Tribeca, New York
John Hee Taek Chae
Third
D. D. D. D.D. D. D. D. is happy to present John Hee Taek Chae’s upcoming solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled Third, this marks the first solo exhibition of Chae’s work since the gallery’s relocation to our Leonard Street location, and his third with the gallery overall. The title also refers to his newfound status as a father and his newborn son’s identity as a third-generation Korean American, brought into the world as Chae enters his third year living in a rural part of western New York. In this exhibition, the artist once again applies his intense scrutiny of the past, present, and future through found and excavated images. Sources of which range from “Hometown Heroes” banners often found in small towns to familial archives, current events, and the art histories of Korea, Europe, and the United States. The artist then uses his subjectivity as a sharp scalpel with which to dissect and reconfigure the realities that gave rise to these images. The resulting work takes the form of two-sided banners deep in affect with collapsed propaganda, and paintings of masks, both as historical remnants, and as those worn today. Anchoring the exhibition are two large paintings by Chae, Quilt and The Death of the Buddha. Quilt, a reconstructed painting made from previous paintings and old military patches, serves as a record that traces through time the familial, personal, and professional. The Death of the Buddha, fittingly the third time Chae has painted the motif, attempts to reconcile such patchwork. The complex psychic and symbolic permutations of the exhibition find an allegorical moment of respite in the Buddha painting, where the central motif presents an alternative proposition, a site of meditations juxtaposed against unceasing re-generation. John Hee Taek Chae (b. 1988) is an artist and educator whose work explores the hybridization and mutation of visual culture, primarily through the practice of painting. Chae received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010 and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. His previous solo exhibitions include Hallucination at D. D. D. D. (New York, NY), A Dark and Bloody Ground at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Shed Your Eyes at March (New York, NY), and Make. Believe. at MOCA Jacksonville (Jacksonville, FL), among others. Chae was awarded the MacDowell Fellowship in 2021, was a Yaddo Fellow in 2022, and the Cynthia Wood Mitchell Scholar in Residence at the University of Houston in 2023, and was the recipient of an AHL Foundation Visual Artist award in 2024. He has been on panels at the Hammer Museum and Maryland Institute College of Art, and given guest lectures at Kent State University and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University.