Jae Ko at Marsha Mateyka - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2000 by J.W. Mahoney

Any sculptor who employs biomorphic shapes can count on their primal appeal; such forms are familiar and often beautiful, two qualities that open channels of pleasant communication with a viewer. But beyond its immediate seductiveness, natural form is assumed to be metaphorical, to be a carrier of feelings or ideas, which is where the real questions begin to be asked. Jae Ko's sculptures, of rolled paper and sumi ink, never stop asking them.

Born in Korea, educated in Japan and the U.S., Ko initiated her mature work in paper when she created an elegy for her deceased father by setting in sand at the Atlantic shore a large roll of paper slit vertically to its center, and exposing it to the rhythms of the tides. The resulting natural chaos in the forms of the paper constituted the beginning of her inquiries into the poetics of flow, which have continued in her recent works.

Her wall-mounted and untitled works range in scale from under a foot to over a yard in their largest dimension. Each involves bending or turning rolls of ink-soaked paper into themselves, creating folds or whorls of curved forms. As metaphors, they often speak of wombs, both as sexual and generative organs, or they may refer more abstractly to power points, voids which attract concentric lines of force and flow around themselves.

Her works encompass wide variations of form. In one 1999 piece, a horseshoe configuration with pointed ends surrounds a central point that extends vertically, in its linear organization of layer after layer of thin, ink-soaked paper, to the inner edge of a surrounding paper circle. In a smaller work of the same year, two whorls are brought together symmetrically in a shape recalling fallopian tubes; they also suggest the fluid dynamics of oil poured on water. In all her pieces, Ko has left no personal mark, only the autonomous sensuousness of her powerfully enigmatic signs.