvey.
The resulting images, which recall cellular processes, roam in texture from porous and ashen to enamel-gloss. From these seemingly inchoate elements, the artists assemble pictures that feature a solitary figure that seems to be fleeing some sort of cataclysmic event: a starburst, a volcanic eruption, a flood or a firestorm. “We walked miles each day,” moving back and forth “looking for the right pieces,” says Harvey. “The images come into being so slowly.” But in that process, adds Koo, “We launched ourselves into a completely new zone.”
Ian Harvey and Koo Kyung Sook’s collaborative works could be seen most recently at JayJay Gallery in Sacramento, CA, from January 9 – February 20, 2010. Their work will also be on view at JayJay’s booth at the San Francisco Fine Art Fair, from May 21 – 23.
