The Angell Gallery (890 Queen St. W., angellgallery.com) is back in form with “Uniformitarian Principle” from painter Min Hyung, who’s still a student at OCAD. Hyung is a remarkably gusty painter, liberally borrowing some of the best ideas around – note her fondness for architectural references – and not being in the least bit apologetic about it. Her ominous landscapes of luxury, calm and sensuality often contain a puddle of “blobs,” as she calls them, which interrupt the surface like the rash of pixels that pop up across a monitor as a sign that something is wrong with a DVD. Even here Hyung is aggressive. Each blob is a vividly coloured puddle of thick acrylic. The show continues to Saturday.
Any artist who comes up with a killer painting title like Min Hyung's Blow Spaces Away from The Whirling Blades of the Fan is surely halfway home. And the wondrously berserk painting that proudly shoulders her kinetic title - a central part of Hyung's exhibition called Uniformitarian Principle - is a barn-burner.
The title of her show clearly doesn't have quite the same liftoff - indeed, repeated readings of Hyung's intolerably prolix essay, "Background Information Re Min's Work" (which is all about tectonic plates and "spontaneous catastrophic actions" in the earth) muddies more water than it clarifies.
So skip the essay. Hyung is still only in her fourth year at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and she's probably up to her eyebrows in critical bibble-babble. But she paints stirring, hectic, dazzlingly convulsive paintings. Her work is inescapably seductive and trades so authoritatively in transactions of painterly desire, you'd think she had made a pact with some Mephistopheles of painting: She gives over her soul and as a result is made privy to several ways to knock the public dead.
The canny Hyung attempts to address the whole hot neo-landscape preoccupation, for example, and folds into it an equally hot preoccupation with architecture. Then she binds any split between these city and country cousins by showering them with candy-bright blobs of acrylic pigment, as energetic as atoms.
In a way, Hyung's painted operas about flux, uncertainty, threat and purification are as salutary as painting gets these days and a case could be made for their moral centrality - even their necessity - in art right now: Are these eye-popping essays in upheaval about cleansing or purgation? Do they offer a sustaining joy - or a neo-biblical plague of rainbow-coloured retribution? Can Hyung's rapturous paintings heal - or are they merely hyperventilating models of dissolution?
A painting and drawing student at OCAD, Min Hyung has matured considerably over a short period of time. She populates her works with little multicoloured blobs of acrylic—think Skittles—which in recent shows have, as groupings in front of broader strokes, come to resemble outer space phenomena. Her new effort showcases these globules in a dramatically new light: as patina on dream-like views of contemporary luxury architecture. In some instances they populate pools, like flocks of children’s rubber balls; in others they join together, forming bodies that dive and swim across showrooms and terraces.
September 2011
