Page 7 - 김희재 초대전 2023. 8. 16 – 9. 15 일조원갤러리

Artistic Spirit of Oneness between the Heavens, Earth, and Humans

Kim Hye Nee, Ph.D., literary critic

◎ Synopsis of Kim Heejae’s Art Realm Among themes of Kim Heejae’s pictures, the mountain is a sacred place distanced from the mundane
due to its height, and the rock symbolizes cohesion, immortality, eternity, and stability due to its sturdiness
The Brush-Knife Painting Technique & an Abysmal Secret Drawer and durability. In being a middle point where the sky meets the earth, the mountain is symbolized as
While wrestling with the picture plane for six decades, Painter Kim Heejae has been repeatedly elevating an axis of the world and a tree of life, a ladder for climbing to the sky, and the backbone of the universe.
her level as a great figure in the painting circles, throwing all her mind and body at the task. Also, she Also, in the case of alchemy, the so-called philosopher’s stone symbolizes the combination of mutually
invented the very unique “brush-knife painting technique,” something she can call her own. Further, music opposing worlds. Therefore, the rock is nature unifying wandering and stability, the body and the mind,
flows and poetry whispers in her oeuvre, in which philosophy is settled at the center. Painter Kim comes and the conscious and unconscious selves. As such, a rock-faced mountain settles in her mind and body
from an artistic family. Very few, if any, painters today could match Kim Heejae’s knowledge of the theories to encompass all. Therefore, this is also an expression seeking to overcome life’s ironies and fatefulness, i.e.,
of literature and art as well as philosophy. humanity’s limits, by replacing and elevating them with a cosmic imagination.
From early on, she unfolded an art realm while focusing on mountains, rocks, withered flowers, The pond in the picture is not that of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell into a pond while swooning
wildflowers, and thistles. Such natural environments, however, are not real and pure natural scenes, but over his own image and drowned. It is just an unconscious mirror and self-portrait she had carefully
memories seated deep in the imagination of her sentimental depths. So spatial distances or the concrete hidden in her depths. She is lost in thought while dreaming as she gazes at a pond in a solitary daydream.
forms of her intended subjects are sometimes deconstructed in her paintings, resembling Impressionist Her pond is completely still. After a kind of self-forgetting descending to the bottom of existence, her spirit
styles. Therefore, to effectively understand her art, one will first have to open the secret drawer of the resurfaces. The pond can be considered an entryway for passage from the world of space to a spaceless
meditation and silence piled layer upon layer in the depths of her abyss. world, and from being a temporal entity to being a timeless one. An initiation awaits in the process. That
is the lonely and winding mountain-spur pathway. This trail is her way from the earth to the heavens, and
Dialectic Aesthetics of Elimination & Generation from the worldly to the sacred. It is quiet in the mountain where the route ends. Her silence implies there
While art and philosophy could never be one and the same, they cannot be considered completely is a path off the path. The silence becomes a wind and grows in the mountain. She rides a rock cliff that
separately either. Kim Heejae’s art realm, in particular, requires locating the philosophy condensed in served as her ladder and climbs onto a cloud. In that paradise atop a cloud, she breathes out a celestially
it. In the previous secret drawer, I found the composition of a dialectic pictorial journey of elimination blessed breath.
and generation, and descent and ascent, as a theme of Kim Heejae’s art. The thistles filling her picture
planes whisper a poetic language while scattering in the wind. They are deploying the ironic principle of Secret of Black
“causing to bear fruit through scattering, and filling through emptying,” i.e., flower-fruits and elimination- If colors operate on the mind, the mind is the spirit. Also, if the condensed expression of the spirit is
generation. This is also life’s dialectic process we finally reach at the end of countless doubts, frustrations, paintings, colors in paintings directly reflect the artist’s mind. The background black particularly draws
denials, and despair. It is also simultaneously a self-realization of rebirth through revival, and it signifies the the eye in her early and mid-stage works. She paints her backgrounds black even when representing the
birth of the self and the world. abundant thistles and wildflowers of the summer. Then what might be the secret of that black? Black
Mountains & Rocks, Ponds & Mountain-Spur Paths generally symbolizes futility, despair, stillness, silence, denial, death, sin, and anxiety. That black can be read

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