"Jae Ko", Washington, DC, at Marsha Mateyka Gallery by Nord Wennerstrom ARTFORUM, January 2007, p. 255 Jae Ko's most recent sculptures are more aggressive in their physicality and more complex in their surface treatment than her earlier work. Ko uses large, tightly bound spools of adding-machine paper that she wraps, folds, and contorts like taffy. Her previous exhibitions featured low, largely symmetrical iridescent black or colored wall reliefs-round, ovoid, and square- whose subtle surface modulations suggested labia, the glyphs of Asian signature seals, or topographic models of old, eroded hills. The Washington, DC-based artist, born in Korea and educated in Tokyo, travels extensively in North America, finding inspiration in unusual and extreme natural forms. The wall reliefs and floor pieces in her new show were in fact inspired by the wind-blasted trunks of the ancient bristlecone pines that the artist encountered on a trip to California's White Mountains. Ko's new work is notable for its defter manipulation of the chosen medium, its expanded visual vocabulary of subtle, awkwardly elegant forms, and its greater sense of authority. Ko now forcefully torques and twists the spools, yielding more expressive results. As with Richard Serra's early thrown lead pieces, these objects make us immediately aware of the artist's active participation. Compositionally, she fuses the swooping curves of Bernar Venet with the ebullient swerving ribbons of Karin Davie and the efficient excessiveness of Joel Shapiro. The new works suggest tornadoes and the great, exaggerated hair bun that Marsha Graham sported in her later years. There's also a palpable sense of animation, as though these works were bodies in motion suddenly frozen, another point of difference from her earlier work. "Untitled (Jk 508)", (all works 2006) suggests a whirling dervish channeling the rearing motion of a hooded cobra; "Untitled (JK 521)" rifts on the giant cylinders of a turbine generator; and "Untitled (JK 506) resembles a portion of an enormous drill bit or an endless coiling column. Several groupings of works suggested animals, especially "Untitled (JK 516) and "Untitled (JK 520) ", which together looked like a bitch and pup. There's a degree of spontaneity and imperfection to these forms that makes them convincingly organic, a reminder that they are the results of an evolving dialogue between artist and material. Unlike, say, Hiroshi Sugimoto's recent sculptures of idealized objects, Ko's pieces sag and flop in places; they're mildly ungainly and off-kilter; and there is a naturalness to them that makes them more credible, as though they are experiments gone awry. "Untitled (JK 513)", for example, resembles a couple of wheels on an axle where one wheel has collapsed, while "Untitled (JK 501)" appears to be spinning our of control. Ko's surface treatment are particularly beguiling: While her earlier works were soaked in traditional Asian inks, the new sculptures are also coated in glue ( and the darker-colored ones additionally in graphite ). The treated paper's hard carapace could easily be mistaken for fiberglass, plastic, or ceramic. In its natural state, the mix has a dull, cream color, while the addition of graphite yields a matte, ersatz metallic sheen. Overall, this body of work evinces a combination of maturity, liberation, and self-assuredness that marks a significant shift for th artist, away from an early tendency toward overproduction and irresolution and toward a system of objects that feels both complete within itself and poised for further development. "Washington, DC. : Jae Ko at Marsha Mateyka" by J. W. Mahoney, Art in America, July, 2000. Any sculptor who employs biomorphic shapes can count on their primal appeal; such forms are familiar and often beautiful, two qualities that open channels of pleasant communication with a viewer. But beyond its immediate seductiveness, natural form is assumed to be metaphorical to be a carrier of feelings or ideas, which is where the real questions begin to be asked. Jae Ko's sculptures of rolled paper and sumi ink, never stop asking them. Born in Korea, educated in Japan and the U. S., Ko initiated her mature work in paper when she created an elegy for her deceased father by setting in sand at the Atlantic shore a large roll of paper slit vertically to its center, and exposing it to the rhythms of the tides. The resulting natural chaos in the forms of the paper constituted the beginning of her inquiries into the poetics of flow, which have continued in her recent works. Her wall-mounted and untitled works range in scale from under a foot to over a yard in their largest dimension. Each involves bending or turning rolls of ink soaked paper into themselves, creating folds or whorls of curved forms. As metaphors, they often speak of wombs both as sexual and generative organs or they may refer more abstractly to power points, voids which attract concentric lines of force and flow around themselves. Her works encompass wide variations of form. In one 1999 piece, a horseshoe configuration with pointed ends surrounds a central point that extends vertically. In its linear organization of layer after layer of thin, ink-soaked paper, to the inner edge of a surrounding paper circle. In a smaller work of the same year, two whorls are brought together symmetrically in a shape recalling fallopian tubes; they also suggest the fluid dynamics of oil poured on water. In all her pieces, Ko has left no personal mark, only the autonomous sensuousness of her powerfully enigmatic signs. The Washington Post Thursday, February 17, 2000 GALLERIES "Jae Ko, on a Roll: The Young Sculptor Adds to Her Reputation" by Ferdinand Protzman When Jae Ko's strange, austere sculptures made from rolled paper and black ink appeared in "Artsites'98", the sprawling group show by Washington area artists, they were an immediate hit. But that sudden success by a relatively unknown young artist also raised questions about whether she was a flash in the pan. The answer, a resounding no, can be seen in Ko's extraordinarily evocative exhibition of new works at Marsha Mateyka Gallery. The show reinforces Ko's reputation as one of Washington's most interesting young artist. It also highlights one of the most exciting developments on the local art scene over the past few years: the emergence of a group of talented young female sculptors, including Yuriko Yamaguchi and Tara Donovan, who work primarily with simple materials or found objects. Ko's work is clearly part of that conceptual trend. The 11 wall-hung sculptures in the show were all produced with the process that first earned Ko kudos. She takes rolls of paper-usually adding machine paper rolls with varying degrees of tightness-submerges them in a tub, then adds Sumi ink, which is made from ash. The paper absorbs the water./ink mixture and swells into a much larger shape. Ko eventually removes the paper, applies glue to stabilize it while drying and finally adds a wooden backing. The finished works, all untitled, are somber, sober, sever and beautiful. At first glance, they resemble giant black fungi that have mysteriously sprouted from the wall. But as you look at them, these simple shapes made from simple materials become increasingly complex and intriguing. The sculptures seem to mutate with every shift in the fall of light or the viewing angle, as if they possessed a closed-loop, kinetic energy, like a Mobius strip made from a single, three-dimensional brush stroke. There's lots of gesture and emotion. And the color, form and texture offer a wealth of allusions. The shadows, created by the rolled paper sinking into itself, are so deep and black they seem to absorb light, like some black hole. The layers of paper call to mind the growth rings of a tree or the pages of a book. From different angles, the blackness can either shine like silk or fade into dusty gray. The forms, which Ko apparently can control more that could those in the earlier works, are equally varied. Some are simple circles, like a tire or doughnut. Others are more complex shapes that look vaguely like a water lily or a baboon's face. For me, the ever-shifting blackness and sharp tonal contrasts in Ko's sculptures evoked images of Mathew Brady photographs and memories of the shiny, black horsehair sofa in my grandmother's living room. Only a very talented artist can get that kind of evocative punch from an adding machine roll soaked in inky water.