Alex Paik is an artist, writer, and community builder based in Los Angeles. He serves on the Steering Committee at GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals. He is Founder and former Network Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces, and currently serves as an Advisory Steering Committee Member.
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Statement
My site-responsive installations use repeated geometric units made from folded, hand-colored strips of paper to create temporary formations. Influenced by various lifelong interests — from my early days as a computer science major, to my love of the repeated patterns in Philip Glass’s piano music or the structure of Bach, to my work founding and building a multi-nodal artist-run organization — these installations reflect my interest in how structures can be built up through small, relational interactions.
Through their emphasis on negative space, which visually takes up the majority of these installations, they make the invisible monumental and perceptually felt through the use of reflected color. My work is labor intensive and intentionally handmade. Drawing from my experience as the primary parent and as an Asian American man, my work can be seen as a reflection on the (in)visibility and legibility of labor.
My martial arts teacher emphasizes adaptability and how one’s personal martial arts system must constantly be re-evaluated and re-imagined. Using a similar ethos, my wall installations are endlessly reconfigurable, never a static, permanent structure but rather a dynamic, constantly shifting series of relationships. These installations are adaptable and unstable, insisting that there is always potential to imagine and build new structures, identities, and relationships.