Skip to Content

Yoosamu: AHL Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Competition Winner

Open 2472 C acrylic on linen canvas2 C led2 C film print2 C polycarbonate2 C 198 9 cm x 162 1 cm

Stamps MFA student Yoosamu was recently awarded third place in the AHL Foundation contemporary visual art competition. 

Established in 2003, AHL Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Korean and Korean-American artists living in the United States by promoting exposure of their work in today’s competitive contemporary art world. In 2004, the foundation created an annual art competition open to all artists of Korean ancestry who are living in the United States. 

The jurors for this competition were Alise Tifentale (Independent Curator, Art Historian, Writer, curator for the Latvia pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale), David Cohen (Editor and Publisher of Artcritical; Founder-Moderator of The Review Panel at the National Academy Museum), and Hyewon Yi (Director and Curator of Amelie A Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury).

The AHL foundation will open a group exhibition for the winners of the competition at Art Mora gallery in Chelsea, NYC on October 22nd

Yoosamu will present his newest painting, Sun Queen, part of his Remake Culture” series, which addresses the phenomenon of American remakes of foreign films through incongruous re-makes” of iconic Western paintings that incorporate elements of Asian animé. 

Yoosamu offers database painting’ that possesses the qualities of the Picture Generation of the 1970s and 80s, but Yoo’s appropriated images derive from a younger generation’s video games and the Internet. The grandes machines of the pre-Impressionist salons of Paris also reappear in these large-scale paintings with their modern nymphs from Manga and modern warriors from videogames.

Spatial Visions: The AHL Foundation 2015 Visual Arts Award Winners
October 22 – November 42015
Opening Reception: October 22nd, 6 – 8pm
ART MORA Gallery, 547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001

Artists: Eunsook Lee/​Buhm Hong/​Yoosamu/​Heelim Hwang
Curated by Hyewon Yi