Rimi Yang is an ethnic Korean who was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. In 1986 she moved to the Ohio where she studied at Bowling Green University and then in 1991 to Los Angeles where she studied at California State University and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, the Otis College of Art and Design and spent a summer in Florence, Italy, studying at the Florence Academy of Art. She has lived and worked near the ocean in Santa Monica since 1991.
Yang is known for her intense enthusiasm for vibrant color which is manifested in both her figurative and her abstract paintings. After many years in the field of books she has come later to art, making up for that tardiness with her passion for her solitary studio practice.
Celebrating the chaotic emotional duality that exists in life in her art, she revels in the confusion mankind creates in its attempt to order the un-orderable and to explain the unexplainable. Adhering to Joseph Campbell’s dictum that the best things in life are those you cannot explain her paintings are intuitive, instinctive, balancing acts of contrasts.
Building up and tearing down of surfaces and images searching for reason where none exists, for that imaginary perfect world of equilibrium on each canvas. Creating a new language with each work, using each as a stepping stone to the next she is dedicated to making each painting better than her last. That Yang’s work is universal in spirit yet personally intimate is evident upon viewing the non-deconstructed whole.
Intensely curious about both Eastern and Western art history, Yang reveals new meaning by deconstructing iconic images of each culture, borrowing images from masterpieces; flower paintings by Fantin Latour, Japanese woodblock of Geisha by Eizan, portraits of madams by Ingres. At the same time, Yang tries to cultivate new methods of paintings by mixing up different techniques from various painting styles, escorting viewers down the path to Rimi’s unique and mysterious wonderland.
Yang has exhibited in California, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Oho in the United States. British Columbia and Newfoundland in Canada and more recently her work has been exhibited in Europe.
Less