FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hoon Kwak

Tea Ceremony

September 8 - October 3, 1998

The Charles Cowles Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of installations and paintings on canvas by HOON KWAK from September 8th through October 3rd, 1998. The Gallery is located at 420 West Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets. The Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, September 10th, from 6 to 8pm.

In this, his first solo exhibition at the Charles Cowles Gallery, HOON KWAK will be exhibiting two large zen-like installations; one consisting of fifty mixed media paintings on paper coupled with ceramic tea bowls, the other featuring floor-to-ceiling scroll paintings. The exhibition is a continuation of his recent one-person show at the Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. In addition, there will be several of his large expressive paintings on canvas.

In his 1998 essay, Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, relates KWAK's fascination with tea bowls:

(A)fter the Korean war, when many people were displaced from their homes, his family, like

countless others, had to live in tents and makeshift communal camps. KWAK remembers

his amazement as he watched camp neighbors digging into the ground, unearthing relics of

pottery bowls, vessels, tea cups - from the distant past. And it seemed to him then, in the

makeshift camps, that there was a nearly magical - or as he might describe it now, mystical -

quality about these earthenware relics that miraculously, amidst the rubble of the present, -

had survived from the past. It occurred to him that what could not be destroyed was the

past, and from that time on he has always held a belief in the unceasing and vital connection

of the present to the past.

HOON KWAK was the Korean entry at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and has exhibited extensively throughout the world. His work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Kumho Museum of Art, the Sungkok Museum of Art, the Walker Hill Art Center, the Modern Art Museum and the Sonje Museum of Art, all in Seoul, and the South Wales Gallery in Sydney, Australia. A native of Korea, KWAK moved to Cleveland in 1974 and then to Los Angeles in 1979. He has recently relocated to New York City.

For further information or photographs please contact the gallery at 212/925-3500.