When I first went to the museum opening at the beginning of the semester, probably the most prominent thing I noted was the work of Joo Lee Kang. Her mutated animals were mesmerizing and intriguing to me, and I had a good deal of questions about her process and why she decided to make these prints/plates.
Luckily, Kang came to UNH to give an artist lecture about the installation. Some background on Kang: she's from South Korea, has a BFA from Tufts university and has been published in numerous publications including The Boston Globe and Boston Korea Magazine. She picked up her interest in nature, and its perversion in the cities, from the second hand accounts of the country side from her parents.
She would visit different medical museums to study the stuffed animal oddities they had there, and made some of her work based on that and other pictorial sources.
Her process involves using a ballpoint pen to draw multiple layers of ink, creating a depth not available with other pen and ink methods. The idea for her subjects, the mutated animals, came from a trip back to Korea after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. When she went over there, it showed her how much the nuclear materials were affecting the country: people weren't eating seafood, or buying fine Japanese makeup due to fear of radiation contamination. The blue of these particular images comes from the simple idea that blue equates with water, and specifically the ocean, and helps tie some of the ideas of the work together.
Interestingly, Kang always tries to be at the installation of her works, and UNH was no exception: she was here for three days setting up. She spent much of that time working on a piece that needed to be finished on site and only about a third of it could be done in the studio.
