Jae Ko: Deconstruction as Invention

Much of the pleasure in viewing Jae Ko’s new sculpture is in seeing how the pieces work both denotatively and connotatively to create so many interpretive possibilities.

At first glance, the pieces present themselves as if they were merely blank facts.  That is, the sculptures seem only to exist, and, crazily, without attribution.  They are there; they do inhabit space.  They can be viewed, measured, touched, and examined.  But because they look strange and lack context (for the most part, the works are untitled), the sculptures are initially enigmatic, and feel odd to approach. They are simply there, waiting to be engaged.

Seen from different angles and in different light, Ko’s sculptures seem perpetually to reinvent themselves, to reconstitute themselves.  Whorls of fossil turn to bone and then, even, to toothpaste.  Textures change as well, from wet and gooey one moment to dry and wooden the next.  Shadows well up in scallops and light hardens over protuberances, giving the static pieces an amazing mutability of form with every change in perspective.

Working denotatively, one might interpret the rolled paper and glue sculptures as a critique of the current capitalist economic system with its emphasis on commodification.  The paper is paper like that used in an adding machine to total up sales or purchases, all figures of a supply and demand economy which has come unraveled and undone, indicating the collapse of the capitalist system and our current world order. 

Most powerful in Ko’s work is the way in which she constructs new ideas and new notions for living in the post apocalyptic, post 9-11 world.  These ideas connote primitive, natural, abstract, ethereal, and Eastern themes for renewal, peace, and tranquility among the world’s people.  They also suggest for man a new relationship with the world: an eco-centric relationship that is not merely sensitive to the miraculous workings and interconnectedness of the natural world but rather defined entirely by them. 

All of Ko’s best sculptures seem to work in the same way, moving from that which is denotative to that which is connotative—or from deconstruction to construction, from disorder to order: out of chaos and collapse to new order and life.  Only a very good artist can achieve a thematic and technical resonance in her work that develops the symbiotic relationship between the two far more than anything that can be accomplished one without the other.  In Ko’s new exhibit, we may be looking at the work of a budding master.


John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic