Press

Imi Hwangbo was born in Daegu, South Korea. She received her MFA from Stanford University, and has been a resident at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Rome, and the Carmargo Foundation in France, among many others. She lives and works in Athens, Georgia, where she is Associate Professor at my alma mater, the University of Georgia. She currently has a show at Pavel Zoubok Gallery on West 26th street. The following is a portion of our exchange about pattern, abstraction and devotion to process. For more about Imi’s current show, please visit Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NY. The…

Jo-Ann Conklin, curator David Winton Bell Gallery Brown University, 2008 Imi Hwangbo has created a series of mesmerizing works.  These delicate sculptural reliefs elicit awe, inspired by the elegant beauty of their floral and geometric patterns and the laborious methods of their construction.  Works from the Pojagi Series, which dates from 2003 to the present, range in size from an intimate 6" x 8" to a monumental 11' high.  Made by women, pojagi were the sole creative outlet of Korean women during the rigidly Confucian era of the Chosun dynasty (1392-1910).  These small square and rectangular textiles are decorated with…

By: Ann Wilson Lloyd Art in America, March 2008 Imi Hwangbo's three-dimensional drawings consist of aligned layers of Mylar -- sometimes as many as 30.  Each layer is hand cut with incredible precision in all-over stylized floral or geometric designs and mounted with slight spacing in between layers, to create delicate sculptural reliefs. Hwangbo bases these works on drawings translated into digital prints.  The Mylar sheets are printed with colored ink, which thinly outlines the edges of the cutouts.  During the cutting process, each petal, line or shape diminishes in tiny increments from one layer to the next, so that,…

January/February 2005 Vol.24 No.1 A publication of the International Sculpture Center by Cathy Byrd A finely drawn line separates Imi Hwangbo’s sensual sculptures of the 1990s from the discretely dimensional objects that she makes today. The swollen forms of “The Waiting Chamber” series have given way to exquisite introspection. Before, she carved and modeled organic shapes in plaster, then cast them into red rubber vessels. Now she turns her drawings into vellum maquettes and achieves sculptural geometric designs from multiple layers of digitally printed, hand-cut Mylar. Hwangbo has exhibited her work at the International Print Center, the Alternative Museum, the…

By: Lilly Wei Second Street Gallery  2004 Everyone has a vision of perfection, don't you think?  Agnes Martin Imi Hwangbo transfixes and is transfixed by detail.  In this group of remarkable drawings on hand-cut mylar, the artist begins with a visual unit and multiplies it, using repetition as a method and, beyond that, a kind of wondrous madness.  Through sheer accumulation—and a nod to other cultures, to modernism, post-feminist ideologies and recent strategies of hybridization—these units become more than the sum of their parts, the quantitative translated into the psychological, the phenomenal into the immanent, cool objectivity into stubborn, passionate…

By: Glenn Harper, Sculpture Magazine editor One of the primary subjects of art is, quite naturally, the cultural climate in which the artist finds him/herself. It should be no surprise, then, that one of the primary subjects of contemporary art is popular culture, or that today artists are often drawn to the popular art form that is most saturated with seductive imagery and wish fulfillment dreams: cartoons. For young artists today, cartoon imagery is an inescapable part of their landscape, through television, advertising, and computer games. Cartoons are, indeed, the virtual reality promised by not yet delivered by technology. One…