Kate Oh (Trabulsi) is a Korean American artist based in New York. She graduated from Parsons The New School for Design, earning both a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in Fine Arts, with a focus on painting and sculpture

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Since 2004, Kate has served as a docent for the Highlights Tour at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inspired by the depth and beauty of the Asian art collection at the Met, she developed a deeper appreciation for the fine arts of Asia, particularly the Korean folk painting Minhwa. As an artist, she employs traditional Minhwa materials and techniques while also exploring contemporary Minhwa practices. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions and group shows worldwide.

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Kate is a member of the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) and will become the 16th President of the Korean-New York Artist Association in 2025. She is also an Ambassador for ShinHanArt US. Kate founded the Kate Oh Gallery in New York and teaches Korean Folk Traditions (Minhwa) at Rutgers University.

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케이트 오는 뉴욕을 중심으로 활동하는 예술가이자 문화 기획자입니다. 뉴욕 케이트 오 갤러리의 설립자이자 디렉터로서, 한국 전통 미술과 현대미술을 연결하는 전시들을 기획하며 한국 미술의 국제적 확산에 기여하고 있습니다. 메트로폴리탄 박물관에서 21년째 도슨트로 활동하고 있으며, 뉴저지 럿거스 주립 대학교에서 한국 전통 예술 (민화) 강의를 하며, 한국 미학을 알리는 데 힘쓰고 있습니다. 

현재는 뉴욕한인미술협회 회장으로서 뉴욕과 뉴저지 지역의 한인 예술가들을 조직하고 지원하는 다양한 프로젝트를 주도하고 있으며, 미국 여성 미술가협회 회원으로도 활발한 활동을 이어가고 있습니다. 다수의 전시와 예술 행사에서 큐레이터이자 참여 작가로 활동하고 있습니다.

파슨스 디자인 스쿨에서 순수미술을 전공하며 학사와 석사 학위를 취득한 그녀는, 민화를 현대적 감각으로 재해석하는 작업을 지속해오고 있으며, 전통과 현대, 동양과 서양을 넘나드는 예술 언어로 자신만의 독창적인 세계를 구축하고 있습니다.

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A City Recharging

By Ekin Erkan, PhD

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Kate Oh is one of the bastion artists working in modernizing and promoting traditional Korean culture in New York City. Oh pursues this with her art practice, academic pursuits and her work as a gallerist, operating Kate Oh Gallery, where she frequently curates exhibitions mounting works by contemporary and historical Korean artists. This endeavor, of dovetailing Modernist approaches to the picture plane and traditional Korean folk art, is adeptly evidenced in her new painting, A City Recharging.

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The work is, in a sense, minimalistic though it also enjoys a rough and three-dimensional surface texture. The rocky background swathes the hay-cream glowing sun into a curling orb, matched by the red and blue orbs flanking its left and lower-right. The unevenly distributed strokes below augur the powdery-blue base of the mountainous structure slight. As one’s eyes climb the tower—a crag and skyscraper alike—the canopy grows crested with ridge-stones: maroon-red, charcoal-black, and mustard-yellow. Like bricks dusted into a fine powder, the central area’s pulverized mill gleams with crystalized dust. The nature/built dialectic is materially and thematically manifest in Oh’s bluff tower.

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Oh’s Stygian skyscraper latticework, which metes out the three celestial spheres, is masterfully rendered. On the one hand, she has achieved dimensionality with her materials, the peak and middle elements of this architectural foray bulging as angles, casting real, sculpturally manifesting the figure/line relationship. On the other, however, the bottom facets of the skyscraper set is pooled into an even gray silhouette, evincing Oh’s erudite command of minimalism and a doubling-effect. She does not forego simplicity where it is required.

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Purposing the moon/sun motifs (and tripling them while using vivid palettes to endow them with a distinct, almost alien, sensibility) while inventively dovetailing these celestial spheres into the structure, Oh’s work appropriates traditional Korean motifs but also traditional formal principles, such as Dancheong’s flatness, but the minimalist field, both of which it inverts. Oh’s work is also meta-referential, in a way, as her modernization is also made iconographic, indexed by the subject matter she has pictured in the bottom-most inner structure: a set of New York skyscraper buildings poised along the skyline.

This is, to be sure, marked by her own familiarity with the city where Oh resides and operates her gallery. But New York is also the birthplace of a particular stripe of “medium-specific” abstraction, which, in the early 1940s, found European Surrealists like Roberto Matta imparting the Surrealist theory of automatism upon William Baziotes, Gerome Kamrowski, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Peter Busa—who, thereafter, sought to spy the essence of painting qua painting, arriving at the structure of the support.

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I have elaborated on this affair in detail in my Journal of Aesthetics & Culture article "Abstract surrealism: the New York Schoolers’ ‘Personalized Surrealism’" (2024). However, the relevant principle for Oh’s work is that the New York School, undergirded by the ideological apparatuses of collector and museum networks of the Cold War semblance (including those related to the 1948 Marshall Plan and anti-Soviet Realist propagation) displaced Europe as the center of the avant-garde. But it never displaced, and likely is unable to displace, Korean traditional art, which remains as much an art as a skill requiring apprentice-pupil mentorship and serious, studied, laborious erudition. Oh is one of the select Modernists who possesses such know-how, as demonstrated by this new work.

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Ekin Erkan is a philosopher and art history researcher whose writing has appeared in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Philosophia,  and the Journal of Value Inquiry, amongst other venues. Erkan also is an art critic who contributes to the Brooklyn Rail.

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Spirit, Unity and Enduring-Hope.

I express the natural balance that exists in the Universe through my paintings. I try to visualize the secret order that underlies in the universe that encompasses our individual differences.  

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My work reflects my sense of a well-balanced Universe that evolves with great mysterious power but accompanying internal order. Each person mirrors this order with a balanced mind, body and spirit.

Each gorgeous flower contains seeds representing dream and hope of an individual. I hope the viewers acknowledge the uniqueness of each blossom and what it entails. 

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I appreciate people’s difference. Our distinctions and diverse individualities contribute to the intricate balance of the universe we reside. Thus, each must accept and respect distinctions, variations that are a part of the natural order, since these are the essential components that maintain the balance of the Universe.

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