Page 5 - 김은 초대전 2024. 9. 24 – 10. 7 어우재미술관

Co-existence by preconditions on the 'contrast'

Since 1997 Eun Kim has utilized Painting, Sculpture, Installation, and Performance art to highlight the paradoxical parity of opposites.
Kim establishes this significance within her ongoing construction of precarious structures. By exposing the tangible, material limits
of different media, the artist suggests the dynamic of time and space as the source of aesthetic balance.

Eun Kim grew up in the pastoral countryside of South Korea, where beliefs of Confucianism flourished. Traditionally, the
environment in which women write on Korean Paper was not as easy as men, so Kim developed a secret curiosity about paper. The
artist’s curiosity continued to evolve, leading her to Paris, France where she studied at the Sorbonne and received a Doctorate in Fine
Arts. Since then traditional Korean paper and paper pulp have become the underlying anchor that is seen throughout most of her
oeuvre. “As I became an artist,” Kim says, “I have analyzed the characteristics of traditional Korean papers very deeply. The material
that can take any shape that I want, and can show the natural and delicate colors when dyed. It can even be preserved for over a
thousand years. Now I can’t imagine my works without this material. When I knead the paper pulp, for example, it feels like touching
my own skin.”

While living in Paris, Eun Kim created sculpture and site-specific installations that memorialized the tragic loss of human life in
international events such as September 11th, 2001. About this complex and disorderly reality. “I believe that every complexity bears
order, and every order involves complexity,” statesKim. “If the world is full of purely complex things or purely ordered things, the
words ‘order’ or ‘disorder’ might not exist, the concepts of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ might not exist.” As a result, Kim’s artwork highlighted
the beauty of tattered shards along with asymmetry, thick textures and rough surfaces. For the artist the process of destruction is, “led
to a "new birth",gesturing amusement. I am pleased by the process of how my work repeats the "destruction" and the "new birth" as
"life" and "death" does.”

Ripping, or burning something is one of the way to disrupt objects for daily use. Nevertheless, for her art making, this manipulation
- generally for destruction - is a gesture of play for 'naissance'. By repeatedly ripping or burning the objects, which leads to the
next naissance, "my inmost soul reaches to the serene, and peaceful world. We finally realize that the world would be born must
be grounded on the associations between destroy and naissance, assemblage and dispersion, and light and darkness. My artwork
gradually discloses its shapes, like as blooming and fruit-bearing in this world, throughout the moment of enlightenment.(...) The
assembly of torn, and burnt Hanji pieces is not a driftless cluster, but the world of co-existence where each piece perceives the others
as its associates. It is the world of a swirling torrent, which heralds the next naissance and extinction perpetually." She emphasizes.

Moreover Kim moves freely from handling delicate concave forms to shaping volumes of wet paper pulp into plaster-like firmness.
Through the repetition of the process of dismantling and combining the materiality of Korean Paper porridge in abstract form,
which is free to model, the non-visual world of ideas is brought to the visible world. Taking the non-visual concept as an abstract
theme, Kim's latest sculpture has arranged rough and ragged-shaped disorderly forms of objects vertically and horizontally on
the background screen in white or red. Therefore, it creates the speciality of the screen in which disorder and order co-exist while
achieving complex and simple dual effects.

Her work creatively embodies strong sameness, as if it contrasted with the combination of each connected word in poetry. It was
also important to express the amount of delicate depth between the object and the object that was placed on the canvas. Preserve
much of the depth in space or space. This serves to complete the work in various ways, each moment, with different colors and
shapes depending on the viewer's location.

By Jill Conner, New Yok

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