Kent Henricksen at Arario Seoul

Duality of Snakes in Henricksen's Art

“Heavenly Hostilities” is one of the new works presented by Kent Henricksen at his solo show at Arario Gallery Seoul. / Courtesy of Arario Gallery Seoul
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter

When American artist Kent Henricksen was growing up in New Haven, Conn., he and his friends would catch small snakes, put them in a bucket and play with them.

``Now, if I see a snake, I'm never touching it. I don't know how I did it when I was a kid," Henricksen laughed.

The only snakes that Henricksen deals with these days are the ones he creates in his artworks. The 35-year-old met with The Korea Times last week at his exhibition, which introduced a new series featuring snakes, at the Arario Gallery Seoul.

``This is a new series that I'm debuting here. It's based on snakes and the duality of snakes, a powerful creature in ancient times, and an evil creature in the Bible tempting Eve. I'm playing with good and evil. This new series is creating patterns using images of snakes, as opposed to the older works, where I was just using Art Nouveau patterns and medallions from other time periods. I'm creating the patterns instead of appropriating them," Henricksen said.

Henricksen created a blue wallpaper covering one side of the gallery's wall. From afar, it may look like some unusual ethnic or calligraphy pattern, but upon closer scrutiny, one will find an intriguing pattern of thin, curved snakes and hooded angels on the silkscreen wallpaper titled ``Snakes."

His first solo show in Seoul also features silkscreen pieces embroidered with eerie-looking hooded figures and porcelain sculptures.

Embroidery may seem like an unusual thing for a male to do. But Henricksen says he was inspired to embroider after traveling around Asia for a year, visiting countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and India.

``During that time, I became familiar with two things, embroidery in northern Vietnam and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. I tried to incorporate the two things when I went back to New York, making little suicide bombers on small pieces of canvas. I did that for a year. Then I started embroidering the hooded figures on these fabrics," said Henricksen.

Initially, he incorporated into his works the uniforms of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a group of suicide bombers in the 1970s who fought for independence. Then he noted that there have always been masked figures in different countries throughout history, such as the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the United States. The figures started resembling ghosts of the KKK, thieves in ski masks or medieval executioners.

With its gold frame, ``Country Still II" looks like an idyllic Victorian-inspired scene, except the two figures have been covered in embroidery. This juxtaposes the harsh violence symbolized by the masked characters with the feminine medium of embroidery.

``By observing the masked characters dispersed throughout the picture plane, the audience is reminded of words such as robbery, terror, assassination and fear. The imagery has a very approximate relationship to the violence that has always existed throughout human history. … Henricksen calls attention to the passiveness that we feel for the atrocities in the world, especially when they are not directly ours to suffer through," Arario Gallery said, in a statement.

For Henricksen, art is a way to connect people. ``In my narrative base, there is a storyline we can all work with and talk about, and experience together," he said.

The exhibition runs through June 21. Arario Seoul is located near Anguk Station Line 3 Exit 1. Closed on Mondays. Admission is free. Visit www.arariogallery.co.kr or call (02) 723-6190.

cathy@koreatimes.co.kr