Shatto Gallery is proud to present Blessed Journey, a solo exhibition that features the entire oeuvre of artist Hei Myung C. Hyun. Many from deep in the archive and rarely or never seen, this exhibition surveys the artist’s career from the early 1990s to the present, and reveals the evolution of her visual vocabulary and mature painting style.

 

Hyun’s paintings are distinguished by an immense collection of visual journals, portraying her longing for rejuvenation and renewal found in nature and the landscape. From the majestic mountains and shores that surround her to a single flower, bearing witness to God’s work through nature is the source of the artist's joy in life and her purpose as an artist. Her works serve as testimony of His creation and its renewal every season, with every blossom and seed.

 

Equally inspirational to Hyun’s work is her background. Educated in Korea, Hyun completed her art education in the US in the early 1970s. Hyun notes that her work will always be a balance of abstraction and figuration, East and west, tradition and modernity: these tensions are re-created in her work through the use of varied visual tools and compositional structures found in both Eastern and Western art. The grids, scrims, patches of color, and symbols of the natural world that appear in her work necessarily do so in a fragmentary way, for they signify the spatial shift of time involved in culling microcosmic glimpses of her daily experience. 

 

This exhibition, Blessed Journey, will provide a new generation of viewers with the opportunity to see the critically acclaimed, deeply moving body of work of Hei Myung C. Hyun, one of the first female artists from the East to study and work in the US, whose journey is beyond personal history but an important trace of the Korean diaspora art world. On view from September 14 to October 12 with an opening reception on September 14, 2024. 

 

Hei Myung C. Hyun was born and raised in Korea, but moved to Connecticut in the US to finish her art training. Hyun has received her BFA from the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea and received her MFA from Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut. Hyun has participated in numerous solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and competitions from 1966-2019 in several different cities around the world.

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“Life is a long journey. Every hour, day, month, and year can be broken down into single, uncountable steps. Though others might prefer leaps and bounds or shortcuts, for me accounting for every step is important and valuable. It is only through this humble consideration that I am able to locate the path, trace my history, and seek my tomorrow”.

Hei Myung C. Hyun

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Curatorial Team

Yujin Iris Jeong   |   Suzie John