Light, nature, our lives

Kate Oh Gallery is honored to present Light, nature, our lives, a solo exhibition in Upper East side New York by artist Yeong-Hi Paik.

This exhibition reflects on the profound relationship between light, nature, and life. Through her paintings, Paik explores the harmony and quiet power of the natural world, inviting viewers to contemplate how these forces shape both our outer and inner landscapes.

Yeong-Hi Paik studied Oriental Painting at Hongik University in Seoul and later Western painting at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. Based in Virginia, she has exhibited in over 120 group shows and 11 solo exhibitions across the U.S., Korea, and internationally, including juried shows at the Smithsonian Institution.

A former illustrator for The Washington Post, she was also invited by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to lecture on Oriental painting, helping to raise awareness of Korean art.

She also served for many years as a juror for the Korean government’s Overseas Korean Student Art Scholarship program. Her work has been featured in Elan Magazine, Dwell Architect Magazine, Howard County Times, and Koalife Magazine. Paik has served as president and board member of the Washington Artists Association and continues to live and work in Vienna, Virginia.

Paik Yeong-Hi’s canvases radiate with luminous color and poised geometry, the result of a patient gaze upon nature. At first encounter, they seem free of solemn messages; yet within their quiet harmonies, a more intimate revelation unfolds. Rectilinear peaks, clouds fractured like sculptural shards, circles traced as if to summon the sun and moon, and repeated fragments arranged in rhythmic constellations-all form a personal cosmology.

Her paintings weave together threads of Korean modernism: the rigor of geometric abstraction, the radiant palette partially inherited from her teacher, the late Cheon Kyungia, and a whisper of Surrealist wonder.

In this fusion, Paik offers not only a transformed vision of nature but also a subtle self-portrait, refracted through light, form, and memory. Paik’s paintings extend far beyond a formalist exercise in modernism. Trained first in East Asian traditional art and later immersed in Western modernism at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design, she infuses her work with the meditative restraint of classical landscape painting, where silence itself becomes a compositional element.

Beneath luminous fields of color and crystalline geometry lies a hidden code of transcultural identity. Mountains and light central motifs for many Korean artists since the myth of Dangun and long associated with national identity and spiritual energy— are reimagined in her practice.

Paik’s mountains, however, are not confined to regional landscapes; they appear almost transcendental, rising beyond geography to suggest universal ideals of harmony and peace.