John Pai's Liquid Steel: Reading Room & Listening Session
About this Event
Gallery Hyundai New York hosts a summer evening of collective reading, listening, and drawing inspired by John Pai’s lifelong engagement with music. As a seasoned multiinstrumentalist, Pai saw his sculptures as akin to musical improvisation, introducing musical ideas to his groundbreaking, interdisciplinary curriculum at Pratt University by inviting composer and jazz pianist Hall Overton, cellist James Kreger, and South Korean concert pianist Kun-woo Paik to the classroom.
The evening opens with a collective reading of excerpts from the monograph Liquid Steel and other texts relating to Pai’s relationship with music, accompanied by a discussion on how sonic qualities like timbre, rhythm, and harmony may inspire visual and tactile experimentation. The second part of the evening will comprise of a listening session of John Pai’s favorite records, where attendees are invited to converse with the music with improvisational drawing. The gallery will provide drawing paper, pencil, and charcoal, and attendees are welcome to bring additional materials.
About the artist
Born in Seoul in 1937, John Pai spent his childhood in Ilsan, Korea, before moving to the United States in 1949. As a Korean American artist, he occupies a singular but multifaceted position within the field of welded steel sculpture. While Pai’s welded sculptures are formally and aesthetically distinct from American Minimalism, his signature use of countless thin, short steel rods echoes burgeoning movements in postwar New York: the American Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism that was reconjured in the name of Neo-Avant-Garde, and reductionist abstract sculpture. Atop this rich cultural soil, Pai developed his own interdisciplinary sphere of interests encompassing music, visual art, mathematics, and science, which he applied not only to his own practice but also as a pedagogical foundation to his extended teaching career at Pratt Institute. He eroded the distinction between inside and outside through topology, was inspired by natural science to embrace coincidence in his process and to warp the modernist grid, and facilitated phenomenological encounters between parts and whole as well as between works and their environment. Furthermore, Pai’s artistic language is inseparable from the conceptual implications of his process of melting solid steel into liquid, and of the natural erosion of resulting steel sculptures, pointing to the transferability between one medium to another and between East and West.
About John Pai: Liquid Steel
Rizzoli Electa
Author John Yau, Contributions by Darren Aronofsky
Published in 2023, Liquid Steel is the first comprehensive monograph on the master contemporary Korean American sculptor, from his seminal wire sculptures to his never-before-seen early works formed of steel. It interweaves Pai’s biography with his evolving work, accompanied by artist notes and an interview with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.
The monograph is available for sale exclusively in person at Gallery Hyundai and Gallery Hyundai New York.
Cover image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Hyundai.
Where is it happening?
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