FLLAC event at KooNewYork

Weintana Abraha Guest Writer

The Vassar community will soon be presented with a unique opportunity to explore modern Asian art. On Thursday, March 1, the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will hold the opening of the third annual East Meets West gallery visit series at KooNewYork in Manhattan. Esteemed alumna Jiyoung Koo ’91—one of the premier Korean art dealers and scholars in the country—is curator of the gallery.

Koo is an example of the roles Vassar graduates have created for themselves in the world of fine art, and demonstrates that there are more options for artistic cognoscenti than just being an artist or an art academic. Koo has an important role in promoting and displaying art in all its different shapes and formats. She emigrated from South Korea as a child, eventually graduating from Vassar with a bachelor’s degree in art history. Almost immediately afterwards, Koo set down an astonishingly quick career path.

Soon after graduation in 1991, Koo joined the staff of the acclaimed Sotheby’s auction house. In 1996, she became the auction house’s Korean Art Department Director and was named Managing Director of Sotheby’s Korea in 1999. She has guest lectured at universities such as UCLA and the College of Visual Arts and regularly lectures at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2001, she opened KooNewYork, her own art gallery. The gallery features both classic and contemporary Korean artwork ranging from pottery to sculpture to photography that has been bought, borrowed and donated from collectors in America, Europe and Asia.

In the five years since its opening, Koo’s gallery has already made a big splash in the art world. According to Orientations, a magazine for collectors of Asian art, last year Koo unveiled two rare Buddhist art discoveries of small portable gilt-bronze devotional altars dating to the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392 A.D.). This past September, modern Korean ceramics from a private American collection were on display at KooNewYork; in December, KooNewYork created an event called Entertaining and Décor with Asian Art to attract young collectors. The show included limited editions of modern functional ceramics by the likes of artists Lee In-Chin, Cho Sung-Mook, and Lee Un-bom.

These accomplishments are only the beginning. KooNewYork’s future keeps looking up: its Web site (koonewyork.com) announced the gallery’s first public exhibition during the renowned annual International Asian Art Fair, being held at the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan this April. With all of these accomplishments, this young gallery is on the cusp of world achievement—an exciting prospect for Vassar art majors interested in careers in the field like Koo’s.

KooNewYork is located at 126 East 64th Street, Second Floor, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Admission is $35 ($15 for student Friends), and the event will take place from 6-8 p.m.