A Rite of Passage (2023)

REAL ART WAYS, CT

The pandemic marked a turning point in my life. The constant confrontation with the harsh reality of hate crimes in New York, the place I called home, shattered my sense of belonging. This, coupled with the loss of my pregnancy left me with deep grief. Anger, a burning ember, threatened to engulf me. In this dark moment, I reconnected with my long-dormant desire to go back to painting on canvas, using brush again.

'Optional Happiness’ was born to find solace in acceptance. I wanted to embrace the nature of life and death and to start again. As I navigated the depths of grief, I discovered a hidden strength within myself. I knew that clinging to the darkness would only perpetuate more hate. Memories flowed as I picked up large brushes, weaving them into the canvas in a quest for reconciliation with my core beliefs. With oneness, I tried to reclaim my past and embrace my future.

A Line of Flight

Essay by Billie Lee

What role does art serve through times of rupture, loss, and trauma? What can it offer us? Kate Bae's A Rite of Passage opens us to glimmers of hope and spiritual connectivity in our darkest and bleakest times. The exhibition is an invitation to practice what she calls joyful diligence–a practice of "instilling more joy in the world, in any way possible.” This body of work comes out of an intense period of personal and social traumas Bae experienced during the pandemic–including loss, domestic violence, and being subject to violent attacks of anti-Asian racism in New York City. Born in Busan, South Korea, Bae immigrated to the United States at fourteen alone, while her family stayed in South Korea. She spent her first year in a Catholic boarding school, then transferred to a Chicago public high school and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with her BFA in 2003, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2010. She then moved to New York City and continued to pursue a professional contemporary art practice. As with many anti-Asian and bias-related violence accounts throughout the pandemic, the police responded with willful negligence. In the absence of social and structural support, she used her creative process as a ritual act to heal, find solace, and purify hate. Bae created A Rite of Passage to process the turbulence and uncertainty of the last few years in which her life was upended and transformed and to honor the miraculous and synchronous events that also punctuated it. 

We see this dichotomy in the cyclical themes that undulate in A Rite of Passage. Cycles of life, death, rebirth; karmic loops; and forms of concealment and emergence are seen throughout the installation. Motifs of circles, gestural marks, and floral imagery give the work an ethereal figuration. Yet, the vibrant pops of color throughout the exhibit clash with hints of danger. A central piece in the exhibit, Optional Happiness, is a small abstract painting with a rope precariously tied around it, the ends dipped in red paint. The image is of a hazy bluish-gray and orange gradient with a distinct shape–a loosely painted circle. The circle signifies a completion, only to begin and go around again. In Buddhism, circles represent the endless cycles of life, death, and rebirth. Death is not an end but a passage and opening into a new beginning. There are also resonances of Korean folk practices where knots symbolize han or deep collective sorrow and grief that can be released through shamanic kut or rituals. 

The touch of red paint on the tips of the rope signals bloodshed or perhaps a sacrifice accompanying karmic shedding. These intimate details give the piece pause. 

Optional Happiness is particularly weighted for Bae, as it was based on a personal loss that Bae says "shook the core of my being." The painting is both a memorial and a manifestation of how we claim and reclaim our pain to give life to new horizons. As the title indicates, happiness is never given; it is, in turn, optional. Although it is one of the smaller paintings in the exhibit, it functions as the anchor. This exhibit is about cycles of death and birth, tieing and untieing knots of suffering, and opening windows of hope, vitality, and re-emergence. "I wanted to have joy instilled in my work from that point on," Bae says. 

On either side of Optional Happiness are two foldable paintings, A Rite of Passage, suspended about one foot off the floor. The paintings are loose and expressionistic, made with a sense of urgency, as if trying to capture a fading memory. Bae wanted them to have a "Matisse-y feeling." She was channeling a particular painting by Henri Matisse, The Bathers by a River, which she passed nearly daily for four years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Just a week before she began to make work for this exhibit, she auspiciously visited the hotel room that Matisse stayed and painted in for several months in Tangier, Morocco. Although not intentional, the foldable paintings echo the Tangier hotel window with its shutters open towards the vista. The Bathers was part of a tryptic of lyrical pastoral images commissioned by Russian collector Sergei Shchukin that Shchukin ultimately rejected. Matisse reworked The Bathers for several years; by then, World War I had devastated Europe, and the painting's idyllic iconography and lively blue palette became drained of color, taking on a somber tone. Matisse painted the formerly blue river that ran down the center of the painting into a black band. 

However, in Bae's channeling of The Bathers from memory, the muted tones are flooded with the deep blue river again. The re-emergence of the blue river is symbolic of regeneration and life. Spillage of blues and greens permeates the paintings in large blocks of saturated colors, with Matisse-y abstracted pastoral and figurative shapes that are light and dynamic. "Things that we are unaware of happening to us are blessings," Bae says. The significance of blue is not accidental for Bae, as the sea played a transformative role in Bae's healing process the summer before making this work. She spent months in the waters of Jeju, South Korea, unexpectedly enrolling in an intensive haenyeo (female divers) school (she was a poor swimmer, but the sea changed that). And seen another way, the hovering paintings on either side of the gestural simplicity of Optional Happiness can be read as floating wing-like forms (we also see feathery wings around a circular shape in Infinite I.)  Rather than in mid-fall, the paintings are in mid-flight, with a feeling of buoyancy. There is hopefulness in that. 

The surrounding works contain familiar elements from Bae's previous bodies of work–peeled paint skins, floral imagery, bubble gum pinks, and lemon yellows. She is known to use materials with a tactile, kitsch sensibility. The aesthetic feels playful, unassuming, and approachable. Yet, there are hints of the rupture that underlie this work. Several paintings have a sense of upside-downness–paint drips upwards rather than with gravity. Joyful Diligence and Blessing in Disguise have interactive elements with sound rods that visitors can play with while walking around the exhibit. Bae invites visitors to walk around the foldable paintings in an infinity pattern while sounding the rods to cleanse any negative energy. She intends for the paintings and the sound frequency to be healing. In this vein, the floral elements in Bae's visual iconography are symbolic and elegiac–to ward off evil spirits or honor the dead. Although she has used floral imagery extensively in her previous work, in this instance, she intended them as offerings for her attackers, as a gesture to "get rid of hate." 

A Rite of Passage asks us to consider the various passages in our inner and outer lives that may need clearing or support, inviting a sense of deep acceptance for the things we cannot control and offering exuberance to the areas that might bring change.