Infinite stage at night without boundaries (ENG/KOR)
Seolhui Lee (Chief Curator of Kunsthal Aarhus in Denmark)
Exhibition Preface
«Prototype Temple: At Night» is Jeemin Kim’s first solo exhibition in Korea after moving back from the UK where she spent her teenage and college years. The impression I got while getting to know the artist is that Jeemin Kim’s work is clear. She has a definite taste and purpose in the practice of art. Her work begins with embodied experience. The artist studies what has been revealed by research based on literature, art, and musical languages, organises the derived topics and visualises them on the work with a suitable medium. The work resembles the artist. It is no coincidence that the justification for media selection is clearly revealed in her work, considering that she carefully organises her notes and changing thoughts at every moment.
Jeemin Kim mainly worked on the installation until 2019 and started painting in earnest in 2020 and is currently working on both media. The installation works are divided into Art as Language and Moving Chandelier series while the paintings are divided into Musical Painting and Silence series. «Prototype Temple: At Night» is the result of Kim’s research that has experimented with the cultural convergence of East and West with a variation of installation and painting. The exhibition, combined with Moving Chandelier and Silence series, is made up as if chandeliers symbolising western classical culture, and oriental paintings using ink, appear on a dark stage. The sound added to this is a mixture of choirs, cathedral mass, temple sound, and a bell, resonating the entire space and creating a reverent atmosphere.
The scenery of mixed cultures of the East and the West comes from the artist’s reversed experience of two cultures. The artist, who spent half of her life abroad, fantasises about the classics of the Orient that she had not experienced as a child. As a result, Kim studies a medium Oriental ink and is influenced by the precedents of realising an infinite ideal world on a canvas with the idea of “Emptying is filling”, which can be seen in Eastern philosophy. For her, who had felt the limitations of the physical space through the installation work, the painting was a suitable medium to express infinite space. Just like a painting meant an ‘abstract’ for oriental artists who tried to represent a world beyond appearances, it is natural that Kim’s works are represented in abstract ways.
Such immersion in Eastern culture gives rise to another aspect of Western classical culture acquired by the artist as a child, creating a third culture where two countries and their cultures meet. This exhibition, where chandelier installation and oriental paintings meet, is the evidence of such. The cultural hybrid within the artist herself has been manifested in this exhibition, and as the subtitle shows, it happens ‘at night’. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty(1908-1961) said “Night does not have an outline”, the space is like a living time without boundaries, and in Jeemin Kim’s work, it is only a liberal time to travel between the East and the West. The space is a ‘Prototype’ and will be a stage that opens and closes through various performances in the future. It is the artist’s intention to test the unexpected possibilities by drawing images that can be imagined when the cultures of the East and the West intersect and combine in a new place and environment.
Falling Chandelier (2021) can be said to be the only work from this exhibition that Kim superficially revealed her personal background. She grew up in a Christian family and moved to England in her teens. She went to a boarding school and continued her classical music activities with the choir. It was the upper class Western classic culture that dominated Kim’s teenage years, that is, when her identity was formed. She figured out her identity as an Asian within the environment and experienced many emotions. It was the emotion of longing for something, which was paradoxically not directed towards the East.
It was a longing for a classical culture that she felt while going through two cultures. This deformed nostalgia towards an imperial state is like an ambivalent feeling accompanied by joy and pain, that is, the feeling of ‘sublime’ in Kim’s work.
Jeemin Kim created this experience by projecting it on a chandelier, which is repeating its movement with mysterious sound in the background. As Charles Baudelaire(1821-1867) said, the chandelier has always seemed to him the principal actor, it is the biggest and brightest being on the stage. It is also, however, a being that has to overcome the darkness all by itself. The chandelier overlaps with the artist. The ambivalent feelings of sublime she experienced are objectified through the chandelier, representing a feeling that involves joy and pain. Moving Chandelier is one of the examples that Kim gathers the elements evoking the emotions of sublime and turn them into an installation.
Silence, installed harmoniously with the chandelier, is the result of contemplating the way a painting exists in a space, indicating itself. There are four main elements on the canvas: smudging as a technique, ink as a medium, egg as a shape, and gold as a colour. The Chinese characters of silence(沈默) indicates the sinking of silence. Kim reveals the “sinking” through ink slowly seeping and spreading on the canvas. Kim also justifies her choice of medium through the fact that ‘Muk(默)’’ from ‘Chimmuk(沈默)’ has the same intonation with Chinese ink ‘Meok(墨)’ in Chinese. As a symbol of silence, the egg is introduced with its primal meaning of cosmos, and the colour gold is derived from an old saying “Silence is golden”.
The word “silence” reminds of Wittgenstein, who said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The artist eliminates objects from the canvas as much as possible and leaves only a minimal metaphor, and as a result, elements left on the canvas exist as a representation. Therefore, her paintings are followed by some kind of mysticism, and are transformed into a space where various interpretations can be presented. Just as Wittgenstein wrote in his diary that a world is assembled in a sentence, Kim tries to assemble a world on a canvas. This is a world based on silence. The artist is substituting the deep thought of a philosopher into an art language. That is, what cannot be said is not meaningless because it cannot be proved, and that one who tries to prove it is making it rather worthless.
Based on Kim’s life experiences embodied in the East and the West, the diversity of cultures seen while they intersect and combine, and the subject on language, philosophy, religion, etc derived from it, are expanding the boundaries of Kim’s works with her unique calm and noble sensibility. Ultimately, the artist intends to design a multi- layered stage in which religions of the East and the West, Orientalism, and Occidentalism are harmoniously produced in a mixed composition. Her work as such is noteworthy as an interesting example showing the active acceptance of Western trends and the pursuit of oriental tradition, which is constantly discussed in the Korean contemporary art world. By discovering something different and new from what has been considered cliché among the young generation, Kim‘s work is expected to present various perspectives to Korean contemporary art. Today, Kim is quietly sinking inside herself and devoting herself to the work, just as usual.