Jae Ko’s 22 bold abstract sculptures at Andrew Bae, made of long rolls of adding-machine tape soaked in water and ink, have their origins in a seven-year depression. After getting art degrees in Korea and Japan, Ko moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988; she married a Korean-American in 1990. She’d been raised in an unusual Korean family: her father designed their homes and encouraged her to learn carpentry. But her husband’s more traditional family, she says, was living in the style of Korea in the 60s. “And when I married him, I married his whole family.” They wanted her and her husband to work the night shift at their grocery store. “All I can really do is make art. They said, ‘Artists don’t make any money.’ My husband didn’t say anything.” She left him in 1993, but it was two more years before the divorce was final. Meanwhile she had no money or job and stayed with a sister living nearby. Ko thought that going to grad school would help her return to making art, but for the first month at the Maryland Institute College of Art she sat in her studio, unable to work. Finally she began slopping paint on some plywood panels she’d asked a friend to make, adding plastic junk. “I hated it,” she says, and when her fellow students called it “interesting,” she knew they didn’t like it either. But her depression lifted. “I was happy as soon as I was making art, even terrible art.”
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Jae Ko
