PACIFIC ABSTRACTIONS

Perrotin Los Angeles opens its fall 2024 season on September 21 with Pacific Abstractions.

September 21 – November 9, 2024

Curated by Perrotin Senior Director Jennifer King, and featuring works by Naotaka Hiro, Kazuo Kadonaga, Lee Bae, Yunhee Min, Keisho Okayama, Park Seo-Bo, and Shim Moon-Seup, Pacific Abstractions proposes a fresh art historical view on contemporary abstract art, focusing on the transpacific artistic dialogues between Asia and the West Coast. By bringing together artworks by Asian and Asian-American artists practicing on both sides of the Pacific, the exhibition celebrates the local and global artistic connections occasioned by Perrotin’s recent expansion to Los Angeles.

Though the seven artists in Pacific Abstractions cannot be defined by a single artistic movement or school, they share a thoughtful exploration of materials, process, and form. Attention to the properties and possibilities of media such as paint, graphite, charcoal ink, canvas, paper, wood, and glass are on breathtaking display. In almost every artwork, the inscription of time—the durational aspect of making—is subtly perceptible. Unlike the industrial logic of some abstract practices, an organic and tactile sensibility infuses every work in the exhibition.

Notably, the artworks in Pacific Abstractions were all made outside the geographic locations that have long centered critical discourses about postwar abstract art. Until recently, major figures of postwar Korean and Japanese art were almost completely absent from English language scholarship, with textbooks of contemporary art heavily weighted towards developments in New York and Europe.

Perhaps for this reason, there is a freshness to these works that feels both challenging and decisive—a creativeness with materials, leading to unique formal vocabularies. Using the most basic tenets of abstraction (color, gesture, shape, line), the works speak to each other about the uncharted possibilities of abstraction—conversations one can imagine crossing back and forth across the Pacific.