173: 12

ARTISTS
ARTWORKS

LatchKey Gallery (LKG) is pleased to unveil 12, a group exhibition that showcases the unique and diverse talents of 12 emerging artists, all pursuing their MFA in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, organized by artist James O. Clark in collaboration with LKG founder/director Amanda Uribe.12 will be on view at LatchKey Gallery, located at 173 Henry Street, from Tuesday, February 13 through Sunday, February 18, 2024, with an opening reception to warmly welcome all on Thursday, February 15, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

12 celebrates the unique beauty of each individual thread, inviting you to join a sanctuary at the intersection of time and space. The number 12, symbolizing completeness, harmony, and diversity within unity, serves as an interconnected order. Reflecting the cycles of change, renewal embodied by the 12 months of the calendar year and the 12 zodiac signs from Western and Eastern cultures. 12 offers a wide-ranging selection of works that orbit an interrelated set of themes. The drawings, photographs, videos, paintings, and sculptures on view variously explore the divining of order from chaos, the strictures of conventional image-making, the transience of experience, and the distortions of memory.

The featured artists are Jieun Cheon, Greg Herbowy, Hongbin Kim, Orange Li, Xinyu Liu, Nathalie Marti, Junsun Jessie Seo, Kun Kyung Sok, Guy Nechmad Stern, Zoe Toscano, Zeyu Xue and Ethan Zhao. 

ABOUT THE ARTIsTS

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jieun Cheon (b. 1995, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on installation. Her works are themed around the visualization of the “tacit noise,” the paradoxical term she created to represent invisible experiences between consciousness and subconsciousness. She makes a fictional story, “Uncanished Workld” (uncanny world + unfinished work), and expresses her invisible experiences in visual languages through the story. Her drawings and sculptures act as words and sentences within the Uncanished Workld. When organized in an installation, these individual artworks constitute the whole fictional story, and invite viewers to her own world. Cheon received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sculpture at Seoul National University. She is currently a MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Greg Herbowy (b. 1979, Utica, NY) makes art about animals and art about art about animals. He plays with repetition, reduction, craft, and the ideas and imagery of science, myth, and visual storytelling to create unreliable narratives of an unruly and fragile world. He is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts and has an MA in English from Queens College, City University of New York, and a BA in English from Boston College. He lives in Brooklyn.  

Hongbin Kim (b.1988, Seoul, South Korea), a.k.a. VANHADA, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from Hongik University and is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. One of his recent projects is“<MAYFLY>,” a series of abstract paintings that capture the accumulation of fleeting daily experiences and memories using the metaphor of the mayfly, an insect with a short lifespan. Each piece of life, like a mayfly, is piled up in the work through multiple strokes and various colors, symbolizing accumulated experiences and the resulting creation of ego. At the same time, he strives to rationally express his emotions and everyday moments through the medium of painting.

Orange Li (b.1988, Keelung, Taiwan) is a visual artist currently based between New York City and Jersey City, NJ. She faced immense challenging issues growing up, such as poverty, gender discrimination, the commodification of girls/women, and sexual violence. Li copes with those intense emotions and physical pain by transforming them into cosmic fluid to form biomorphic figures, sparkling stars, and expansive radiant travels from underwater to celestial bodies, fiery inferno to outer-space paradiso, rational scientific images to emotionally charged inner landscapes. Her paintings explore the dualities of the world and the potential between art, introspection, and storytelling. Her work in automatism navigates a path toward healing, curiosity and freedom.
Li’s work has been shown in select exhibitions such as Elza Kayal Gallery, New York (2023); Taiwanese American Arts Council, Government Island (2023) ; SVA ContinuEd Project Gallery, New York (2022); Village One Arts Gallery, New York (2021, 2023); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (2021); Monira Foundation, Jersey City (2021) and Art Taipei, InSian Gallery, Taiwan (2020). She is also the author and artist of the fictional fine-art book The Door to the Infinite Dream (2019). Li is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2024).

Xinyu Liu (b. 2000, Shanghai, China) is a mixed-media artist currently based in New York. She works in diverse mediums, including sculpture, video, and installation, to explore the unseen and intangible energies that permeate our surroundings, and pivotal moments in architectural space and emotional upheaval. Her recent focus is on the collective apprehension connected to uncertainty and the human psyche’s response when on the verge of transformation. Liu received a bachelor’s degree in product design from Shanghai Institute of Technology and is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. 

Nathalie Marti (b. 1997, Geneva, Switzerland) is an interdisciplinary artist who blends the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional works by combining sculpture and painting. She learned these techniques during a one-year stay in Florence, Italy. Marti has exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions in Italy and Switzerland, and her work has been published by the official Instagram of the city of Geneva and in L’Illustré, the most-read newspaper in western Switzerland. Marti holds a barrister’s license in Switzerland, and is currently an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Jusun Jessie Seo (b. 1995) was born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the Bay Area of California. Through her practice, Jusun attempts to understand the idea of values within the changes in sizes of the actual canvas. She continuously revisits her paintings by painting in different sizes, referencing her own paintings. In her paintings, using her microscopic visual simulation to focus on what is seen simultaneously. Seo is a 2024 MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York and received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. She co-founded the collective WEDAPEPO, founded in Oakland, CA, in 2020. Her work has recently been exhibited at the School of Visual Arts, New York; Moosey Gallery, London; and Root Division Gallery, San Francisco.

Kun Kyung Sok (b. 1968, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York. The central concept of her work revolves around transforming human suffering into a form of artistic expression, using the mediums of the body and performance as vehicles for this transcendent process. Breaking existing conventions is a key element of her idea, signaling a desire to challenge established norms within the artistic realm. Sok studied political science and later moved to the UK, where she undertook an MA in African studies. She subsequently worked in several countries, including Kenya and Cameroon, as a community-development consultant. She holds a BFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is now an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the institution. 

Guy Nechmad Stern (b.1996, Tel Aviv, Israel) is a multimedia interdisciplinary artist and analog photographer. The technologies of his practice are specific to the his adolescence and childhood, when the world was turning digital to the point where everyone is a photographer. Remaining analog as a refusal to grow up, as an expression of premature nostalgia and a determination to stay forever young, his work touches on the sublime and mundane, life and death, lust and ephemerality. His installations are poetic compositions that reference art history as well as pop culture and social media. In the early 2000s, the difference between art and porn was functionality—art can’t be functional. Nechmad Stern’s work blurs that harsh line, allowing play, humor, and joy to bleed into everything. He received his BFA from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and attended the MFA photography program at CalArts for one semester before transferring to the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he is completing an MFA in fine arts.  

Zoe Toscano (b. 1994, Modesto, CA) is an artist born and raised in California currently living in Brooklyn. Her art practice is centered around oil painting. She uses the colorful landscapes of her home state to direct her palette, creating lush, vibrant, textural works. She invites her viewers to enter her world of women, nature and personal symbolic imagery to invoke a sense of contemplation, the ephemeral and vulnerability. Toscano earned her BFA in fine arts with an emphasis in painting from CSU Stanislaus in 2017 and is now pursuing her MFA in fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She owned Tri-Chromatic Gallery, Modesto, from 2017 to 2020 and has shown in exhibitions in both California and New York.

Zeyu Xue (b.1997, Hainan, China) is a sculptor and MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her works are triggered by the secular, her memories, and pure randomness. Influenced by Zen and Taoism imperceptibly, she infuses the ideas of “letting time pass through the body,” “constant adjustment,” and “the essence of isolation” into her works. Xue’s sculptures often look light and muted in tone, but carry the heaviest and deepest parts of the artist. Her sculptures share the common attributes of textural repetition and intuitive gestures, and are often built at the scale of a human body or larger. Most of them are made of industrial materials. Xue holds a BA in sculpture from the University of California, Irvine, and was recently nominated for the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture.

Ethan Zhao (b.1992, Liaoning, China) is a geometric abstract artist. His artwork visualizes the geometric structures of algebraic equations. So, while his pieces may appear to be  abstract, they are, in fact, portraits. Zhao holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Heilongjiang University and is an MFA Fine Arts candidate at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

ARTWORKS