EXHIBITION: kate hers, encounters, Gallery Asia Unlimited, Berlin, 29 April - 27 May 2011

03 May 2011

Congratulations to INDAAR member kate hers on her first solo exhibition in Berlin!

Gallery Asia Unlimited is pleased to host the first solo exhibition of Korean born, American artist, kate hers in Berlin from April 29th through May 27th 2011.

After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a B.F.A., hers obtained an M.F.A. while on full fellowship with the Jacob K. Javits Foundation at the University of California, Irvine. While at UC-Irvine, she worked closely with renowned professors: Juli Carson, Yong Soon Min, Yvonne Rainer, and Bruce Yonemoto.

She is a recipient of numerous awards, such as a Fulbright, Blakemore Freeman, and DAAD scholarships, a Pacific Rim grant, a studio grant of the cultural project of the Professional Association of Berlin Artists, and a full residency fellowship at Vermont Studio Center. In Germany she has exhibited at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Kunstverein Hildesheim, and at the Residence Gallery of the Ambassador of the United States of America.

For this exhibition with Gallery Asia Unlimited, hers presents works which investigate transnationalism, historical landscape painting, and German Orientalism while calling into question the perception and the role of the viewer. She explores the spiritual and philosophical quest to discover the unknown. Allegory, romanticized landscape, and kitsch are employed in her work to dismantle notions of the “Other”, revealing Orientalism and the fascination with the “East” as humorous perversions.

As a Korean born American artist – based in Europe, kate hers’s cultural position is complicated but exemplary of modern trends of immigration and cross cultural border crossings. Her performative videos and multi-media drawings seek to overcome the simple dichotomy of east/west, modern/primitive, and insider/outsider in order to dismantle the essentialization of identity. She combines the notion of landscape with Orientalism and the “Other” (the Edward Said’s post-colonial term and the philosophical and spiritual Hegelian notion). Her reference to the Rückenfigur in landscape painting names a subject/viewer position as an “Other” and outsider, which is to say outside of the picture plane and outside culturally and spiritually. The 20th Century post-colonial term Orientalism describes a ubiquitous Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of the prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the West described the
East as exotic, mystic, and primitive, devoid of logic, modernism, and science, we see Orientalism at work.