Shorelines, Bristlecones, and Glaciers:

Nature and the Art of Jae Ko 

Those places where land converges to a point and is met all around by water offer a catalogue of propositions about the remarkable force and rhythm of nature. These are the last spots to step before we are unanchored into a vast liquid flow, resistant to human development and density. They are also locations where constant exchange occurs. Water erodes and deposits in ways unseen until the effects accumulate across various registers of time. We can contemplate the momentary ripples of currents, the daily tides, and the varying textures seasons bring to surfaces, as well as the formidable disturbances of 100-year storms and climate change. Trees bend dramatically to find conducive conditions, while fragments of sea glass and encrusted metal along the shore, the detritus of old shipwrecks, testify that human matter is also subject to the impact of water and the inevitability of change. For the last 20 years, Jae Ko has maintained a studio on an area of high ground just steps away from such a point where the Potomac River flows into the Chesapeake Bay and beyond into the Atlantic Ocean. Fresh and salt water mingle here, as do natural and human histories formed over short durations and vast stretches of time.

The emphatic, illuminating presence of nature, which feeds Ko’s sculpture and artistic philosophy, has not always been such an immediate part of her surroundings. The first decades of the artist’s life were defined by the stories of late-20th-century cities. Born in 1960s Pyeongtaek, South Korea, a town about 40 miles south of Seoul, Ko remembers the capital of South Korea as a “concrete world.” She moved to Tokyo in her late teens, studying art there throughout the 1980s as the megalopolis burgeoned into an international hub of economic activity and technology. By the mid-1990s, Ko had relocated to the East Coast of the United States to pursue her graduate degree in Baltimore, a city not only half a globe away, but also one on the opposite side of the growth cycle with its shrinking population and declining manufacturing industries.

Seemingly in reaction to the urban growth and decay manifested in the hard surfaces and rigid, electrified geometries of these cities, Ko visited an empty winter beach along the Atlantic to create experimental artworks. Yielding control to the ocean as if it were a collaborator, she buried utilitarian Kraft paper in the sand, then let the tide wash over the material repeatedly before recovering it. Rather than dissolve or tear the paper, the ocean caused it to soften and coalesce into a more enduring object, beautiful in its irregular clefts and swells and profound in its expression of nature’s powerful undercurrents.

Ko has long since brought her process back into the studio, replacing brown Kraft paper with white adding machine tape, which she unrolls and then rerolls into large undulating shapes before submerging them into baths of calligraphic and sumi inks. When removed from these lush pools, the absorbent paper blossoms into velvety violets, effulgent ultramarines, mossy greens, and endless crimsons. The sculptures, with their strong curving contours, suggest a kind of organic heraldry, a pageant of rare hues that might be discovered in the details of peacock tails, the shaded undersides of flower petals, and the untouched depths of remote forests.

Works made with sumi ink deepen into a singularly rich black as the ink, made from the soot of pine trees, seeps into a microscopic network of paper fibers, themselves pulped from trees. This chemical reunion lends conceptual harmony to Ko’s gorgeous formal explorations. As with her observations of the shoreline, the artist is drawn to trees for the different cycles of time they encompass, from the annual sprouting of branches, leaves, or needles to the aggregation of growth rings over a specimen’s life. Similarly, concentric ridges accrete throughout Ko’s body of work, generated through the hours of labor and care spent preparing each turned form and inflected by the years over which she has achieved a nuanced understanding of how to balance the roles of control and chance in her process.

In particular, bristlecone pines, found in a limited range of the Western United States, inspire the artist. Some species of these pines have the capacity to live for 5,000 years, a span thought to be longer than that of any other organism. Growing as slowly as one inch every 100 years, the pines root in limestone ridges at high elevations, inhospitable to other vegetation. Exposure to harsh weather conditions shapes the trees into sculptural wonders, at the same time their isolation from other plants acts as a natural buffer from fire. The almost impossibly lifted and twisted spirals of Ko’s pedestal works evoke the gnarled growth patterns and astonishing stability of the pines, and the artist adds a subtle sheen of graphite powder to their surfaces to heighten the appearance of their tree-like rings of paper. Recalling the tradition of Asian scholars’ stones, Ko provides an abstract meditation on the physical qualities of a tree, in which we can discern lessons on adaptability, endurance, and finding possibility within limitations, critical lessons for living in our precarious era of accelerating planetary change. 

There are more recent art historical comparisons to make with Ko’s art. Her inventive approaches share the exploratory spirit of the post-WWII Japanese Gutai group, comprised of artists who experimented with unconventional materials, including mud and newspaper, and radical, performance-based methods of creating images from ostensibly destructive gestures like tearing screens and hurdling ink at paper. Further resonances can be detected between Ko’s works and those of the American Post-Minimalists of the late 1960s and 70s. These artists placed importance on materials like felt, latex, lead, and even earth itself, asserting their unique, at times haphazard physicality beyond the hard-edged, manufactured structures that characterized an earlier generation of Minimal sculpture produced by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and others.

For Ko, however, the influence of nature is far greater than that of art history. Perhaps then, the writings of Donna Haraway might serve as an intellectual framework for interpreting Ko’s work. Haraway combines a background in biology and feminist studies as she considers the models that non-human inhabitants of the Earth provide for survival in an epoch of human harm to the planet’s biosphere. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is another thinker who turns specifically to pine trees, as well as Matsuke mushrooms, a culinary prize which thrives amidst them, as examples of resilient actors supporting human communities and natural ecologies that might otherwise collapse. Indeed, the intricate surfaces of Ko’s works conjure the tender gills of the Matsuke, revealing that strength and delicacy can be naturally companionable attributes.

Despite the kinship of Ko and these influential scholars as all three seek to reintegrate humanity into the natural world and upend notions that the former can master the latter, Ko is driven not by academic theory, but by an intuitive and direct perception of nature, encountered around her Mid-Atlantic studio and also during trips throughout the North American landscape. She has explored Southwestern bristlecone groves and deserts, glaciers in outlying regions of Canada, and the Arctic tundra, venturing as far away from signs of fellow humans as possible to absorb the colors, textures, shapes, and other evidence of the infinitesimal movement of plants, earth, rock, and ice.

Her largest works don’t depict these topographies in the manner of landscape painters and photographers (Ko doesn’t sketch or photograph during these trips). Rather her work represents the sublime dynamics of majestic expanses. For instance, wedges of mustard yellow compacted into steel frames shimmer like heat glistening off sand or mineral-rich muds dried into exquisite networks of fissures. And, inspired by the advance and recession of glaciers, life-altering in its impact but imperceptible to a transitory bystander, Ko creates towering stacks of loosely rolled, undyed paper. Mounting walls, these rolls variously compress into strata and spring outward in dramatic cantilevers; their amassed shape frozen by the artist before the components careen into disorder. Ko invites her viewers to linger in this sense of radiant suspension, of stillness and beauty, that permits us to contemplate change, while raising us above the frequent tumult of contemporary life.

-Kristen Hileman

January 30, 2024