Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is excited to present Dusk to dawn, an exhibition that brings together two artists whose paths criss-cross between East and West. Minjung Kim, born and trained in Korea, moved to Western Europe in her twenties, where she continued her studies and established her career as an artist. While her work engages with Western artistic concepts, its essence remains deeply rooted in Eastern tradition. Rebecca Salter PRA, born and originally trained in the UK, spent six years in Japan studying woodblock printing, where she found her artistic inspiration in Eastern philosophy and Asian techniques and approaches to image-making.

Dusk to dawn pivots around the notion that both artists, now based in the West, pursue practices that are traditionally Eastern: abstract, tranquil and measured. Kim and Salter find their inspiration in the customs and ideas of the Orient rather than the Occident. Against the backdrop of today’s image-saturated and story-centred culture, their work resists narrative and spectacle. Minjung Kim and Rebecca Salter are quiet voices in the noisy imagery of our contemporary visual culture, voices attuned to stillness, material sensitivity, and attention.

Following the principles of Asian non-linear spatial tradition, Salter and Kim create complex, multilayered surfaces within their works, which allow the eye to move freely and quietly across the structures of ink and paper. Building up their surfaces through mark-making, every mark holds equal weight, whose perception expands beyond the visible plane, suggesting that the image broadens into an infinite field from which it arises.

Dusk to dawn features work in mostly darker, obscure and meditative tones: colours of the night, hues of dusk, dawn, twilight and mist. Shapes and contours, some faintly visible, are dissolved through the use of muted tonalities to give way to shades, soft passages and reflective moods, inviting a slower, more tangible way of experiencing the work.

Minjung Kims’ works are intricate and well-balanced collages assembled from delicate Korean mulberry paper in the artist’s constant quest for an overall equilibrium. In Vertical timeless the careful manipulation of form and colour creates a sensation of a slow progression. Countless strips of torn paper, carefully burnt along the edges, as if drawn with fire, are collaged vertically, then painted in alternating hues of black and blue. Horizontal gradients of colour shimmer between darkness and light, resembling a sky emerging from or dissolving into shadow.

Rebecca Salter, through precise and repetitive gestures, stains, scorches, and punctures paper, treating her works as three-dimensional objects. The use of Japanese papers allows her to experiment with ink pigment absorption, fusing the image and its substrate into complex compositions. In JF4, splashes of dark paint on the right half of the drawing are mirrored reflections of those on the left. The shapes of those seemingly identical pairs of blots are encircled by a sea of white ink and constellations of fine dots that trace and cross their edge.