Art Projects International

Art Projects International in Tribeca is delighted to present Small Works, a group exhibition featuring a selection of important works by artists including Bahar Behbahani, Yojiro Imasaka, Il Lee, Gwenn Thomas, Jian-Jun Zhang, and others, featuring a vast array of small drawings, along with small works on canvas, and several works of photography. Each work may be considered a signature work of their respective creator – presenting noted signature themes, renowned processes, and widely recognized styles – that have developed and been part of the gallery’s programming over the past 34 years.  Sometimes translated to larger works, these small works offer an intimate glimpse into each artist’s musings.

Bahar Behbahani’s Growing Persian Garden series of drawings began as ritualistic depictions for an extensive series of paintings entitled Persian Garden. Her research-based works of intricate patterns of flowers and plants incorporate information from her culture’s history and archival materials as a way of addressing questions of memory and loss, displacement and longing.

Yojiro Imasaka’s painterly photographs using large-format mid-1800 photographic methods explore landscapes through ambiguities of scale and space. In particular, Imasaka’s Wet-Land series of photographs are the result of spending weeks photographing the Louisiana Bayou to bring forth the distinctive natural environment of an undeveloped forest – quiet, breathtaking scenery to deaden the sense of time.

Il Lee’s well-known ballpoint pen work over the last 50 years has consistently featured the creation of small drawings. Concurrent with his continuing development of large format works on paper and even larger works on canvas, Il Lee has continually experimented in countless smaller drawings with a multitude of imagery that speaks to viewers with dramatically different and varied imagery throughout. Highlighting the criticality of working on paper to Lee’s practice, numerous exhibitions at museums and institutions worldwide have featured special installations of a single wall densely hung with tens of small drawings from Lee’s studio.

Gwenn Thomas’ series of etching and aquatint prints draw from her signature works on canvas, also included in this exhibition. These dynamic, masterful orchestrations of abstract forms and marks – drawn rectangles of solid color, silhouettes of cut bits of cloth, depictions of paint strokes or a wayward bit of newsprint – are realized by hands-on manipulation of printing plates. In the Song series, the prints feature an arrangement of vertically oriented, variously colored, and isolated brushstroke like forms.

Jian-Jun Zhang’s China series are alterations to Chinese antiques. In some cases the actual antique, usually a jar or a pot, is changed (with clay and/or wood) and in others the work is made by painting over the top of photographs of objects. Painted interventions over photographs add angles, elongations and other reshapings to the depicted antiques and make them look like contemporary, or even cubist, sculpture. A series of paintings often uses the same photographic image as a starting point. The image is then altered differently from each painting to painting. Zhang’s skill at making convincing alterations becomes clear when comparing images and realizing that what seems a subtle change may be a radical reshaping.

About the Artists

Bahar Behbahani (b. 1973, Tehran, Iran. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a recipient the Pollock-Krasner Foundation 2024-25 Artists Grant. In 2017, Behbahani’s solo exhibition Let the Garden Eram Flourish was presented at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Behbahani‘s work has been featured in numerous international biennales including the Sharjah Biennial 15, UAE (2023); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia (2017); 11th Shanghai Biennale, China (2016); The Prologue Exhibition for the 2016 Honolulu Biennial (2014); and 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012). Recent exhibitions include Rivers Flow / Artists Connect, Hudson River Museum, NY (2024); Open Sessions 15, The Drawing Center, NY (2019); Active Forms, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2018); Garden Coup, Thomas Erben Gallery, NY (2016); and Marking 2, Art Projects International, NY (2016). Her work is represented in major collections including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; Princeton University Art Museum;  Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and Queensland Museum, Australia.

Yojiro Imasaka (b. 1983, Hiroshima, Japan) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA in photography at Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo and went on to study at Pratt Institute in New York from which he earned an MFA in 2010. Imasaka’s work has been exhibited in North America, Asia and Europe, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; New Jersey City University Gallery; Art Project International in New York; and a solo presentation at Paris Photo in France 2018, by Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery in New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Carnegie Museum of Art, and New Orleans Museum of Art.

Il Lee (b. 1952, Seoul, Korea) lives and works in New York. Lee is celebrated for his pioneering work with ballpoint pen. In a critical period of experimentation, development, and production during his early years in New York City, Il Lee created a small group of rarely-seen ballpoint works on paper focused on presenting a single form floating on a white field. His work, with its unorthodox media and distinctive style, has received worldwide recognition. His work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions including his critically-acclaimed mid-career survey at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2007. His work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Vilcek Foundation, Queens Museum, Crow Museum of Asian Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Palms Springs Art Museum, Arkansas Arts Center and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA). Work by Il Lee is represented in prominent collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA), Palm Springs Art Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Vilcek Foundation, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Société Bic (France), Montefiore Fine Art Collection, and Bank of America among others.

Gwenn Thomas (b. Rhode Island) lives and works in New York. Thomas is a multi-disciplined artist whose work ranges from collage and painting to prints and sculptures and often employs photography in shaping contemporary perceptions of painting.  Thomas’ digitized collage works on canvas depict elegantly composed harmonies of hue and form. In some works, rows of cut rectangles of many colors of cloth seem to be adhered to a canvas surface; in others a bright paper ground shows off a composition featuring a few pieces of cardboard and cut shapes of various felts and woven materials. Shadows captured by digital scans or digital photographs create tromp l’oeil effects, but even when a close look shows a fuzzy bit of white velvet and a curling piece of pink paper to be strictly a two-dimensional print on canvas, it is the works’ refined compositions and color balances that first come to the fore. Thomas studied at the Sorbonne, Paris, and graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. Her work is represented in major collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum; Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; ‘Plates of the Present’ Collection, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; São Schlumberger, Paris; C.A.M. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; and Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany.

Jian-Jun Zhang (b. 1955, Shanghai, China) lives and works in China.  Zhang is among the first generation of Chinese contemporary artists to gain international recognition. Ink has often figured in many of Zhang’s works whether creating large installations, photography, or intimate ink drawings on paper. A constant in Zhang’s work over the past 40 years, ink drawings are a substantial and significant part of his practice. His work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Asian Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; China National Art Museum, Beijing; Shanghai Art Museum; Yuz Museum and Power Station of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; M+ (Hong Kong); National Contemporary Art Museum, Rome, Italy; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; Brooklyn Museum; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; and the Shanghai Biennale, Venice Biennale, and Gwangju Biennale. His work is represented in major collections including the Uli Sigg Collection (Switzerland); M+ (Hong Kong); Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation; Shanghai Art Museum; Yuz Museum (Shanghai); Guangdong Museum of Art (China); Shenzhen Art Institute; Brooklyn Museum (New York); San Francisco Asian Art Museum; Djerassi Foundation Permanent Collection; and Ahmanson Foundation Collection.

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