www.springbreakartshow.com
Collector’s Preview | Tuesday, March 3, 11am - 5pm
Press Preview | Tuesday, March 3 - 5pm
VIP Opening Night | Tuesday, March 3, 5 - 9pm
Regular Show Days | Wednesday March 4 - Monday, March 9, 11am - 8pm
CHRISTINE PARK GALLERY is delighted to announce its first participation in the SPRING/BREAK Art Show New York with a solo booth by New York-based artist Mathew Tom (b.1984). In its 2020 New York edition, the gallery will showcase Tom’s recent body of work entitled The Pure Land Revisited. This project is an extension of his latest solo exhibition with the gallery in December 2018, The Pure Land, in which Tom explored images from two worlds traditionally considered diametrically opposed: the “East” and “West”. Now Tom enriches this dialectic with imagery sourced from both contemporary pop culture and art history. Tom’s training in Korean Minhwa painting in Gwangju informs his use of blurred paint strokes and overlapping layers to synthesize images with symbols significant to Eastern and Western cultures: Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, Disney cartoons, Tibetan thangkas, European botanical illustrations, and Korean still-life paintings.
Since his first solo exhibition, Tom’s reinterpretations of historical artworks have become a playful way for him to express his mixed, Chinese-American cultural identity. His childhood in Florida spawned an interest in pop media and how it functions as modern-day religious iconography. By juxtaposing these symbols with art historical references, Tom investigates cultural appropriation and its broader meaning in an increasingly borderless, globalized society.