Long-Distance Couple Marry Their Talents
By Victoria Dalkey
Published Feb. 7, 2010
Sacramento Bee
Married to each other for six years, Koo Kyung Sook and Ian Harvey have a bicontinental relationship. Koo lives and works in Korea where she teaches at Chungnam National University in Taejon. Harvey teaches at Sacramento State.
While each has a strong reputation as an individual artist, when they are together during winter and summer breaks they work together to create large-scale collaborations that draw on each of their individual strengths.
Koo and Harvey met in 2004 at the Vermont Studio Center, where she had a fellowship for Asian artists and he was director of the center’s press, which produced prints by prominent artists to benefit both the artists and the Johnson, Vt., artists retreat. Finding that they had much in common both personally and in their work, they joined their lives and began discussing what would become a major collaborative project whose subject is the human body. Several of their collaborations are up at Jay Jay through Feb. 20 along with examples of their individual efforts.
The collaborations take the form of monumental abstracted figures that emerge from a grid made up of hundreds or sometimes thousands of painted cards the size of standard business cards. The figures, in some cases monumental torsos, in others whole bodies, are based on photograms of Koo’s body pressed against paper and blown up digitally. “Figure 1,” a towering torso on a 10-by-12-foot ground, is made up of 2,112 small painted cards organized in a grid, the cards resembling pixels on a computer screen.
The effect is stunning. The shadowy figure emerges from passages of paint, pooled and dripped, sprayed and poured in elegant biomorphic abstract forms. Using combinations of shellac, enamel, polyurethane, graphite and synthetic and organic pigments, the artists allow their diverse materials to interact and create spontaneous forms. Assembled following a grid, the works are at once organic and geometric, creating a tension between macro and microcosmic expressions of the body – the body as individual entity and corporate conglomeration.
How do two such strong, independent artists produce such seamless collaborations? Koo is known for sculptures made of seaweed and digital prints that reference the female body, Harvey for dynamic geomorphic abstract paintings that New York critic Donal Kuspit has characterized as “maximalist.” Their collaborations have a unity and integrity that stems from melding their talents into one visual voice.
“Neither of us is egotistical,” Harvey explained in an interview at the gallery. “We each have individual careers and we don’t have things to prove to ourselves.”
“We have to work together 50-50 exactly,” Koo added. “We tried to work apart (on the collaborations) but we lost communication.”
Describing their method as a conversation, Koo explained that they resolve differences in a legislative way.
“We have a constitution, a set of laws,” she said.
“Our latest constitution is from 2007,” she added, explaining that they refine their process through discussion and revision.
“At the fundamental level,” Harvey said, “we think exactly the same. Materials drive our work, materials that we can’t control very well.”
The truth of that is apparent from looking at their individual works.
Harvey shows a series of paintings on wood that at first glance seem to be chaotic. In them architectural or geometric forms – stripes and grids, for example – contend with flowing, puddling, congealing passages of bold color, setting up a playful postmodern dialogue between organic and geometric abstraction. They are dynamic works full of brash color and explosive gesture mitigated by but not fully restrained by ratiocination.
Koo presents a group of works on mulberry paper in which she has used her body as a template for gestural expression. Coating her body with photo emulsion, she has pressed head, torso, genitals against photosensitized paper, creating archetypal emanations of the female body. Unlike Yves Klein’s body prints, they have a subtle, earthy tonal range that gives them a kinship with traditional Asian brush painting while having some of the immediacy and archaic force of cave paintings.
In the collaborations, each brings an individual strength to the task of creating coherent works that draw on Harvey’s playfulness and experimentation and Koo’s intense exploration of the body on all levels, cellular, organic, and individual.
In September, they will finally end their bicontinental phase when Koo moves to Sacramento to live with Harvey in a midtown Victorian built in 1890. It has high ceilings, plenty of room and a three-car garage for studios, and one can expect them to continue working both together and apart on their joint and individual projects.
In true collaborative fashion, the house is a joint venture. Koo found it on the Internet and Harvey moved in to prepare for their coming together permanently in the fall.
