Sunny Kim

If Different Day is a Same Day…
Enna Bae
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‍If Different Day is a Same Day… is a cumulative installation of paintings, film, images and objects by Korean-American artist Sunny Kim. The exhibition was conceived through our long-distance conversations -- she was in New York, going through a difficult lockdown, while I was in Seoul. We have collaborated on two reenactment performances, Still Life (2012) and Landscape (2014). If Different Day is a Same Day …  became a rumination upon ways to make a seemingly-impossible exhibition real, leading us into an unpredictable journey of temporality. In a time when the artist felt continuing her work an unfeasible task, I wanted to convey a space that felt as if we were traversing the time she spent on her painting instead of displaying her paintings through an exhibition. If Different Day is a Same Day … exposes these points of inconsistency where we contend with a present that unveils a world made unfamiliar.  
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Revisiting the artist’s memory and in dialogue with both the distant and immediate past, If Different Day is a Same Day… opens a sense of impermanence in Kim’s painting. Faced with a world made unfamiliar and isolating, Kim, rather than anticipating what follows, instead chooses to reflect upon past emotions and hopes. The girls in uniform from Playing Stones (2020) who once reenacted her paintings, the dismantled plywood from the structure of Landscape (2017) opening up the gallery space, the mountain separating the sky and the land in Point of View (2015), the distant Big Flower Tree (2019) and closely seen Small Flower Tree (2020) - these images invite us to a world where nothing is new, yet nothing is old.
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‘Memory’ seems a tenable material rooted in reality when one is in isolation. Kim begins If Different Day is a Same Day… with a fixed point in time and uses it to invoke other instances of her recollection, accompanied by her archive of images, writings, and other found materials. The exhibition is also supported by Kim’s own reading of A Sixfoot Sickbed by Masaoka Shiki (1867 - 1902), with which the artist has assimilated the feelings of confinement, isolation, consolement and hope with her own situation under lockdown.  

Sunny Kim imbues a sense of grief and hope, reanimating and altering moments that appear permanent in an attempt at eroding them. It is a wall that appears and interrupts the depths of her paintings; the reflection of a mirror that can’t be met with the real, and like the ‘dead center’ that continuously emerges, the image’s substance that can’t be caught with the ‘seeing’ of the eyes, the ‘awakening’ of the body that we must contend with, and the ‘vitality’ of our mind. If Different Day is a Same Day… is an exhibition where Kim reenacts the ‘liveness’ of things past throughout the ‘tableau-space’ by rearranging her paintings and images in different gestures: juxtaposing, adjoining, overlapping, laying down, overlaying a voice that echoes in the room. Kim’s attempt to grasp perpetually ceasing moments become real in space, but ultimately this reality is an image that can’t be grasped.

Painting as an Active-Passive Collaboration:
An Aesthetic Discourse on Sunny Kim’s Paintings, Practices, and Ways
KANG Sumi (Art Critic, Professor at Dongduk Women’s University)

1. Pleasure
People’s attitude towards art tends to be more conservative than progressive. This is especially true when it comes to painting, with its long history and ingrained values. For the majority of people, any painting by Leonardo da Vinci is automatically a masterpiece, by default. On the other hand, most experimental paintings by contemporary artists are presumed to be immature and incomplete. Likewise, with regards to artistic theories and concepts, people tend to latch onto widely circulated ideas and narratives, eschewing more eccentric interpretations. Thus, every artist who has gained an exalted place in art history is labeled a “genius.” Then, as implied by the definition of the word “genius,” we embrace the myth that the great artists (almost all of whom are white, European, males) created their masterpieces through some combination of superior talent and the divine intervention of the muse. No matter how much time passes, or human reason advances, or culture flourishes, people still want to believe in these myths. It reminds one of Picasso’s comment that he focused on “finding” rather than “research relating to modern painting,” which was long remembered¹, and we love to believe that Van Gogh had to suffer in order to create his incredible works. We love to suggest that the liberating energy of Basquiat’s graffiti is the result of his unique artistic spirit as a minority artist who was inspired by the street. But in perpetuating these myths, we never stop to consider that such concepts—genius, talent, the muse, and the secret creation of divine inspiration—are merely aesthetic claims from a certain perspective, primarily compiled under the influence of nineteenth-century German Romanticism.

Many people would be surprised to learn of a more radical theory about the muse, first put forth by Aristotle in Politics and reintroduced by Pascal Quignard in La Haine de la Musique (The Hatred of Music), his argument for an aesthetic critique of music. According to Quignard, Aristotle suggested that, while singing or playing an instrument, the mouth and hands of the muse “are occupied exactly like those of a prostitute who, with her lips and fingers, inflates her client’s physis in order to make it stand below his belly until he ejaculates.”² Thus, Quignard suggests that the creation of an artwork is not necessarily the free and independent act of an artist, but is rather bound to something, somewhere. According to Quignard, this binding is the state of “being captivated by sorrow.” Moreover, as memories are accumulated, this captivation by sorrow sinks and collects at the bottom of the artist’s soul—and in the artist’s works—like dregs at the bottom of a vat of wine. But while Aristotle’s sensual analogy may shatter some of the illusions that people harbor about the mythical status of the artist, most will find Quignard’s theory somewhat stifling. After all, of all the words or images that he could have chosen, Quignard asserted that artistic creation and the aesthetic pleasure of a viewer were simply “dregs” ensnared by sadness.

2. Sketch
Now turning to Sunny Kim’s artwork, one may consider my critical analysis to have already begun since my focus – and if possible, to delve into at depth – is Kim’s concentration on “painting” practices, one of the oldest art forms. When making a painting, Kim engages in a series of blind steps, never knowing if the end result will be successful. But this process does not reflect her adherence to a grand methodology or her dependence on inspiration from the muse. To some degree, of course, this description may be applied to any contemporary artist. As such, it may be discussed as an issue that is universal to contemporary art, but it is particularly crucial for an effective analysis of Kim’s work. Since 2012, Sunny Kim has intensively and methodically focused on creating paintings at her own pace, which has allowed her to find her own path and results. Through this process, Kim has been able to create paintings that resonate with an individuality that cannot be absorbed by the universal.

Here exist the purpose and intent of this essay. In order to fully explore this process, this article focuses on Kim’s work from the past five years (I will discuss later why I separate this time period). Moreover, rather than simply discussing Kim’s “paintings” per se, I wish to discuss her overall work, which has been focused primarily—but not exclusively—on painting. In this way, we can better understand her creative trajectory and methodology, as well as what she hopes to achieve through the work of painting, as an artist operating outside the frame of conventional ideologies of art. Rather than manifesting the transcendental “genius” of the artist, Kim’s works express her experiential and performative questions and doubts as a working subject. Rather than being inspired or produced by a divine muse dwelling in her head or her fingertips, her works are the tangible result of a laborious process. Rather than embodying the perfect freedom of creation, her works represent the constraints of invisible forces, as well as the artist’s incessant attempts to strain against or comply with those constraints.

3. Obvious Matters and Opposites
Back to 2001, Sunny Kim (who was then in her early thirties) introduced herself to the Korean art field with her first solo exhibition, Girls in Uniform at Gallery Sagan in Seoul. As suggested by the title, the paintings of this exhibition depicted girls in school uniforms. The paintings seem to capture images from a bygone era, reminiscent of faded photos developed from damaged film. While the overall contours of the figures are visible, the details, like their nose or fingers, are hazy. The surrounding landscape, if it exists at all, is fragmented into areas of light and shade. Indeed, the sharp contrast between light and darkness dominates these canvases. But rather than a cold, dry sensation, these works exude a strange mixture of emotions: longing, nostalgia, comfort, and regret. At first glance, the subjects seem to be Korean school girls from the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), but the styles and subtle details of the uniforms indicate that they are more recent, perhaps from the 1970s or 80s, when Korea was developing at breakneck speed. But the paintings do not seem to portray Sunny Kim’s memories of her own past, nor do they match the time or space around the turn of the millennium, when Korea became affluent, despite the financial crisis of the late 1990s. Herein lies the core of Kim’s early works (if we were to distinguish between her early and recent works for the sake of formality), which clearly depict images from the past, but not images from “her” past. What do these images represent, and why did she paint them?

In 1983, when Sunny Kim was in the eighth grade, her family left Korea and moved to the United States. Thus, she became part of the “1.5 generation” of immigrants, who come to a new country around the time of their early adolescence. She grew up in the U.S., where she studied painting at the Cooper Union in New York City and earned her master’s degree in Combined Media from Hunter College. After initially preparing to launch her career as a young artist in the U.S., she decided for personal reasons to return to Korea in 1998 and started her domestic career as an artist through her first solo exhibition. Thus, for about fifteen years, Korea existed only as a blank space for Sunny Kim, devoid of memories or experiences. Interestingly, after having moved from and back to her homeland for reasons beyond her will, the first works that she showed in Korea were about blankness, absence, and existence – or what is believed to have existed – within emptiness. In sentence form, these paintings would use past progressive tense and the subjunctive mood: “While I was gone, these girls would have been taking this or that photo…” The(se) girl(s) with bobbed hair attended all-girls middle and high schools in the 1980s; they went on field trips to Gyeongju; they assumed chaste poses for a group photo beneath the eaves of a Korean traditional house; they wore fitted uniforms with a white top, broad collar, and black skirt; they stood facing straight forward, with a modest but buoyant smile. As the title states, they are “girl(s) in uniform.” These images are not derived from Sunny Kim’s memories, but nor are they something that she has forgotten. In The Art of Forgetting, neurobiologist Ivan Izquierdo quotes and affirms two key ideas from other scholars: that forgetting is the most striking aspect of remembering, and that what we remember is who we are.³ In this context, the paintings of Sunny Kim cannot be understood solely through the relationship between remembrance and oblivion, as her works evince certain layers or dimensions where neither her memories nor her subjectivity exist. Perhaps these dimensions are occupied by the collective social memory of Korea, including what has been forgotten. But no matter how she tried, Sunny Kim could not occupy or coexist with these dimensions. Notably, the Korean title of this series includes the word “교복” (“Gyobok” which means “school uniform”), as opposed to the more general term “uniform,” another disjunction that reflects the impassable distance between Sunny Kim or the girls in her paintings. But the gap between them is even larger than this.

The paintings of Girls in Uniform do not document the past or record specific or detailed figures. In fact, it is difficult to determine if they are traces of actual existence. But by representing banal and stylized old photos as vague or incomplete figures, Kim touches upon something that transcends individual existence: the loss of an entire era. By conjuring this parallax view, precipitated within social memories, the paintings ultimately evoke the fickle nature of human existence. The abstract and psychological qualities of the paintings make them difficult to visualize or rationalize. But as images that are familiar from our current stereotypes, they address residual matters and conditions of the present, while also drawing our attention to fleeting emotions and unconscious perceptions that we usually choose to ignore. Although the images themselves are distinct and apparent, they also arouse complex, invisible, and multi-layered effects. In this early phase of her career, Kim may not even have been aware of such effects, but that does not mean that they were not an influence or inspiration. At that time, she was primarily interested in exploring how to paint something beyond memory or experience, or how to use the medium of painting to visualize the ever-changing reality through the parallax view. These issues are part of the mission of many contemporary artists who choose to express themselves through painting, the oldest and most conservative artistic field. But at a superficial level, the paintings of Girls in Uniform might still be read as the artist’s attempt to re-visualize photos of the past, in order to stir nostalgia and melancholy.

In my view, this was before Sunny Kim became aware of this mission. At that time, she seems to have been dedicated to amassing such paintings, steadily producing diverse images of girls in school uniform, with different backgrounds and motifs. But in 2012, she began tapping into the core of the medium of painting, boldly discarding two-dimensionality and pursuing various routes. Interestingly, it was only by abandoning the fundamental condition of two-dimensionality and adopting a methodology of diverse expressions, media, and interpretations that she was able to approach the essence of painting. This process is reminiscent of her back-and-forth relationship with Korea.

4. Acknowledgment of Being
The photography resources that Kim used in Girls in Uniform were not social or historical documents, but rather found images, not taken from the artist’s personal or family album. The photos are not indexed or attributed, so the people in the photographs cannot be identified. As such, they are anonymous, and their meanings and functions are opaque. Nonetheless, to Sunny Kim, they weakly but persistently attest to her own presence – I/we, here and now – in a specific time and space that she did not actually experience. Meanwhile, to the viewers, they attest to the presence of the girl(s), there and then. Although Kim altered the figures and changed the meanings of the original images, the figures still exist as beings that cannot be deferred or replaced. One of the first painters who experimented with capturing the essence of photography, rather than simply using photos as tools for sketches or paintings, was Gerhard Richter. According to Richter, “[A photograph] is absolute, and therefore autonomous and unconditional.”⁴ Similar to Richter, Sunny Kim uses photography as a raw material. Yet due to the absolute, autonomous, and unconditional attributes of the medium, the photography of the schoolgirls must have limited Kim’s freedom of expression. Or, recalling the theory of Pascal Quignard, the existence of the schoolgirl(s) is what captured Sunny Kim with sadness. Of course, Kim “actively” painted Girls in Uniform through her own creative intentions and desires for free expressions. But at the same time, she was “passively” drawn to the leitmotif of “girls in uniform” via photographs of a time and space infused with sadness, or some emotion beyond the sentimental. The sadness is inevitable, because the time and space had vanished from Kim’s own existence, leaving a gap in her experience and memory. The resulting works are an attempt to represent that gap.

Sunny Kim’s paintings are the result of this collaboration between passiveness and activeness. In her creative process, she actively pursues her own artistic expression and aesthetic judgment, but she does so from a restrained or passive position. She cannot look away from the indelible presence of the girls at the ontological level, the presence that is both “being here and now” and “having been there and then.” Like Gerhard Richter, Kim attempts to utilize the objective and material quality of photography as the controlling agent of her subjectivity and thought, and also to revitalize the accidental and active depiction of a subject who escapes from this passive position. In short, she creates her paintings via the feedback between activeness and passiveness. They are an acknowledgment of being, of the people who surely existed but are now blank or absent in one’s memory. They embody the times, lives, experiences, memories, images, controlling powers, the energy of expression, and the desire to act. Of course, they also embody Sunny Kim, the subject that all of these elements and influences converged upon, moved through, and released from.

5. Leap in the Dark
We are living in the era of artificial intelligence, when AI-interfaces like Siri read our minds, answer our questions, and choose our music. The self-learning and constantly improving AI program AlphaGo can now defeat the world’s best go players utilizing adept strategies that people cannot comprehend. In the future, our present era may be defined by our capacity to develop and improve AI technology. What is most astonishing is that we have created this advanced technology, which may ultimately supersede the human species, despite having only a rudimentary understanding of our own minds. For the most part, the territory of the human brain is dark and unexplored. We do not even know how the different areas of the brain function or interact. Indeed, new procedures such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography) scans show that even our simplest thoughts involve simultaneous activity among various parts of the brain.

Some readers might be surprised by my sudden segue into the world of neuroscience, but these ideas have great relevance for our understanding of Sunny Kim’s recent creative output. Like today’s neuroscientists, Kim has taken a “leap in the dark,” a term that serves as both the theme and title of her recent exhibition. Taking such a leap means acting without being certain of the result, a spirit that defines Kim’s current painting process. For the last five years or so, Kim has consciously discarded the painting methods that she studied and mastered, and she also avoids making any concrete plans or calculations before embarking on a project. Instead, she seeks to immerse herself in whatever phenomena, incidents, conditions, thoughts, and perceptions that she may encounter while she completes a painting, or better yet, while a painting becomes complete on its own. She leaps into the darkness, courting hardship by exposing herself to knowledge, experiences, and feelings that she might otherwise have chosen to avoid. In doing so, perhaps she intends to shift the meaning onto her own practice of painting. Although the concept of “painting” is filled with ideas about tradition, authority, genius, and masterpieces, it is still just a common noun, a huge dark zone that is ready to be explored. The fact that we have yet to understand the workings of our brain fills us not with dark despair, but with the light of investigation. Similarly, having traversed her “girls in uniform” period, Sunny Kim is now ready to leap into her new mission. Perhaps, like Haruki Murakami, she believes that the capacity of our “high-powered cerebral cortex” is derived from such abstract thought, a vital component of the creative process.⁵ Other artists have acknowledged the significance of this factor in the production. For example, discussing his own theory of creation, Gerhard Richter said:

“When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings—like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.”<sup>6

‍</sup>Despite some poetic exaggeration, Richter’s statement seems to summarize what it means to be an artist making a painting. To the viewers, Kim’s recent works, presented under the grand title of Leap in the Dark, seem to be complete artworks of superior aesthetic quality. But to the artist, they must be manifestations of the ambiguity, anonymity, purposelessness, nonexistence, and insecurity of the painting process, imbued with all of the desperate effort, judgment, and emotion contained in every step. Or perhaps the paintings themselves exerted pressure on her. Either way, Sunny Kim did not try to hide or overcome these aspects of the creative process, nor does she exaggerate or beautify her artistic capacity. Instead, she ardently activated these negative qualities as elements of her work, concentrating on transforming them into an aesthetic style.

The three recent works that most clearly demonstrate this sensibility are Well, Reflect, and Encounter, which resemble landscape paintings with a dark tone, if they must be classified. In truth, they are very different from conventional landscapes, but they also cannot be called abstract or conceptual paintings. In terms of the theme, they lie on the boundary between landscape paintings and abstract paintings, or perhaps they alternate between the two, dynamically swapping genre conventions. For example, the lower part of Well contains an incomprehensible line that is cut very abruptly, with rough brushstrokes underneath. Meanwhile, the upper part of Reflect is largely achromatic, and the depicted valley of the landscape is neatly divided with a vertical line. Finally, about one-third of the canvas of Encounter consists of a dark, dingy area, showing traces of the downward flow of the paint. Most viewers, being accustomed to the conventions of balance, harmony, and moderation, will likely be embarrassed or aghast to see these paintings, which willfully break the harmony of the scene, confuse the motif of the landscape, and interfere with the viewer’s satisfaction of being immersed in the virtuality of the image. But Kim said that the paintings “had to be that way, they couldn’t have been otherwise.”⁷ According to her, she began Well with only a fragmentary idea of painting a well surrounded by rocks in the upper part of the canvas, an unconventional composition. Then, while she was painting, she experienced a certain state in which the work itself seemed to be leading the process. Feeling the need to include this odd sensation in the work, she depicted the dizzying traces of confusion, frustration, compromise, persuasion, and success that she experienced. Like the works of El Greco, she sought to give her viewers a more substantial and physical experience of the work, beyond simply gazing at an imaginary landscape. Thus, rather than striving to conceal the fact that Well is a painted presence, she openly confesses to the chaos and absurdity that are churning just beneath the surface of the finished work. The aforementioned elements of Reflect (i.e., the achromatic area and vertical lines) and Encounter (i.e., the dark area and flow of paint) can also be understood in the same context. On one hand, these details are included in the landscape as visible elements on the canvas. But at the same time, they testify that the landscape is neither an imitation of nature nor a representation of reality; it is rather a creative performance, both the act and achievement of an artist who leaped into the dark path of creation. In these works, Sunny Kim is attempting to verify her painterly existence, an agenda that is at odds with the mechanical objectivity of photography. In the process, she subverts the myth of a painting as the result of a genius’ subjectivity. The conventional ideology of art history simply cannot be applied to her paintings, which were created by her willingness to abandon convention in favor of uncertainty.

Hints of Kim’s desire to verify her painterly existence can also be seen in earlier works, such as Under the Purple Sky, Dark Clouds, and Waterfall. These paintings contain certain forms, rendered with expressive brushstrokes, but what exactly are they? Misty mountains at dusk? A mass of clouds before a downpour? Waterfalls beneath an overcast sky? These paintings seem to have been made before the artist firmly committed herself to an aesthetic style, and they do not fully convey the artist’s confession that they are paintings. Instead, they function by conveying traces of the artist’s contemplation, or by psychologically or emotionally enticing the viewer. Although Kim’s artistic concept may not have been fully developed at the time she created these works, they definitely feature provocative and experimental elements that go beyond the mere depiction of forms.

6. Integration in Painting, like an MRI and Tomography
“Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself?”<sup>8

‍</sup>As referred to at the beginning of this essay, my position is that Sunny Kim’s artwork can be divided between the early and recent. From this perspective, I reviewed her work over the past 16 years. 2012 is the clear year of that divide. That year, she began moving away from the canvas with performance works such as Still Life (2012, Culture Station Seoul 284) and Landscape (2014, Incheon Art Platform), which delineated various media and genre conventions. They can be called “performance works” for the sake of convenience, but there is no simple term to describe these works, in which Kim articulated and self-replicated her previous paintings. Kim has explained that Still Life and Landscape were originally intended to be part of a trilogy exploring the nature of contemporary painting, along with a piece called Portrait that has not yet been realized. Still Life and Landscape may be thought of as the outcome of Kim’s journey, in which she departed from the primary path to painting in order to return to it via a different route. To make an unusual analogy, this process is reminiscent of an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) that makes images of our body or brain. Unlike X-ray photography, MRI involves taking many cross-sectional photos from various angles and then combining them to create a comprehensive three-dimensional image that can greatly enhance our observation and understanding. In a similar way, Sunny Kim has meticulously contemplated every aspect of her early paintings of “girls in uniform”: her images, creative methods, materials, expressive techniques, apparatuses, etc. Prior to 2012, her paintings were indiscriminately executed or lumped together, but she has since begun to divide them by their themes, elements, methodologies, and qualities, and to look into them with different sensory devices.

This work is exemplified by Landscape, which Kim performed six times at the Incheon Art Platform, from May 23 to 25, 2014. With the audience looking straight ahead, images of Kim’s landscape paintings were projected in the center of a dark stage. Three girls appeared, looking as if they had been cut out of the Girls in Uniform painting series. They wore white blouses, black skirts, black socks (pulled up below the knee), and black loafers. In a situation outside of any specific time or space, with no clear context or narrative, the girls made very subtle and ambiguous movements, as if they are in a vacuum. Sometimes they slowly approached the projected landscape, or they walked towards the audience, placing their hands around their mouth as if to shout into the crowd. Obviously, they are people, not a landscape, but the viewers come to feel as if the girls are permeated with the faint tones and colors of the background landscape. At the same time, the silent landscape seems to come alive, as if it is breathing through the nuances of the girls’ gestures and clothing.

This is the sense that I experienced while watching the performance, and it is what I remember most today. As usual, the specific details or inessential aspects have faded into oblivion. To me, the performance sliced the conventional lump that we call painting into topological cross-sections, which were then reassembled along the axes of time and space. This is what I remember, in any case. If memory is who we are, then the I who remembers Sunny Kim’s Landscape am nothing but the subjecthood of memories formed by Sunny Kim’s Landscape. It does not matter if those memories are big, small, many, few, strong, weak, rough, or subtle. It does not matter if Sunny Kim was present, or if she experienced similar sensations, for these are the memories and the existence built through the artwork. In “girls in uniform,” Sunny Kim could not avoid passiveness, due to the absence of memory and experience. Then, by pushing her painting into darkness, she contributed to forming the experiences of other people. Thus, she became the active subjecthood who, like Hansel and Gretel, leaves a trail of big and little pebbles that will not be lost in the forest of memory and oblivion. Relating to Maurice Blanchot’s thought about writing, if Sunny Kim must continue painting “seen by everyone and indecipherable to herself,” she will continue to do so.

^1. John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso, translated by Kim Yunsoo, Seoul: Mijinsa, 1989, p. 39. The original text from:http://www.learn.columbia.edu/monographs/picmon/pdf/art_hum_reading_49.pdf^2. Pascal Quignard, La Haine de la Musique, Korean trans. Kim Yujin, (Seoul: Franz, 2017), pp. 10-11. According to Quignard, ancient Greeks used the word physis, meaning “nature” or “growth,” as a euphemism for the penis.
^3. Ivan Izquierdo, The Art of Forgetting, Korean trans. Kim Youngseon (Paju: Prunsoop Publishing, 2017), pp. 20 and 28. The former idea is from neurobiologist James McGaugh, while the latter is from philosopher Norberto Bobbio.
^4. Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter-Writings 1961-2007, eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (New York: D.A.P, 2009), p. 45.
^5. Murakami Haruki, 기사단장 죽이기 (Killing Commendatore) Vol. 1, Korean trans. Hong Eunju (Paju: Munhak Dongne Publishing Group, 2017), p. 432. Menshiki, one of the major characters of this novel, speculates that the meaning and significance of our brain comes from abstract and metaphysical thought, a necessary condition of our inability to fully comprehend the brain’s function or capacity.
^6. Gerhard Richter, ibid., p. 142.
^7. From my conversation with Sunny Kim on July 20, 2017.
^8. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 2.

Air of Suspicion: into the gap of time
Enna Bae (Independent Curator)
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‍I remember Sunny Kim always looking somewhere far away. Her paintings were creating a thick border neither here nor there. This place was the land and the sea; something alive and dead; and possibly you and me. Or perhaps none of these.

In the early 1980s, the entire landscape of Korea was transformed by rapid economic growth, accompanied by major social and political shifts. In the midst of these grand changes, many Korean individuals and families were compelled to relocate. Sunny Kim was one of them. Although she dreamt of being a high school girl in a uniform, her future was interrupted when she had to leave her homeland. However, after she returned to Korea as an adult, her dream was vicariously realized through the act of painting. When I first encountered Sunny Kim’s series in 2001, I thought that the girls in her paintings were more than mere representation of lost dreams of a Korean American. My question at the time was not “what does she paint?” but rather, “why does she paint?”

At a glance, the images in Kim’s early paintings (e.g., girls in uniforms, schools, field trips, the “ten longevity symbols,” landscapes, etc.) seem to invoke the system of symbols embedded in history, encompassing our conventions, values, norms, institutions, and traditions. But Kim’s images are actually removed from that system. They look opaque and dislocated, but they emit a certain virtue. They often seem to escape the gaze of the viewer, always moving off into the distance. Through her production process, two different timelines intersect: the axis of the reproduced images, borrowed from photographs, films, newspaper scraps, or magazines, and the axis wherein those reproduced images are incorporated into binary allegories of memory and oblivion, fact and fallacy, past and present, growth and death. Through this visual and sensory collage process, the images gradually acquire a psychological three-dimensionality, taking on an air of suspicion. Kim’s meticulously manufactured images enable viewers to simultaneously experience seeing and the sensation of being unable to see, thus revealing the inherent gaps in our sight. Looking at her works, I feel that I am looking at a body without a face or a soul only left with its body. Her girls are not the girl that she could have been; similarly, her school uniforms are not the school uniform, and her landscapes are not the landscape. Perhaps her paintings are not meant to represent any images at all, but rather to serve as a catalyst for awakening the imperfect cognitive system that lies beneath logic. They might exist to enact this very instability.

It was only after about ten years that I could truly begin to ask the question of why Sunny Kim paints. Between 2012 and 2014, Sunny Kim and I produced two performances that were reenactments. In Still Life, Kim projected her own identity onto the girls in her paintings, allowing her to see the girls with her own eyes in an actual space. Similarly, she created Landscape in order to walk into the landscape that the girls saw and walked through. These two performances also reenacted time, as Kim’s painting process was realized not on a canvas, but in three-dimensional space. By transferring the images of her paintings into actual space, Kim attempted to summon the identity of an individual and the temporality of the past, which have been lost to history. But inevitably, the nature of these things can only exist by disappearing. Here, two contradictory states of mind coexist: the eagerness that she might be able to elicit memories of the past within repeatable movements and living bodies in the present, and the concurrent despair that she will not be able to achieve this. Her images seem to aspire to resuscitate that which is dead, to move that which is still, and to restore the time that has been lost. Her images remain adrift, refusing to be read in the language of the real world, as if they themselves want to evaporate, and reminding us of our inherent imperfections.

In some ways, painting is a primal act. After all, we are all capable of painting, almost from the day we are born. But painting still represents another type of language that cannot be translated into words, no matter how hard we try. Sunny Kim’s paintings look ominous, but they are also sad and beautiful. These feelings likely stem from our overwhelming sense of being unable to describe what we are seeing in words, even though it is right before our eyes, and even penetrating our entire body. This is possible not because of what her paintings are, but since they relate to a certain primordial and inherent state.Why does Sunny Kim paint? This leads me to ask another question: what are we all seeing? What continues to arise inside me? Eventually, we cannot help but think of the human condition inherent in these questions. Through her works, Sunny Kim shares such contemplations with us. I will continue to await the journey, moving towards a destination that we will reach together. Thus, I recommend her for the Korea Artist Prize, which entered into the gap of time in this process.

Paintings Move and the Performers Stop
Haejin Kim

‍The first thing I noticed when I entered the theatre were the several columns that had been placed in front of the audience. ‘What could that be?’ The stage was still dark and only some rosy lighting illuminated the columns and seats. Before long, as the stage brightened, an image filled the wall facing the audience. At that moment, the columns became ‘something’, as they caught my eyes looking at the stage. By obstructing sight, the columns constantly reminded the audience that they were engaged in the act of ‘seeing’. On the other hand, they helped with the act of ‘seeing’, by functioning as a device to prevent us from being drawn into the landscape. Perhaps ‘seeing’ is just that – something that requires distance. Is this the reason why the girls – who had been looking at something or somewhere with their backs to the audience – came out of Sunny Kim’s painting?

The image that fills the entire screen slowly begins to move and transforms into another image, just as the thin fog outside the image changes its color corresponding to the delicate changes of the stage lighting. It looks as if fog is flowing into the painting, and also as if the fog in the painting is escaping out to the stage. The image continues to change. It is a transformation and at the same time, a disappearance. Images are disappearing into other images. This performance titled ‘Landscape’ mulls over paintings by putting them in motion. What came about from this struggle?

Performers. Navy skirts, white shirts, socks that rise up to the knees, and black shoes, all of which that reminds us of school uniform are neatly clad. Three performers become the school girls and gaze at the image. The performers’ movements become more active and the audience’s eyes begin to wander all over the theater including the screen. However, the performers were carefully controlling their movements as well as their sounds as if to protect themselves from being fully exposed. The girls sometimes would suddenly stop moving like statues as if they are part of the still image, or sometimes would all of a sudden halt their dash toward the audience making it look like the images on the screen had come to a stop. At that moment, it felt as if their bodies had been flattened by some invisible glass wall and had turned into paper dolls. And rather than being heard individually, the sounds of their voice are made collectively by them all and echo throughout the theatre as a chorus. The actors in this performance, instead of coming alive as characters, cleverly function within the space as if knights on a chessboard.

The girls, who appeared in front of the audience, are a product resulting from the artist’s struggle to transform the two dimensional space of the painting into a three dimensional space. None of these girls have individuality. We are staring at a body realized from an idea. The girls exit from their vague memories and play out a moment in time like ghosts.

The girls also take apart syllables from a poem and utter them without order. At first, I tried to make sense of what was being said, but gradually began to just observe the process of the language turning into meaningless ‘sound’ and dispersing through the space. It was quite different from being able to picture the image in my head when listening to Kim Sakkat’s poem recited by the performers earlier. A substance known as language had been visualized and was transforming into a landscape that I had never experienced before.

In ‘Landscape’, the eyes of the audience shift, like crossing a stream on stepping stones, from images on the screen, to mirrors and trees that had been placed, then to performers’ domain, then columns, and finally to the performers beyond those columns, in that order – outward starting from the innermost part of the theatre. “Landscape” in fact pushes and expands its space, little by little in an inverse perspective form, toward the audience.

In the last scene, a performer crosses the point beyond columns and takes a step forward towards the audience. At this moment, the space in which the performer roamed and ran, emerges along with the performer. Possibly because the performer is looking up into the void, the space brought out by the performer and that of the audience do not confront or compete. Instead, these spaces slide by at an angle along the performer’s line of sight.

Through ‘Landscape’, where the relationship between the subject ‘who is seeing’ and the object being seen is not one-sided, but rather, where layers of different views overlap, I experienced the artist’s vision exploring and seeing through many different spaces at the same time. Moreover, since the performance encompassed layers of different senses, several different modes of audience perception evolved. On one hand, my mind wandered between the painting put in motion and the potential of the still landscape, pondering which better allowed the audience to freely imagine and feel. The performance carefully structured in detail by the artist was clearly seen. As for the emotions it draws from the audience, it is not as clear.

Three Dimensional Portrayal of a Landscape Painting
Kyunghwa Ahn
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Man-Dae-Ru at Byeongsan Seowon (Historic Byeongsan Academic Institution) in Andong – not just a place where a magnificent view of Nak-Dong River can be appreciated, but also hailed as a structure that even captured the sounds of grasshoppers as well as the wind in its design. Seeming to have been erected in mid-air, the structure’s wooden columns, to be more precise, are an important part of the glorious landscape, along with the Nak-Dong River, Mt. Byeong, the trees, and rocks. As one’s view of the mountain and river between the columns shifts, these columns function as frames. The columns which have already become part of the landscape, either obstruct other elements from being seen, or on the other hand, act as background to allow others to stand out.

Such landscape in which a man-made architectural structure known as Byeongsan Seowon became one with the nature, was recreated on stage by Sunny Kim’s production of ‘Landscape’. While the scenic images projected on the screen represent a distant view, the seats in the audience of various heights serve as a vintage point to take in the vista such as Man-Dae-Ru, or a near distance view. Between these two views, trees and a pond, as well as columns are placed, and the landscape becomes complete with the actors’ movements on stage. The audience is easily reminded of the girls in school uniforms in Sunny Kim’s paintings by the three performers neatly clad in white shirts and black skirts. All the scenes as well as acting in this 6-part performance were thoroughly directed in order to recreate the scenes already portrayed in the artist’s paintings in a three dimensional space. Scene 4, for instance, having sunset and twilight as the theme, begins with the animated images from the paintings portraying late-afternoon scenes during a sunset. It is then followed by the stage performers enacting the poses portrayed in the painting. They take turns reciting an old poem about an imagined landscape. While walking towards the screen, a strong ray of late afternoon sunshine even casts itself on the backs of the performers. The twilight scene on the screen, the scene created by poem recited by the performers, and the scene created by all the elements on stage, these are the layers coexisting in Sunny Kim’s work.

Through her paintings, the artist has been asking questions about a perfect image which cannot be attained from a fictitious space and time, nor from the characters in that space. ‘Landscape’ – a performance where seemingly opposing counterparts such as space (void) and person (being), image and text, as well as sound and light, exist in harmony – is an experiment to discuss the true nature of painting by different means, through transposing the theatricality existing in a pictorial plane to a real space. This effort to bring out a pictorial subject from a flat surface to a real space had been attempted before in 2012 by Culture Station Seoul 284’s performance ‘Still Life’. The girls that played instruments, sang songs, and read texts in order to reenact ‘Still Life’ once again act in “Landscape” to recreate the painting. And after five scenes that represent dawn to late night, in the final Scene 6, we finally reach a time that does not exist.

The flow of time in ‘Landscape’, as referred to by the artist herself, is a journey by the girls in search of their own selves and also a metaphor for the lives of people through an unknown world. These girls, as in ‘Still Life’ and ‘Landscape’, while sharing the questions about painting and our existence, will eventually return to the ‘portrait’ of all of us – each burdened with their own dilemma yet still carrying on.

Second Thought
Yunkyoung Kim
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It always felt as if something was missing whenever I came across any comments of her works. For a long time now, her works had been labeled to only depict 1.5 generation immigrants, school girls and school uniforms. It seemed to me that such labeling restricted or reduced the artist’s original intent or that of the critics interpreting her work. The time Sunny Kim began introducing her work in Korea was during a period when the gale of late post-modernism and a massive inflow of discourse tended to confine the interpretation of the artist and their work into a standardized framework. As the audience, now with a greater power than ever, tailored and labeled artists, Sunny Kim’s works were also assigned their place. Ironically, that assignment has now become the keyword in theoretically defining the context of her works.
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The interesting thing is that despite such misunderstanding and misreading, most of the images and symbols that persisted throughout Sunny Kim’s works did not originate from her actual or direct experiences and memories, similar to the viewers experiencing her works indirectly through a preexisting framework. Those images and symbols, although pursued by the artist, were eventually unfulfilled and thwarted. They, because they did not exist, could not be touched nor obtained. They are something perfect which only exists in a place that can never be reached. They had been sealed within her everlasting anticipation or maybe in her memories, in the form of the most vivid and perfect images. Could this be the reason why Sunny Kim’s characters and landscapes felt like still life displayed in a showcase? It is this context, her works, having smooth and neat finishes, perceived to be lacking the artist’s warmth or breath, or felt as subjects detached in distance, can be understood. This idiosyncrasy also continued through her 2006 exhibition.

In her exhibition ‘Second Thought’, the first since her last show in 2010 – when she introduced works where people and landscape coexisted – she uses a different brushstroke technique and ‘Line’ (2013) stands out among her new works. For Sunny Kim, ‘Line’ plays an important role in representing an opportunity for the first time in her career to finally remove that transparent, objective wall that had always stood in her way. It was her first attempt in expressing her emotions being faced with the actual landscape itself, from the memories of feelings acknowledged within herself. This, however, does not mean that such a change is the theme of the exhibition. Rather, as the title suggests, the exhibition openly shows, in a somewhat distracted manner, the artist’s thoughts and concerns which continue to occupy her.

Landscape without people. Carefully displayed objects. iPhone snapshots. Yet, this exhibition cannot be simply criticized as being ‘distracted’ due to the artist’s willingness to expose her state of mind. This attitude materializes in ‘Line’. This change, perhaps caused by the humbleness and loneliness felt when facing Tumen River – a place that only existed in her imagination as a symbol of strength – by the artist who had always dreamt of the ‘perfect image’, is the reason that makes me eagerly anticipate her future work.

ROLLlNG FOG:
Memories of things which never were
Eunju Lee, 2010
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My first encounter with Sunny Kim’s “Girls in Uniform” series was from her 2001 Gallery Sagan exhibition. At the time, her work, which mostly originated from documentary sources suggestive of standardized types, was transformed to deliver an artificial formality akin to graphic images. There was a certain intentional barrier that evoked a sense of absence and a feeling of cold detachment, and the fact that one could not find any youthful energy nor movement in the uniformed smiling girls made the paintings different. The psychological blocking and absence shaped by the consciously-removed ambiance paradoxically created a unique aura. Her solo exhibition at the Ilmin Museum of Art continued along the same path. Ornate and intricately painted traditional embroidery motifs were also used to signify the lack of life and movement. The school girls’ youthful energy is locked within the distance of time, even more distant than old photographs one may find in a museum. The perfectly elaborated and flawless finish of the paintings rendered them more unreal, and this intentional effect of removal operated as a psychological device. It is interesting to note that Kim explains such manipulation to be her attempt toward a “perfect image.”

When discussing Kim’s work, one cannot overlook the fact that she is a 1.5 generation Korean- American. As she admits, the abrupt break and change following her move, and the attitudes formed therein, have been important foundations for her work. The “Girls in Uniform” series shown at the Gallery Sagan exhibition may have first created the impression that her interest was in socio-cultural conditions such as the systematic suppressions found in Korean society, perhaps due to the clearly systematic clichés embodied within the motif of uniforms. However, her works using the theme of traditional embroidery exhibited at the Ilmin Museum showed that the artist’s interest was not in socio-political themes such as the systematic suppression of the individual, but, rather, in the concept of standard “rules” under certain conditions. “Rules” can have a suppressive and negative connotation, but, can also be a very consciously creative act of controlling and organizing a subject in a specific manner. In Kim’s work, these rules become a mechanism for consciously manipulating the images in her paintings toward her targeted “perfect image.” This aspiration toward the “perfect image” is an important motivation driving Kim’s work. For Kim, who left Korea when students were still required to wear uniforms, the appearance of a high school girl in uniform is always a prototype of this “perfect image.” This is likely due to the neatness of the uniform, the beauty regulated by rules, and the social position accurately and reasonably thus imparted on the wearer. In an environment where rules were suddenly lost, and in a situation where balance had to be independently found, uniforms could have been for Kim an effective ideal of a youth where safe order was guaranteed. In this vein, the uniforms in Kim’s work are not a means for suppressing female students, but rather can be seen as a means for establishing a fixed and clear identity.

Uniforms and embroidery have served as vehicles through which to recreate memories, but those which Kim could never possess, since they were never realized in and abruptly disappeared from her own life. Kim’s work, which seeks to revive such objects which were omitted or absent, may be perceived as an irrational nostalgia for memories which never existed in the first place. Thus, her works are fundamentally based on the impossible attempt to hold what cannot be held on to. The images in her paintings are also ultimately only substitutes for what cannot be real, and are fabricated visions. Despite being constructed, they still concern a reality which is continuously sought for balance within the artist’s unconscious, and somehow connects and links within the artist’s internal world. Even if these images never actually existed, they have a psychologically compensating function in Kim’s work and acquire a complete reality within her paintings. This is also why Kim speaks of a “perfect image” rather than “perfection.” Kim’s paintings can be seen as works which “perfectly” recreate the fragments of her lost memories, within the rules of the painting surface which she can control as the artist. This is a conceptual world which can never meet reality, a pure painted utopia. The weightless space and ethereal nature represented in her recent works originated from the above.

Recently, an important transformation has been occurring in Kim’s work. The works in her Gallery Hyundai 16 Bungee show evolved from her “Girls in Uniform” series, but mainly use objective sources such as movies, magazines and newspapers, rather than personal photographs. The biggest change is that the element of movement has been incorporated in her work. If her previous works conveyed a stiff feeling through permanently fixed poses of uniformed girls or embroidery patterns, the figures in her recent works – taken from movies or magazines – appear to have a cautious vitality contained within a certain time and space. While this movement is still very subtle, and it remains uncertain whether the figures are stationary or moving, what is clear is that they have a greater spatial reality than the memorial-like arrangements of her previous works. Uniformed figures still appear in Kim’s images. Unrelated to the narrative of the original source, they play roles within the time and space depicted by her paintings. They exist, but their actions or locations are unclear – with no obvious clues of their situation. Their faces are not drawn, and they mostly appear from the back or as partial views. Viewing Kim’s new paintings, I was reminded of the Japanese movie “Wonderful Life”, which is composed of the desired last memories of various deceased characters immediately before they move on after their death, and create in the viewer an illusory sensation, of not being sure if the characters are alive or dead or where they are. I felt a similar sensation of a blurred middle ground from Kim’s work.

For instance, the uniformed students in Sunset are looking at the landscape in front of them, but they also look somehow melancholy or perhaps even singing together, or nervous about their future. Such as images projected on a screen, they look likely to disappear without a trace once the projector is turned off. The entire space of the painting seems airborne through a transparent layered effect, and their existence looks as light as an apparition. Works like Drive or Balloon are transformed newspaper images. In Drive, the procession of military trucks traversing through the faint light with their headlamps on looks unsettled and endangered, as if suddenly forced into a secret move toward an unknown destination. The parachute in Balloon appears to be moving very slowly within a space where time has stopped, with no clear destination. From the building in Spring, which seems somehow awkward, such as a sudden apparition appearing from nowhere within some quiet mountains, one is reminded of the psychological experience of mysterious objects which suddenly appear in a strange shape after being buried in everyday life. Despite never being seen, they provide a feeling of déjà-vu or faint recollection. This is likely due to the curious nostalgia created in the viewer by the emotions imparted in the artificial memories created by Kim. This emotional effect is a new characteristic of Kim’s recent work. If her past works had a strong intended sense of a closed space, her recent works seem to have a slightly open window for discourse where psychological experience can be shared.

Kim explains that the uniformed girls and her other images are self-portraits in some sense. Much like a film director, she takes characters and backgrounds from various sources, removes their original context, and transforms them into the protagonist and background existing only for her paintings. This compilation method of creating her own storyline by editing various sources fits well with her own multicultural interests. This attitude, which must have been formed from staking out her own space within the disparate Korean and American cultural frameworks, is still an important part of Kim’s working process. To her, the original source is irrelevant, and the only significance lies in how they ultimately contribute to her “perfect image.” By moving between such sources, Kim is pursuing the psychological space she has lost but wishes to recover. Even if impossible, her work, which seeks to connect broken links like a mobius strip, creates a certain empathy. The vague feeling of déjà-vu generated by Kim’s work may be due to our sense of nostalgia for things lost. However, this lost world does not intrude into reality, remains forever on the other side, but still returns faithfully to us as visions.

Kim has recently started a new portrait series of uniformed women well beyond their teenage years. She is painting these women in idealized poses, in the manner of icons, such as saints, and she states that they are idealized images of uniformed teenage years which never existed, while also representing a mourning for years already passed. This portrait series is Kim’s first attempt using actual models, rather than indirect sources such as photographs and movie stills. In placing her models in uniforms and specific poses, Kim is still acting as the director, and her focus on the desired image rather than the subject matter seems a clear link with her previous work. However, painting live figures will involve the expression of a different reality, clearly distinct from her past efforts. I am anxious to see how these portraits fuse memory and reality to evolve into yet another “self-portrait.”

Interview by Jang Un Kim

JK: I would like to ask about the recent development of your work from your past images of girls in uniform, which left a strong impression on us. Which aspect of your work should we focus on, from your past concerns moving onto a new area of interest?

SK: The idea of a uniform is based on my childhood in Korea. It investigates the uniform as an image and ideology in the languages of culture and politics. “Girls in Uniform” comprises idealized images of youth in Korea which are embedded in my memory as something which represents my background.

Along with the uniform, I introduced Korean traditional embroidery into my work. Beneath the veneer of a clean and controlled shell, they contain both the aspects of repression and restriction of one’s expressions of individuality.

My recent works digest these images and concentrate on removing and rearranging my previous main subjects. This process resembles my formal approach to the work.

For this show, I tried excising most of my images, including uniform and symbolic images most commonly used in embroidery, because I felt that my work was getting a bit too idealistic, or rather, ethereal. As a natural result, the background in the form of a simple landscape appeared. Here, the idea of “Landscape” escapes the metaphysical meaning of the word but is created by elimination and recomposition, through the use of embroidery as a main source.

Through this process, by removing most of the images, a new idea of space is born, under the subject of “landscape”. With traditional embroidery or (documented) photographs, I change their innate personalities and, like collages, I position them as patterns. This process of eliminating and rearranging creates a very unnatural and fabricated landscape, and through this, I hoped to free myself from all of the historical meaning associated with these images.

JK: You often mention a “perfect image”. What does “perfect” suggest based on your social and cultural background?

SK: Growing up in two very different cultures, Korean and American, I always thought that they didn’t smoothly connect, that they were very much separate. I wanted to escape this duality by creating a perfect and ideal image, and that idea is the “perfect image”.
I questioned how these images, girls in uniform and traditional embroidery, would react if I combined and dissected them. By using these pre-existing images and by eliminating and recomposing them, the possibility of a new image exists.

JK: What is the importance of “borrowing” (as a method) in your idea of a “perfect image”?

SK: “Borrowing” is an inevitable and significant gesture for me. In my effort to create a “perfect image”, I feel that I need to use pre-existing Korean images with all their historical meaning and combine them with my own position and identity.

JK: You often state that the elements in your paintings are subject for study. Then, what is the purpose of this study?

SK: My work began with questioning my identity and my status as a 1.5 generation Korean-American. Under a similar vein, I am trying to create a new image through the images of “girls in uniform” which represents Korean modernization and then juxtaposing the uniform and traditional embroidery, and finally, into the landscape, which is a result of eliminating these images.

I am aware of the fact that these images stand within the political and ideological realm of Korean history and culture. I wanted to understand their historical predicament from my point of view, and as a result, wanted to avoid the specifics of politics of their fixed political identity or meaning. By understanding and grasping my identity as a Korean-American, I could finally free myself and hope for the return to the notion of my multi-cultural background. I think this is the purpose of my study and possibly, the realization of the “perfect image”.

JK: I once wrote about your previous body of work from a feminism and subaltern perspectives. What is your opinion on this?

SK: Girls in uniform and traditional embroidery are important images in understanding my identity. I cannot avoid the fact that they inherently embody feminine aspects; however, I cannot say that I use them from the same perspectives.

Sunny Kim’s paintings move from sublime to unfeeling in an instant. In her world, human frailty flickers within the four corners of enormous historical realities. Realities where uniforms (military, academic, professional) are the vehicle, source, and subject of meaning. Nonetheless, this unrelenting uniform world is also hyperbolic, fantastic, even ironic. The sparse spaces of Kim’s depictions become a waiting veneer susceptible to the unique projections of its inhabitants.

Apparent throughout the work is the clarity in with which she renders her subjects. Their formality recalls official documentation or propaganda posters. The images seem aged: muted, black and white, passed into record. The events and people have become the raw material of institutional histories. We recognize the pictorial devices at work immediately and are inclined to make assumptions. Under A Tree is obviously derived from some sort of academic record, perhaps a class photo, while the Girl in Uniform series appear to have been cropped from a larger image. Her group photos speak of the manipulations and ultimate meaning of institutionalized representation. The paintings of individuals emphasize estrangement, separation from the whole, and brooding. In Kim’s work there is a dynamic between the individual and group which spans from playful to painful. It is difficult to look at Late Afternoon and not feel irony. On how many levels are these young women being molded? Even while participating in the construction of this naturalistic image, they are stiff and immaculate. Are they fully conscious beings or some sort of beach side prop?

Central to Kim’s exploration are several questions about consciousness. In the most general sense, Kim asks where individual consciousness begins. After looking at Late Afternoon for a moment longer, the subjects gradually appear less regimented. There is a simple poetry in the band of dark mountains. The beach itself is a pattern of light and dark that says more about painterly decisions than about the mechanical translation of photographic space. Kim, as a painter, inserts an interpretive realm before the photograph. Her concerns do not end with photo realistic technique; rather, they begin there. Consider the not-quite-black-and-white palette of Blue Palace, or the unnatural tonal shift between foreground and background in Pond. Kim’s manipulations are in dialogue with the conventions of the photographic material from upon which she draws. With this in mind, her works veer from oppressive to dream-like. In this world of mechanical clarity we find fantasy on all the fringes. The impassive and calculated expressions of the young women hint to at a deep physiological life.

A uniform is, by definition, something which is always the same. By remaining consistent a uniform affirms the jurisdiction of an institution over an individual. Like the ideology it manifests, the uniform is a Truth which should not be subject to worldly events (such as a fashion show or a sloppy lunch, for example). By repurposing institutionalized dress with aesthetic and psychological embellishments Kim erodes a bit of their power. On the other hand, it is a mistake to think that her work seeks to overturn such conventions. In addition to transforming the uniform, Kim relies on its symbolic power. In all her paintings, the uniform introduces an element of timelessness. Displaced yet still intact, the uniform’s stability serves an allegorical function. We are familiar with how an aged black and white photo may trigger a memory from this device’s frequent use in TV and movies. Kim expands this device with the authority of the uniform. Not only does her uniform invade our photographic-like memories with institutional pollution, but it is reverie itself: persistent, ethereal, unreal. In the end, like our memories, the uniform is not reality. It is merely worn.

This brings us to one of Kim’s darkest questions. Kim is not simply saying that we fill our roles, our very identities, the same as we fill a uniform. She is asking “who is wearing who?” Are we a product of what these uniforms represent, do they determine us? Are they just a surface? Of course, her answer lies somewhere in between. This ambivalence can lead to a playful game of “hide and seek” with individual consciousness or allow possibilities for the worst forms of oppression.

In Garden and Underworld Kim introduces a new element into the work. The photographic space has ruptured significantly. Uniformed figures now stand before painterly emulations of 18th century Korean embroidery. The background, unlike the other paintings, is not a backdrop. The embroidery functions as an emotional projection which seeps into the foreground to interact and envelope the figure. Clearly, Kim is not only analyzing consciousness in the public sphere, but in the domestic as well. There is a juxtaposition of two worlds. The first world describes how the individual fits into a larger social universe, within clearly dominant institutions. The second world is traditional and feminine. The starched white collars and plain black skirts contrast so dramatically with the pattern that the image suggests surrealism. This pretty and magical space creeping about the figures might be the thoughts of the distant girls documented in the other paintings. Garden and Underworld are candid, even archetypal. The figure is, perhaps, a powerful visionary.

Kim’s retreat to this interior space reveals not only how the influence of tradition sneaks into newer roles and institutions, but how our feelings are not always our own. The very fabric of femininity is an internalized fiction; an elaborately woven construct. When surfacing in a uniform bureaucratic state, this fabric seems like an escape. When considering the historical restrictions placed on women in traditional societies, however, this colorful freedom is only seeming. Even if these young women are allowed a fantastic world, what good is it if they are contained by it — if it is tied to a servile and meticulous domestic role? Still, Kim manages to load the paintings with ambivalence. The weirdness of her juxtapositions are larger than the sum of their parts. When these two world views come together it is almost as if she is suggesting a utopian solution in earnest. In comparing the restraints of traditional and modern Korean cultures she manages to highlight what each is lacking. In this process she synthesizes hope and anxiety.

Finally, the autobiographical dimension should not be overlooked. Kim was a uniformed school girl herself. She explains, “I am haunted by that aspect of my past – I cannot shirk the feeling that a significant element of my life has been lost. Having left Korea in my teens while still having strong ties, I often wonder how my life might have been different had I stayed.” There is much in Kim’s world to hinder the development of the individual, yet it remains a birthplace of consciousness. These works are not tragic. They are wonderings of these girls’ futures; of whether or not their glimmer of self realization will be snuffed out.

Paul Johnson
New York, 2001