Harmony in Contrast – Matthew Langley & Soojung Park at AP Space
Discover Harmony in Contrast, a duo exhibition at AP Space featuring abstract painter Matthew Langley and ink artist Soojung Park. On view Jan 10–30, 2024, their work explores the balance between structure and stillness, boldness and quiet reflection.
Great art often lives in the tension between opposites—color and void, movement and quiet, structure and freedom. Harmony in Contrast, the latest duo exhibition at AP Space, presents a compelling conversation between two distinctive artistic voices: Matthew Langley, whose bold geometric abstractions pulse with layered rhythm, and Soojung Park, whose ethereal compositions on plexiglass explore the poetry of subtle transformation.
On view from January 10 through January 30, 2024, at AP Space’s Chelsea location, this thoughtfully curated exhibition invites the viewer to experience how difference can create balance—and how two divergent practices can illuminate a shared emotional field.
Known for his structured yet intuitive abstractions, Matthew Langley is a contemporary American painter whose work builds on the lineage of color field painting and minimalism while asserting a language all its own. His paintings often employ a grid or repetition of forms, but these frameworks serve only as departure points for improvisation and discovery.
Langley’s color choices are bold but considered, shifting from vibrant hues to desaturated tones, from saturated squares to muted gestures. His process is as much about editing as it is about adding—layers accumulate, overlap, and sometimes disappear beneath one another. The result is a visual rhythm that evokes both serenity and tension, a kind of internal hum that invites contemplation.
His paintings, with their emphasis on structure and harmony, offer viewers a sense of grounding—an organized space where chaos has been quietly negotiated and transformed into clarity.
In contrast, Soojung Park works with transparency—both literal and metaphorical. Using traditional mediums like ink and pigment, she applies delicate shades to both sides of plexiglass surfaces, sanding and rubbing layers to create a ghostly depth that shifts depending on the viewer’s position and the surrounding light. Her work is less about defining space than it is about revealing it.
Born and trained in South Korea, Park draws from both East Asian aesthetics and contemporary abstraction. Her process is meditative, and her results evoke motion suspended in time—brushstrokes that feel like whispers, landscapes that vanish into light.
Park’s pieces often feel like fragments of a larger, invisible whole—moments paused within a continuous movement. Whether displayed as a series or as standalone works, they seem to speak to each other across the room, leading the viewer through an intuitive visual journey that’s as much about absence as presence.
While Langley and Park come from very different traditions—Langley with his bold, architectural gestures; Park with her layered transparency and delicacy—their works speak beautifully together. In Harmony in Contrast, their differences become the foundation for unity. Langley’s geometric dynamism finds a counterpoint in Park’s meditative slowness. Her gentle translucency softens the edges of his vibrant grids, while his boldness gives her quiet works something to echo against.
What emerges is not opposition, but complementarity—a dialogue that opens up new ways of seeing both artists. Together, they create a rhythm of contrasts that mirrors the complexity of human experience: how chaos can be calmed, how quiet moments can hold immense power, and how even opposites can live together in harmony.
