Mark Marking/Time Marking: Ryoko Endo | Hannah Lim | Park Seo-Bo
Works
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Press release

NEW YORK, NY  -  Upsilon Gallery is proud to present Mark Making / Time Marking, a compelling exhibition featuring Ryoko Endo (b. 1951), Hannah Lim (b. 1998), and Park Seo-Bo (1931–2023), three visionary artists whose practices traverse East and West, past and present, structure and spontaneity. This intergenerational, cross-cultural dialogue brings together Endo’s meditative, gestural paintings, shaped by her background in calligraphy and the color theories of mentor Kikuo Saito, Lim’s fantastical sculptural forms rooted in hybridity and ornamentation, and Park’s iconic Dansaekhwa works that embody disciplined materiality. Together, they embrace duality not as tension to resolve but as fertile ground for innovation, revealing how tradition can serve both as a foundation for formal rigor and a catalyst for radical experimentation. 

 

Born in Fukushima, Japan, and based in New York since 1994, Ryoko Endo bridges classical calligraphy and postwar abstraction with a practice shaped by training in Japan and France. Beginning with Sumi ink and later moving into expansive acrylics, her luminous canvases reflect the influence of mentor Kikuo Saito, particularly his nuanced approach to gesture and color theory. Endo’s ambidextrous brushwork balances control and spontaneity and juxtaposition of color, yielding works that are both contemplative and forceful, echoing the layered complexities of life. 

 

Hannah Lim, a British-Singaporean artist born in London, creates sculptural works that traverse cultural histories and challenge the politics of ornament. Reclaiming Chinoiserie, a European aesthetic rooted in the appropriation of Asian motifs, she reimagines forms like altarpieces, snuff bottles, and hybrid furniture through the lens of Chinese mythology, memory, and diaspora. Lim transforms tradition into a site of experimentation, offering vibrant, hybrid objects that confront exoticization and open critical dialogues around identity, lineage, and belonging. 

 

A seminal figure in postwar Korean art, Park Seo-Bo is widely regarded as one of the founder of Dansaekhwa, emerging in the 1960s, his minimalist canvases emphasize process, repetition, and materiality, often created by drawing pencil lines into wet gesso overlaid with restrained monochromatic pigments. Park viewed painting as a meditative act, one shaped by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, in which the artist becomes an extension of nature rather than its master. His work resists spectacle and instead insists on quiet, embodied experience, a philosophy that aligns with, and enriches, the exhibition’s exploration of tradition as both discipline and liberation. 

 

Mark Making / Time Marking marks the first presentation of Endo, Lim, and Park’s work in dialogue, highlighting their shared commitment to viewing tradition as fluid and generative rather than fixed. Together, they ask: How can inherited forms be transformed? How can art serve as a vessel for cultural and artistic reinvention? Through their respective practices, these artists demonstrate that hybridity is not a compromise but a vital creative principle, one that allows history and heritage to be continuously reimagined for the present. 

 

This show will be live at Upsilon New York, from Friday, June 13th through Friday, Aug 1st, 2025.  

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