The Oracle Series, a new body of work by Professors Imi Hwangbo, was exhibited at the Art on Paper Art Fair during Armory Week in New York City from March 8 to 11, 2018. Art on Paper is an international art fair during Armory Week, the premier art event for 20th and 21st-century art in New York City. Art on Paper features eighty national and international galleries presenting photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, and large-scale installations that challenge the notion of what a work on paper can be. Art on Paper 2018 exhibitors includes the Aperture Foundation, the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, and the Tamarind Institute. 

Hwangbo, a professor in the Studio Art Core area, draws imagery from decorative patterns in Korean folk art, which is celebrated for its simplicity, innocence, and joyfulness. In Hwangbo’s artworks, these traditional patterns are reconfigured and expanded into space. Light is used as a medium to convey the image, with patterns gaining depth through the translucent layering of light and shadow. As art critic Lilly Wei has written: “Hwangbo’s geometric motifs and lacy botanicals are related to pojagi designs, filtered through a modernist syntax of diamonds, circles, and squares configured as infinitely expandable systems in which solids and voids are similarly important and mind and dream intertwine.” 

The Oracle Series incorporates brilliant pigment using colored pencils on dense paper. Layers of opaque and translucent paper, cut into floral and geometric patterns, are held on pins over the color field. The space between these elements and the viewer creates a kaleidoscopic effect, with patterns shifting as the viewer’s perspective changes.

Hwangbo received her MFA in Sculpture from Stanford University, where she studied with the Bay Area figurative painter Nathan Oliveira. She has been the recipient of numerous international artist fellowships, with residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Camargo Foundation in France. Her work has been exhibited at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in NYC, the Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston, and the International Print Center New York.

Read more about Hwangbo’s work here.