Mother and child, 1973

Han Kisuk (Robert Han) is also known as Nong, a name connoting modesty and simplicity. In his Mother and Child he gives an Asian inflection to the iconography of the Madonna and Christ Child, filling the background with lines of calligraphy that emulate classic texts. Han's wood sculpture I Ching, ca. 1968, was exhibited in "Asian American Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900--1970," the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, and at the Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, New York, 2009 (see Daniell Cornell and Mark Dean Johnson, eds., Asian American Modert Art: Shifting Currents, 1900--1970, exh. cat. [San Francisco: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco; Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2009], pl. 59).