Karen Kar Yen Law 羅加欣: Balancing Bitter
Visually abstracted and repeated, the oblong form of the bitter melon skin becomes both a compositional anchor and a reference to the Chinese cultural understanding of bitterness.
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 14, 3-5pm
In Balancing Bitter, Markham-based artist Karen Kar Yen Law explores the layered expression of bitterness through a hybrid practice that blends monotype printmaking with large scale painting. The heart of this body of work is the bitter melon.
In Chinese culinary philosophy, bitterness is one of the five essential flavour profiles, alongside salty, sweet, sour, and spicy. The flavour is not treated with disdain, rather it is embraced and brought into balance with the four other flavours. In the same way the flavour of bitterness is essential to Chinese cooking, the Chinese recognize the importance of bitterness as an emotional experience. Bitterness is directly related to experiences of pain, hardship, and suffering. It is through the endurance of bitter experiences that sweetness will follow.
The artworks do not offer resolution but instead gesture toward a new framework for understanding emotional pain. Inspired by the philosophy of harmony in Chinese cooking, they suggest that bitterness—like any flavour—need not be rejected, but acknowledged, integrated, and balanced.
Law’s printmaking and painting practice are in constant dialogue, each informing and enriching the other. The use of hand-cut stencils across both printmaking and painting processes allows her mark making to produce dense surfaces where organic patterns emerge, disappear, and return. The multiplicity of printmaking is rendered in her paintings through the use of photosensitive dyes that produce solar printed canvases. While each canvas artwork begins as a solar print, the addition of painting transforms the multiple into a unique object.
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Melon Render No. 5, 202460 in. x 72 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 4,200.00 -
Melon Render No. 6, 202460 in. x 72 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 4,200.00
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Melon Render No. 7, 202460 in. x 72 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 4,200.00
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Melon Render No. 1, 202448 x 36 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasSold
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Melon Render No. 2, 202448 x 36 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 2,500.00
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Melon Render No. 3, 202448 x 36 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 2,500.00
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Melon Render No. 4, 202448 x 36 in.Karen Kar Yen LawAcrylic, oil, and aerosol paint, with photosensitive dye on canvasCAD 2,500.00
