“On Pattern and Repetition”
Hakgojae Art Center, Seoul, Korea
[Channy Huh Solo Exhibition: On Pattern and Repetition]
In her first solo exhibition <On Pattern and Repetition> Channy Huh explores her visual and conceptual observations on repeat. Her tendency to see and understand the world as a continuous repeat of events and fluctuation works coherently with her background in textiles.
“Repeat in textiles as both inevitable and inconclusive. There is almost always a pattern that is repeated in the way they are constructed or designed, oftentimes both.
A woven, in its most basic description, is a series of weft threads going under and over a group of warp threads in a sequence repeatedly. A knit is a build-up of lines of stitches hooking onto each other in an arrangement. And a print is a continuous pattern made by repeating a certain motif.
With that being said, however, a pattern can differ in varying degrees with material, color, finishing, and handling. A pattern woven with polyester monofilament is smaller in scale, stiff, and even curvy in materiality, while the same pattern woven with wool is likely to be larger, softer, and flatter. Likewise, overprinting with silkscreen breaks an existing motif, and the way pigment bleeds through the screen is unpredictable with every print.”
The artist utilizes the volatility of textile creation to talk about her perspective on the pattern of life. She sees the world as a repetition of beginnings and endings: birth and death, sunrise and sunset, stillness and change, success and failure. She understands opposing ideas as existing in one full circle, one giving birth to another.
<Untitled (transit map)> exemplifies the artist’s point of view through transit map as a reference. She is fascinated by the visual and the functional design nature of transit maps as they poss the quality of complexity and simplicity simultaneously. Similarly, in her work <Inhalation, Exhalation> the artist highlights the blurred line between the act of inhaling and exhaling, a suggestion of continuous flow rather than a directional line.
But within the continuity as a whole, she also cherishes the value of every element, every day, a moment, a memory. Similar to how a single unit of a pattern holds its character, slightly varying from the one previous, she sees us and our experience shifting, turning, reshaping, and reforming. The work <Dawn Air> is her attempt to individualize a morning ritual she shares with her mother. At the same time, in the same place, with the same cup, she and her mother drip coffee. But every morning belongs in her memory differently: the taste of the first sip of coffee, the tone, and the weight of their conversation creating the moment to be exactly what it is. The digitally printed pattern is cut and broken up but then again sawn back into another pattern. The artist honors every part in a whole through constant making and breaking of a repeat. In her silkscreen piece <A Glitch in the Matrix of Memory> overprinting a pattern slightly off the grid create an effect resembling a glitch phenomenon on a digital screen when an unexpected error or change occurs. Here, the offset composition of a single pattern represents the fickle nature of human memory.
Channy Huh’s work is on repetition. She uses pattern to describe the eventual oneness of all things, but she also uses pattern to implicate countless variables within one. She notices this in her work in textiles and she experiences this as she learns about the world.
