John Pai - Meditation: Myth and Memory

Gallery Hyundai is pleased to present “Meditation: Myth and Memory”, an exhibition of Korean American sculptor John Pai, a major force in the Korean American diaspora of the last half-century. The opening reception takes place on Thursday September 10, 6-8pm at Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space.

This exhibition seeks to provide a space for meditation where myth and memory, as in Pai’s world, could be considered as companions—at times synchronous, and at times on their own path, but never stagnant. Centering around his two major series Heaven and Earth (2024) and Entropy’s Sirens (1997) trio, it marks the first occasion the trio is presented as a group including two previously unseen pieces, also accompanied by a selection of sculptures and drawings.

Notably in the Heaven and Earth series, a single point becomes a line, then a form, and appears to trail off to gesture to the space around it, going past the artist’s agency and into another realm. This work manifests Pai’s guiding ethos, where the artist’s mind (and the memories and ideas contained within the artist) inform his beginning but the work ultimately develops in conversation with the material and work’s own response. This conversational and improvisational method demonstrates Pai’s understanding that memories are not stable but shift with the everchanging present, sometimes appearing closer to myth rather than reality. Completed when Pai was eighty-seven years old, this grouping of sculptures reveal an artist in his maturity who still remains playful and deeply curious.

Pai is gaining heightened recognition for his indisputable contributions to sculpting with steel as well as his groundbreaking pedagogical methods since becoming the youngest appointed professor at Pratt Institute in 1965, eventually becoming the director of fine art, then chairman of the sculpture department, a post he remained in for thirty-seven years. Referred to as “drawing in space,” his signature use of numerous thin, short steel rods with a hand-held welding tool reflected Pai’s active engagements with burgeoning movements in postwar New York such as the American Bauhaus and Neo-Avant-Garde. Pai’s sculptures are born out of a dynamic field of inquiry, unbridled by discipline, such as topology, physics, phenomenology, and musical processes of improvisation. Following his major retrospective exhibition held in April 2024 at the Korean Cultural Center in New York called John Pai: Eternal Moment and his solo exhibition Shared Destinies at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul later that year, this presentation is an opportunity for closer examination of Pai’s guiding ethos; a process of intimate surrender, both with materials, as well as his relationship to the world.