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Sculptor Eun-Ha Paek is known for her hand-built and 3D-printed ceramic figures that blend humour, personal narrative and storytelling. Her latest body of work features anthropomorphic serveware, cartoon busts, moon jars and her signature Mongmong Lassie vessels, presented alongside a video installation and a Risograph flip-book, for the show Alters, on view from May 2 – June 14, 2025, at the HB381 gallery in Broadway, New York.
Titled Alters for the alter egos and divided selves depicted in her works, this is Paek's second solo exhibition with the art gallery. Alters gives form to archetypal figures caught in internal contradiction, self-doubt and duality. "In her doubled and unravelling portraits of cartoonish characters, Paek's humorous deconstruction of the self is made apparent," mentions the show's press release.
A 3D printing machine, intentionally misprogrammed to 'to falter and err', loops clay erratically across faces, making the sculptures appear to slump or melt, "as though caving under pressure or a weight of emotion. Like a faulty television signal which produces static across the clean animated lines of a Sunday morning cartoon, her sculptural process pushes up against our interactions with technology to reveal something destructive in the interplay of viewership and being seen," the gallery explains.
Paek's gestural handling of glaze and surface textures heightens this sense of emotional unravelling and the sense of breakdown. The sculptor, born in Seoul, South Korea, and now working in Brooklyn, United States, proffers playful surfaces which often contrast with dark undercurrents: "Often, the cuteness of her characters rubs shoulders with existential doubt: human skulls as reminders of mortality, a stack of dinner plates which hides interchangeable emotional states and a two-faced moon jar wrestling with its conflicted identities," the press release states.
Her recurring character—a puckish cartoon figure with her hair tied up in any number of rounded buns, 'cavorts and poses' throughout the art exhibition, her face and body built from plates, bowls and dinnerware—playfully acting out the roles of pottery: containment, support and service. "Reclining and lifting platters, the figure acts out pottery's functional tasks—containment, support and service—to imagine life from the perspective of the objects we use. Her hairdo is modelled on the coifs and pompom cuts of poodles, a breed Paek describes as 'the most objectified of dogs ... a metaphor for objectification, notions of servitude and not being taken seriously.' She alternately sports a grin or a mischievous pucker; however, as Stack of Plate Heads reveals, her attitude is a mask that hides an uneasy grimace when flipped upside down," they continue.
In her Mongmong Lassie series of sculptural art pieces, poodle-headed dog figures guard bowls and jars, merging with the vessels they protect like modern caryatids. Mongmong mimics the Korean sound for a dog's bark and also means 'dream' when doubled, hinting at a dreamlike realm where the lines between pet and owner, object and subject, blur. As the release reiterates, "As such, Paek's sculptures of canine 'lassies' can be seen as an expression of our animal and emotive selves, as well as oneiric missives from an imaginative realm in which the roles of owner and pet blend provocatively together."
Paek's moon jars, riffing on the form of traditional Joseon white-ware vessels, evoke the shifting gaze and 'enigmatic dark side' of the moon, 'another archetypal female figure'—changeable, maternal and quietly watchful—adding another layer to her exploration of identity, emotion and the animate potential of objects.
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