Meeson Pae: Permeate

Evoking the body and its ongoing relationship to technology, Korean American artist Meeson Pae’s work explores the sensual architecture of organic and mechanical forms. With the assistance of 3D sculpting software, Pae renders her muscular mechanisms and fluid flesh virtually. This process allows her to exploit a limitless potential of scale, gravity, perspective, and to boundlessly ‘undo’ or ‘redo’ her subject matter until she has arrived at a moment of climactic transformation.

This work explores the interplay between machine and body, complicating distinctions through the translation of these digital processes into physical objects. Across media, whether oil painting or sculptures fabricated through industrial processes, such as 3D printing and laser-cut steel,  Pae’s work examines how shifting states can alter our perceptions of the abstract and representational, the organic and architectural, the internal and external.

Drawn to the visceral, Pae’s protuberances and cavities, lumps and spills form mechanical organs creating entangled compositions that function symbiotically. Pae builds worlds that are invisible, fanciful, and futuristic—her objects seem aware of their own fragility oscillating between micro and macro spatiality. In paintings such as Formations or Phase (all works 2024), Pae’s imagery occupies an unfamiliar landscape; the dark strangeness of these settings heightens the alien origins of these processors, atoms, motherboards, or molecules. Across her multifaceted practice, the works speak to a desire for exploration of spaces that extend beyond human understanding.

Pae’s sculptures are constructed of disparate materials including aluminum, stainless steel, resin, glass, halite, and other organic matter. These materials are chosen for their inherent dualities, and the contrasts and tensions they activate—such as the rigidity and strength of steel juxtaposed with the softness and malleability of resin. Rounded flesh-like forms begin as abstract ideas, sensations which are given volume, density, and texture, achieving uncanny and metaphorical effects. For example the sculpture Accretion comprises bulbous forms of opaque resin and shiny steel tripod poles that act as a type of support, alluding to the relationship of bones and muscles which require each other to generate movement.

In the adjacent gallery Pae has installed a video composed of animated 3D models. The pulsating forms morph through digital processes—revealing the infinite possibilities and iterations her works take before they are realized physically. The videos are projected onto a centrally hanging web of laser-cut stainless steel tendrils. A twisting network of reflective neurons bounce light and cast shadows about the gallery as they gently sway. Equivocal and enigmatic, Permeate dissolves our sense of the internal and the external, together the works suggest something expanding, tangible, and alive as if these objects might mutate and breakaway spontaneously.