Abstraction Lab
Group Exhibition
June 6 - 18, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 6-8 pm
37-39 Clinton St NEW YORK
ABOUT
New York, NY – Space 776 presents an exhibition of experimental abstraction by four artists: Sangho Han, Siha Park, Sabrina Puppin, and Albert Abdul-Barr Wang. The exhibition is curated by Chunbum Park.
Our world is filled with abstract colors and shapes. From the coloring of LEGO bricks to the tubular shapes of Tic Tac’s to the bokeh in the camera of the subway beaming lights as it enters the station… What is the language of abstraction but a way for ourselves to make sense of the alienly beautiful world surrounding us? Or perhaps it is the language internal to our selfhood prior to being born as humans, as our consciousness was forged in the cores of the stars, if we are to be conceived of as light.
Abstraction is often confused with nonobjective art, which is an internally derived abstract form of art without any basis in the external physical reality. In contrast, abstract art is said to be a reduction of the external reality. In this exhibition, abstract art will be understood as involving either approaches to image-making.
How can abstraction be revitalized since its climax in the form of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s in New York? What do artists who consider themselves to be people of color or women have to offer that the white, male artists have overlooked in the field of ideas and visions?
A key concept might be the idea of “Ethnic Abstraction,” which argues for the explorations and representations of ethnicity or cultural background through abstract art. Possibly another important concept would be “Feminist Abstraction,” although the women artists of this exhibit may not consider their works to be entirely confined to the aims or goals of Feminism exclusively.
About the Artists:
Sangho Han is a Korean artist (based in Brooklyn, NY) who believes that "the image (or painting) is an object that must be destroyed at the moment that it is created." His paintings and drawings on canvases and walls resist the temptation to seek permanence of any kind, as they are made and presented with a rough and improvisational quality. The artist seeks an authentic voice and vision that is neither Western nor traditionally Korean, but of hybrid contemporary and modern languages and styles
Siha Park (born in Seoul, South Korea) is a painter currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Using color and form as materials, Park explores compositions that create discordant rhythms through the interaction of these elements. Her work draws on personal memories, relationships, and life conflicts. Her unique perspective on the world informs these compositions, with humor occasionally offering a subtle contrast to the intensity of the themes. They have been exhibited at the Dock 72 gallery, Brooklyn, New York. Siha Park is currently pursuing an MFA from the Pratt Institute. Siha Park is currently pursuing an MFA from the Pratt Institute.
Sabrina Puppin, Ph.D, resides between New York City and Doha, Qatar, shaping her unique creative perspective. Puppin uses the visual language of color, shape, and form to create compositions in which the world as the seen and the known begin to dematerialize and the underlying spatial relationship becomes apparent. Through the use of hyper-colorful, shining, and overwhelming abstract arrangements, Puppin depicts and investigates the distorted perception of the reality around her, aiming to express her feelings and daydreams through work that wants to be felt, walked in front of, stared at, and dwelt on, rather than merely be illustrative. Her work has been showcased in the Satellite Art Show, SHIM Gallery, Cluster Gallery, Chashama galleries, and Established gallery in New York, the Central State Museum of Kazakhstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan, The Kyoto Museum, in Kyoto, Japan, The Leonardo Da Vinci Museum in Milan, Italy, as well as museums and galleries in the USA, Qatar, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Israel, Malta, Dubai and India.
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang is a Los Angeles-based conceptual painter, photographer, tapestry, and installation artist. His projects focus on cinema theory in relation to analog/digital painting, open-ended sampling and artificial intelligence subversions, the genetic language of post-Minimalism, and the architectonics of sociopolitical violence via technology and social media. Wang was born in Brooklyn, New York City. He received a MFA in studio art from the ArtCenter College of Design (2025) and a BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah (2023); he has exhibited at Postmasters Gallery, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Filter Space, Equity Gallery, Texas Photographic Society, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Also, he has been an artist-in-residence at the School for Visual Arts and a recipient of the WorkingArtist.Org grant.
About the Curator:
Chunbum Park (born in Seoul, 1991), also known as “Chun,” received their BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 and their MFA in Fine Arts Studio from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2022, where they changed their pronouns. Born a male, Park likes to cross-dress and depicts themselves as a woman in their paintings. They are the inventor of the ArtBid art auction card game and run the Office Space Gallery and the Emerging Whales Collective. Park writes exhibition reviews for the New Visionary Magazine and Tussle Magazine. They currently reside in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.
SELECTED IMAGES
ARTIST ESSAYS
1.
David Joselit states in his essay “Reassembling Painting” that “[a] ‘network painting’ establishes a field in which the force encoded in subjectobject marks passes over onto objects, which, as in examples of Duchamp’s and Picasso’s centrifugal modes of transitivity, appear either as readymades (including the subset of commodified pictures) or as a multiplication of styles. In network painting, aesthetic labor consists of carrying objects from one historical, topographic, or epistemological position to another (and back again).... Here such labor consists of the circulation of images through successive thresholds of attention and distraction–arguably the most important new source of value in the postwar period, whose economic engines range from television to the Internet.”
Roland Barthes had spoken of the death of the author back in 1967 and often the death of painting has been heralded repeatedly during the 20th and 21st centuries as this problematic stance which ignores the reinvention and repurposing of painting itself. However, there is no mention of the death of the painter while the paintings live on. Within this current series of works on paper studies and paintings, my exploration of painting theory where paintings of simulacra without an original referent arrives within an age of the post-digital, of a world crafted between reality and artificial intelligence within a post-human landscape. Here I paint completely flattened surfaces which refer to the implicit sculpture of wavy marks, bulbous drips, and configurations of colored shapes built in non-composition. With a postmodern palette of unusual color combinations, I explore the hyperreal landscape within the context of video game technologies, Neogeo color schema, and vaporwave/vaporware anti-nostalgia.
Abstraction of the techno geopolitical multiverse becomes this method for recognizing the human built alongside the technological playfulness that runs counter to the capitalist uses of such technologies. LEGOs which end up in a sublime pile of non-referential objects in a still life. These paintings and studies reflect my fascination with anti-painting painting without its analog antecedents but rather only its analog descendants. Ex nihilo digital worlds.
- Albert Abdul-Barr Wang
2.
My abstract paintings use forms and colors as materials to articulate the invisible aspects of life, creating a pictorial space that mirrors the world. The forms come from familiar places — my studio, my apartment, my desk, etc. When I combine and remove parts of these forms, they inevitably take on a strange shape. Through this process those familiar forms become inherently uncomfortable, abstract and organic. The contrast between earthy and vibrant colors, along with marks that are either spontaneous or built up over time, repeatedly generate contrasting elements such as anxiety and humor, conflict and absurdity, seriousness and playfulness. This serves both as a process of finding balance within the invisible conflicts present in all relationships and as a purpose in itself, to convey these dualities.
- Siha Park
3.
Paintings are all connected. And also, this is all about continuity.
Like Federico Fellini's 8 and 2/1, like Honore de Balzac's The Human Comedy, I tried to understand everyone I met in my life. And the attempts always failed.
I'm a painter who is interested in the history of abstraction. Currently, in my drawing practice, I use different materials such as canvas, wood, paper, and walls. Drawing and painting on two or three pieces of canvas or wood, joined together to make one piece. For my paintings, I am working with 6-foot and 7-inch-thick wood using acrylics, pencils, and house paint.
In general, 2-5 canvases are completed in one work, and the work is rearranged depending on the space where they are installed.
As I work, I experience the forms of painting and sculpture together, changing the order of woods or the position of the canvas up and down according to the pictorial space, or putting them back in place. It's a completely different form of working with canvas, and it's one of the different experiences I've found within this practice from traditional canvas works.
The figures drawn on the woods are a psychological anecdote of the people I have experienced in New York, and also it is a self-portrait.
Divided mark making on a divided screen. The brush strokes are being portrayed in a variety of ways. I make these expressions using pencil, acrylic, and house paint. The abstractions are all looking straight ahead. Most of them look at the viewer in a frightened, uncomfortable, or extremely unpleasant way, and I was both the artist and the viewer of these paintings during the progress.
- Sangho Han