Review: In Kyoung Chun and Huey Lee offer visual bliss in ‘Earthly Delights’

At Swan Coach House Gallery, artists In Kyoung Chun and Huey Lee offer an exhibition saturated with vibrant colors, pleasant scenes and exuberant figures that reflect thoughtful memories and tender moments. Chun’s paintings are delectable, depicting cozy table settings and florid flowered landscapes that contain a quiet immensity. Impressively, Lee matches this energy through ceramic vessels of hybridized forms that drip with color and expressive energy as if bursting to life. The artists’ fantastical joyful joyous scenes complement each other, and what could feel like an over-saturation of color and content is tempered through the curatorial decisions in this exhibition. 

Lee’s work is animated to say the least. Stoneware vessels take the form of animals such as tigers or dogs that are abstracted, caricatured and melded together with likewise cartoonish human forms. The vessels are glazed excessively in a runny fashion, resulting in a design that’s opaque in some areas and translucent in others. A dog’s head sprouts from the top of Sculptural Vessel – Kansas City Odd Dream, while further down the vessel loses a clear pronunciation. There, two gold eyes peer sideways into a hand with yet another animal figure underneath, at the very bottom, three drippy gold stripes and swoosh, alluding to iconic sneakers. 

These pieces are funny — psychedelic, even — and yet they manage to retain elegance in their form and stature. Some of Lee’s works take on a much more straightforward approach, such as Figurative Painting – Lidded Vessel and Appropriated Stripes, where a more conventional vessel shape is used or the figure is more obvious. Even for those that are more traditional, Lee’s works still embody consistent aesthetics and style. They are humorous and unapologetic, offering a confessional quality where phrases such as “We adore you,” and “I’m with you!” are spelled out in gold. Another phrase, “Shell out more $,” twists a playful jab at viewers and collectors to ground the reality that earthly delights, unlike heavenly ones, can be bought. 

While Lee’s bloated vessels luster color, Chun proves an equal vibrancy through her poised and unflinching paintings. Often depicting interior spaces, such as table settings with votives that illuminate their surroundings, Chun’s scenes are familiar, ubiquitous with a certain homeliness to them but also a refined dining or garden setting. They are both unpretentious and grounded, allowing viewers to feel simultaneously right at home or miles away. 

Simple as they may seem, Chun’s paintings are handled with such care that it imbues a profound quality. Watercolor paintings are full of grace, masterfully balancing vivid colors and swaths of blank negative space. The experience is like looking into the sun, blinding whiteness that gives way eventually to illuminating color, particularly those of green vegetation, flowers and vivacious landscapes. As deftly as Chun handles her watercolor paintings, she also offers a rich spread of oil paintings that feature a sumptuous display of color, more vibrant and lush than anything that can be afforded materially through watercolor. To achieve either effect is no small feat, and yet Chun executes both in a manner that is uncompromising and reverent for each respective medium and completed painting. 

The exhibition offers a longingly pleasant presentation of simple and intimate, yet commonplace nuances that capture moments of small joy and everyday pleasures. Lee’s figures practically leap from their pedestals, their muddled and morphing figures exclaiming, crying out and declaring themselves dynamically. In contrast, Chun’s paintings assert themselves confidently and unobtrusively, never relegated to background noise or a mild moment. There is much to delight in Earthly Delights, on view at Swan Coach House Gallery through February 19.

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Noah Reyes is an artist taking steps in many different directions, resulting in a continuous dance between curating, writing and artmaking.