Professor reincarnates Buddhism in exhibit
Assistant art professor Eunkang Koh takes her work out of the classroom and will display it in the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, with an opening reception Thursday. Her exhibit “Humanscape” features prints and drawings of animal-human hybrids, as well as sculptures and books.
Before teaching printmaking at the University of Nevada, Reno, Koh lived in Seoul, Korea. There, Koh grew up surrounded by Buddhism. She said the Buddhist folktales and Korean myths about animals and reincarnation hugely influenced her art.
“The life we’re living is just one fragment we’re looking at,” Koh said. “Like an iceberg, think how there’s one little bit and there’s so much underneath it. There’s so much we can’t see.”
Koh’s work focuses on human faces and forms merged with insect and animal bodies. In larger pieces, such as “Puppets,” Koh said she made more of a social commentary about current politics but the majority of her pieces were made to reflect the childhood influences that informed her worldview.
She said instead of looking at reincarnation as a linear progression, she tried to communicate the circular nature of it in her art.
In a series of smaller prints in the exhibit, Koh made portraits of her friends as animals.
“My friends are really good inspiration,” she said. “Sometimes they request an animal, but they don’t get to pick. I’ll see someone and say, ‘Oh you’re such a giraffe, I have to make you a giraffe.’”
Koh, a cat person, said once she drew a self-portrait of herself as a fox or small cat.
“But that’s my wish,” she said. “I don’t know what other people see me as.”
Since that early sketch of herself as a fox or cat, Koh said she tries to remove herself from the world she’s creating in her art.
“I want myself to be third, me observing these things,” she said. “I’m creating this world rather than putting myself in it.”
The work in the Sheppard Art Gallery is framed by pale green walls painted with curving hills that turn into striped tails in the corners.
“The title of the exhibit is ‘Humanscape,’ so I was thinking about this animal that’s also a landscape,” Koh said.
The tails are reminiscent of the scenery in a Tim Burton movie. Koh said Burton is her hero.
“That’s my dream, is to make animation at some point in my life,” she said.
In the middle of the floor are three books of cut-outs and prints that Koh made as she was experimenting with inks and papers in printmaking. The framed work on the walls are mostly prints. Some of her larger pieces are ink drawings with color by gouache, a technique of washing color in with water. Koh said what she likes about both techniques is the line detail it’s possible to render.
“There’s always something I can do in drawing that I can’t do in print,” Koh said. “And something I can do in print that I can’t do in drawing.”
- Eunkang Koh’s exhibit runs through Dec. 14. at The Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery in Church Fine Arts.
- The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
- There is a reception on Thursday at 7 p.m., with an artist’s lecture at 5:30 p.m.
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