Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to present Here Kitty Kitty, a solo exhibition by Gowoon Lee. The exhibition opens on January 9 and will remain on view through February 21 at 327 West 36th Street.

Known initially as “the white kitten with no name,” Hello Kitty, since her 1974 creation, has proliferated as an icon stripped of history, narrative and voice. Examining this blankness as a generative space for projection, Lee unpacks Hello Kitty through a series of new paintings which look closely at both the character and the merchandise surrounding her. Rubik’s cubes, stickers, plastic combs and jigsaw puzzles are depicted through Lee’s practice of distortion, repetition and mistranslation of the painted subject. The mass produced objects are designed to personalize everyday material for young girls. Lee introduces trompe-l'œil as a new dimension to her painting language to depict the ways in which the artificial emptiness of Hello Kitty sits in a frictional relationship with the real world. In the sticker sheets, Hello Kitty’s disembodied blank stare is surrounded by cupcakes, rainbows and fruit – quietly suggesting an innocuous femininity to be applied to the hard grain of a wooden school desk. Emphasizing the highly commodified nature of Hello Kitty, Lee probes deeper questions into the representation of femininity as both a banal signifier and a historical subject in painting.

Without the normative tropes of narrative or relationships, Lee insists on Hello Kitty’s reality as pure surface. The confrontation of the painted and symbolic surface in Lee’s paintings emphasize Hello Kitty as a vessel for normative cultural values. Hello Kitty’s roundness, symmetry, and perpetual cuteness become uncanny through recurrence and fracture. In haunting monochromatic works, Hello Kitty is repeated in ghost-like form, insisting on the surface as a space of transference. Through the works in Here Kitty Kitty Lee asks how images shape our sense of value and personal identity in the absence of narrative.