Kuon (Eternal Flow of Time): Mayumi Amada

Through her multimedia installations and sculpture, Amada creates elaborate cut-outs representing the patterns of life and the repeated forms that are shared across generations. Using doilies and lacework patterns as a basis for exploring time, her exhibition “Kuon” (Japanese for the Buddhist concept of time), is full of the dichotomies that inhabit everyday lives, transforming man-made, cast-off materials into glowing, weightless, natural forms. She prunes the recyclable materials around her to create facsimiles of nature, suggesting a balance among natural and man-made elements. Her aesthetic meditations on gender, ancestry, and craft ponder the mundane amid the ongoing cycles of life, death, and regeneration.

The Voided: Eun-Kyung Suh

The idea of encapsulating memory and experience is an ongoing theme in the work of Minnesota artist Eun-Kyung Suh. Born and raised in South Korea, Suh finds inspiration in various culturally specific container-like objects, such as Korean funereal headwear and traditional Korean wrapping cloths called bojagi. Suh creates stylized, three dimensional versions of these objects as storage vessels, visual metaphors implying the way most people store the memories of their life experiences. As Suh stitches individual pieces of fabric together, the elaborate patchwork becomes a metaphor for the interplay between personal history and public events.

Download the exhibition brochures: Mayumi Amada, “Kuon (Eternal Flow of Time)” (pdf) and Eun-Kyung Suh, “The Voided” (pdf)

Generous support for MAEP is provided by The McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation.