KOREAN ART NEWS - July 2025
If I Forget, Remind Me, Siobhan McBride, 2024, Acrylic gouache, paint marker and colored pencil on paper on panel, 24 x 18"
By Siobhan McBride
This month we begin what we hope will be a continuing feature of Korean art and artists. This month we feature the works of Siobhan McBride, a KCCNYC student.
Siobhan’s words about her art:
Stay Close, 2024, Acrylic gouache, painter marker and colored pencil on
2024, Acrylic gouache, painter marker and colored pencil on paper on panel, 24 × 18
The paintings present views of a place that is both intimate and strange. Shapes lock together, tectonically tense, creating a sense of anxiety, only to slip past one another like playing cards. I want the scenes to feel full of potential energy, as if the space is prickly with static, charged with the anticipation of an encounter, or blushing in its aftermath. The paintings are descriptions of weird and quotidian experiences, things caught in the corner of my eye, and an attempt to conjure slippery memories. I hope the work is uneasy and suspenseful like the excitement of exploring a new place, and the thrill of knowing you are drifting back into a frightening dream.
My paintings are pieced together from direct personal experiences documented in photography. I am interested in unusual light and color worlds, subject matter that poses interesting problems for my specific painting process and building compositions with complex and compartmentalized spaces. Windows, cut-outs, and portals of different kinds frequently recur and compete in the work. Framing devices, like a border of foliage or open car door, provide context and contrast for an embedded vignette to exist within the larger painting. I intend for viewers to imaginatively move through the spaces, finding zones that both enclose and offer escape from the structured but often claustrophobic scenes.
The Wind Show is Over Now
2024, Acrylic gouache, paint maker and colored pencil on paper on panel, 24 x 18 inches
Numerous painted shapes are described with color gradients bound by sharp taped edges. The process of laying down tape, carving into it with an x-acto blade, removing the incised shape and painting into that void is both delicate and violent. Soft watercolor paper, the most appropriate substrate for gouache, is assaulted by numerous cuts. Tiny shapes are painted and repainted many times creating a dynamic surface that appears flat, but consists of numerous raised plateaus reminiscent of tiered agriculture. Gradients which change color and/or value gradually and smoothly create movement, while the raised edges created by masking are persistently static and automatically create a hard stop. The movement combined with sharpness builds tension, clarity and a degree of discomfort.
Prior to my trip to Seoul, I thought I had never explored my adoption in the work, but I was surprised to discover traces of it existing there, in pictorial space and painting process, the entire time. I’ve begun to understand these painted spaces as metaphorical constructions of what I perceive as a complex personal identity. Being a Korean person raised in a white family, I was always somewhat incongruent in both white and asian communities. This liminal state, both disorienting and fragmented, also offers rich opportunities for discovery and surprise.
The work, which is entirely hand painted, is often confused with digital images. This is due to the sharp edges and vibrant color worlds. I build the paintings by viewing the source imagery on a screen with each individual image occupying its own window. In a typical work session, multiple windows stack and slide between one another mimicking the painting process of pulling together disparate imagery and layering them together on a flat surface in paint. I welcome this misidentification of medium as it mirrors my own slippery identity and existence caught between two worlds, pigment and pixel. Since beginning Korean language study in 2022, Hangul text has found its way into the painting imagery, providing another cultural layer and means for description or misinterpretation.
I am interested in generating paintings derived solely from source imagery from South Korea, but I am also interested in combining it with source imagery from back home in the U.S. The act of combining imagery from the two countries, in a single image or exhibition set, is deeply significant to me and extends the metaphor of mixed race adoption in a powerful way.
I am currently back in Korea, attending an artist residency in Gwangju - Horanggasy Creative Studio. The city is beautiful, famous for its excellent food and art (the Gwangju Biennale happens here). The organization makes business cards for each of the residents and I chose to include the Korea name I was given at birth, 혜정. I have never used this name before and it feels strange and exciting to do so now. I also think it might be a little easier for Korean speakers to use as my Gaelic name has a tricky spelling. My adopted father, John Patrick McBride, was of Irish descent and my parents thought Siobhan McBride might be a good name for a writer or artist.
Click through below for a gallery of Siobhan’s work:
