Il Sun Hong/Seoul, Korea

 Ms. Hong lives in Seoul, where she has won a number of awards for her work. Il Sun says that at first she was attracted to shoes as objects of artistic representation, by the beauty of their shapes and lines, but that they came to have symbolic meaning. The high-heel pump symbolizes modern urbanized images and is more industrial and cold; the Korean shoe evokes more emotion and evokes rural life. “Each shoe in my work functions as a tool, like a brush in paintings.”

 The colors of the shoe linings and exteriors are varied, and, in some installations,  Ms. Hong cuts the shoes into parts and groups the components -- a series of heels, half-shoes in profile, or just the shoe tips -- in combinations and eye-catching patterns. The installations are minimalist in aesthetic, but the shoes are clearly hand-made from richly textured paper, and the skill and craftsmanship of the artist is apparent.

Tamako Nakanishi/Osaka, Japan

Tamako Nakanishi, who lives in Osaka,  does technically remarkable drawings, in colored pencils, of the natural world.  Each work is meticulously made up of tiny lines that seem to adhere like magnetic filings to create dynamic visual patterns. .

 Ms. Nakanishi’s drawings embody the mystical or the energy of living things, whether her  focus is directed to landscapes with distant rolling hills and voluminous clouds or intricate views of natural forms rendered in fine detail. Tiny vegetal structures such as flowers, leaves, and seed pods are delineated with such exactitude that they appear like biological studies --  the lines are so dynamic they convey the generative energy of nature. Tamako’s leafy tendrils evoke early spring growth testing its roots under the soil. These are not depictions of late spring exploding with flowers but rather the Asian concept of early spring, when underground seedlings undulate, searching the earth for nutrients and maturing long before they break though the surface of the soil.

Jung Hyang Kim/New York City

Jung Hyang Kim was trained in her native Korea and earned her master’s in studio art in painting, which she completed in 1980, at Pratt Institute.  Kim paints large-scale  canvases in pairs that present contrasting compositions in color, design, and space.

 At first glance Kim’s paintings resemble textile patterns -- swatches of beautifully designed cloth.  After some reflection, however, Kim’s work seems to embody the traditional mysticism of Taoist duality, best expressed in the interaction of the Asian philosophical symbolism of yin-yang.  The contrasts of female-male, shadow-sun, and water-stone might also include permanent-ephemeral. These ideas were later incorporated in esoteric Buddhist mandalas, which are geometric diagrams depicting the cosmos divided into small patterns, usually a grid of squares containing circles inhabited by a deity.  Used in pairs, the diamond and womb mandalas represent the duality of the universe -- the eternal-unchanging and transitory-growing. In Kim’s work the distribution of elements is sometimes not equal. But for the most part these are balanced rectangles, which resemble the mandala construct.

Keiko Naka/Tokyo, Japan

Living in and exhibiting her work in Tokyo,  Keiko Naka creates large-scale complex paintings and prints dominated by floating, corpulent female figures in gaily colored garments.  They are an ironic commentary on the traditional, demure female image in Japan as well as on the great master tradition of Western painting.  Naka masterfully combines the Western artistic tradition's foreshortened drawing of figures, deep space, animated postures, and thick application of pigment with the Japanese palette of muted colors.

 In contrast to the insular and predominantly homogeneous population of Japan, multiracial participants inhabit Naka’s paintings.

Keiko also addresses the exceptions to the ideal of womanhood and national beauty, which increasingly puts forth youthful and nubile images.  Seeking to portray the reality rather than the ideal, Naka often uses herself as a model. ”I find within me the fat woman who can’t zip her wedding-dress, who drops her glass, and with a broken arm.  How colorful, cheerful, and yet melancholic they are!”

Sahm Doherty-Sefton/St. Michaels, Maryland

“After living and working in foreign cultures for 25 years, I returned home to discover that mythic America still exists.

”The images that illustrate our country's history, that came to life in stories of our childhood and defined an age thought to be long past, are yet to be found here amid the clutter of 21st-century life as we know it.

”Capturing these images before they disappear is my aim.”  --Sahm Doherty-Sefton

Li Hong/Beijing, China

Li Hong is a member of a group of four women living in Beijing called the Sirens, who have joined together to exhibit their work. Trained at Beijing’s famous Central University, she creates beautiful drawings and colorful figure paintings. Li and her friends are self-styled feminists contending with the patriarchal artistic climate in China.

In her highly realistic paintings of young women, often shown in pairs, the girls cling to one another in a hostile environment. Li Hong's women are often sensuously clad, voluptuous beauties with distinctly Asian or African-American characteristics, their eyes brimming with tears.  Li explains that they are no longer able to cry, having shed so many tears.

Some of her paintings explore a new medium -- paint on transparent shower curtains.  Despite the transparency of the plastic, ironically the figures are tightly bound in a restrictive space. In the image shown here, in the company of large golden carp that swim around her, the girl presses her hands up against an imaginary glass wall, as if she were in a fish bowl.