November 24, 2013 – January 20, 2014

Opening: Sunday, November 24, 2013 from 2pm-10pm

CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach presents Rise Above: a solo project by Jiae Hwang. In Rise Above, Hwang explores the demand implicit in the phrase and the expectations to perform accordingly. By ‘rising above’ one is expected to confront another well-known demand: sink or swim. Hwang, (referred to as the artist) approaches that demand as a sort of linguistic and cultural ready-made, and purposefully interprets it in another way: rise becomes rice. In that space, a phonetic interpretation that misreads the initial demand goes in full-force into what the artist calls ‘another type of translation’ bringing the artist’s subjectivity in contrast with the sentence’s imperiousness. In her works, Hwang proceeds to throw and later trace, remove and paint rice on top of large colored silk pieces. This gesture, to throw rice, is an auspicious act in the West, but in Korea, where Hwang was born, throwing rice is a disrespectful gesture towards economy, labor and tradition. To throw it on top of silk would be an even greater offense, as it would imply a negative handling of highly charged economic/symbolic elements. Hwang does not aim at conveying this, but rather pursues the space where misinterpretation brings forward new meaning. In short: fashion, dry-cleaning, silk painting, trade are all faced as cultural pockets.

In the exhibition, Hwang presents a YouTube-found looped video of penguins jumping onto an iceberg. The penguins are expected to rise above it, but instead they slide, fall, or swim back into the ocean, behaving like fish, unable to fly like other birds. In Jiae Hwang’s project, concepts such as reading, performance, language, and expectations are all translated and interpreted through a view that emphasizes equality. For her, to rice is the same as to rise, the trompe l’oeil of rice is placed on equal terms on top of the ready-made ground; the ready-made ground meets color field abstraction, and color field abstraction encounters a ‘colored field’ and non-gender specificity in the silk's peach blossom, or navy businessman’s tones.

Jiae Hwang was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her work was included in Aesthetics and Value at the Frost Art Museum, Miami; New Work Miami at the Miami Art Museum, Miami; optic nerve, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; El Museo de Arte de El Salvador, El Salvador; Abstract Cinema at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Video Revolutionaries, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Footnotes About Geopolitical, Markets and Amnesia, 2 nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow. She also participated in the group exhibition Uncertain States of America—American Art in the Third Millennium, which was first shown at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and has traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Serpentine Gallery, London; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Center for Contemporary Art Warsaw, Warsaw; Le Musée de Sérignan, France; and Galerie Rudolfinum, Czech Republic. Hwang also participated in the following video

installations: Video: An Art, A History 1965-2005 New Media Collection shown at Centre Pompidou and at Miami Art Central, Miami; and AT THIS TIME: 10 Miami Artists, Rubell Family Foundation, Miami.