Kyung Jeon & Negar Ahkami A Precious Passing March 27 - May 10, 2008 Miki Wick Kim Contemporary Art is pleased to present A Precious Passing, a two-person show by Negar Ahkami and Kyung Jeon. Negar Ahkami and Kyung Jeon each paints within the framework of a strong cultural aesthetic to create highly personal expressions of beauty and vulgarity. The images are neither the stuff of traditional Islamic or Korean art, nor solely in reference to Western influences, but rather, they express and embrace an uncertain territory in between. Where these works merge is beyond style and color, at the point of raw emotion, fear, femininity, and an intensely conflicting anxiety over sweet, inevitable destruction. Negar Ahkami paints her small figures far adrift amid elaborately layered patterns; drowning in Persian-inspired motifs, their features are less defined than the sharp expressions signature of Jeon's characters. Instead, the figures are themselves expressions: little yells of terror or sighs of complacency, ghost-like and formless, yet at the same time fully formed ideas of impermanence and overwhelm. But although the garish backdrop (an over-the-top nod to a flamboyant culture) overtakes these small sexless figures, in other works Ahkami creates clear central images of strong women who, in their multitudes and contradictions, speak louder than the screaming color and drama of design. Textured with glitter and passion, and expertly messy, these pieces are a brilliantly crumbling architecture - you happily spin into them, but not without a sense of dread. In her new works Kyung Jeon implants a sharp sense of duality, but more than ever there is a deeply cutting definition of the middle ground itself as the hardest place to be. A story seems only half told; a few young girls are lightly objectified yet still untouched, another waits amid empty space, content in her subtle unhappiness. Sweet borders adorn only some of the pieces. In their absence on others, Jeon adds detail and contrast to a personified landscape. An angry red sea is made up of harmlessly pretty flowers in bright East Indian inspired colors, while rolling purple hills covered in sparkling gold blossoms hide open-mouthed traps, jaws of death that guard pathways and bite off limbs. Alternately, as sad and hopeless characters meet the unkind ax of oversized death fairies, they are cradled into the folds of a familiar Korean pattern, where they find happiness after slaughter. By moving quite confidently in both directions, Jeon's paintings cling to the thin and often redefined line between sinking and rising above. Negar Ahkami was born in Baltimore in 1971 and raised in New Jersey. She received an MFA in 2006 from School of Visual Arts, NY. Her exhibitions in New York City include a solo show at LMAK Projects (Williamsburg) and group shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the Longwood Gallery, Marvelli Gallery, and Kravets-Wehby Gallery. She received a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship in 2004, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency in 2006-2007. She lives and works in New York. Kyung Jeon was born in 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and received an MFA in 2005 from the School of Visual Arts, NY. She has participated in group museum exhibitions at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Kumho Museum, and Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, Korea. She was the recipient of the Scope Emerging Art Grant in 2005 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship in 2003. She will have an upcoming solo exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery, her third solo show in New York. She lives and works in New York. Written by Patricia Milder