October 5-31, 2006

Press Release

This gallery takes great pleasure to present Ms. Debbie Han’s recent work in her debut exhibition in San Francisco.

Ms. Han has been working in multitudes of genres, exploring the issues of perception, identity, culturalization and  hybridization. Her deep interest in how cultural notions and perspectives shape individual experiences in contemporary society relates to her bi-cultural Korean-American background. After earning a B.A. in Art from UCLA and a M.F.A. degree from Pratt Institute in New York, Ms. Han returned to Los Angeles and exhibited actively. When she was invited for a residency at a museum in Korea in 2003, she embarked on a series of work reflecting her experience in the metropolitan surroundings of Seoul. She observed the universality of urban consumer culture; at the same time, the cultural phenomenon of westernization prevalent in most developing Asian countries today induced Ms. Han to create a body of work focusing on the issues of beauty.

The highlight of the exhibition is a series titled “An Everyday Venus,” large scale black and white digital photographs in which the head of the classical Venus sculpture is incorporated into the body of an actual Asian woman. The striking contrast of the marble-like texture of the figure’s skin with the bodily form of an actual person evokes simultaneously sensations of familiarity and strangeness. Ms. Han’s metaphorical depictions of female nude are the fusions of the ideal and real, the occidental and oriental, and the classical and contemporary. The aspects of ambiguity and variableness of these Venuses reflect the artist’s principle experimentation with appropriation and pastiche, thereby creating a new type of visual language which could be described as the “New Conceptual Art of Pastiche and Simulationism.”

The “Terms of Beauty” series presents sculptures executed in the ancient ceramic technique of celadon, and depicts busts of Venus with facial features of diverse races. These hyper-realistic faces combine different racial characteristics, and together with the mystical color of celadon, they become a singular kind of beauty.

Another photo series titled “Food and Sensuality” presents colorful parodical images of cosmetic and beauty advertisement, except the young models are wearing food and spices as they would wear jewelry or makeup. These slick and sexy photographs not only address the commodification of women’s sexuality by consumer advertising but also dramatize the cultural view of women’s sexuality seen as an item to be consumed like food. With humor and glamour, the artist elevates the issues of sensuality, trend and fashion to an avant-garde fusion of tastes.

A fully illustrated color catalog is available.