PUBLICATIONS

• In Search of Lost Time and Space

  Artists are such a being who constantly asks, "when is now, where is here, and who am I?" and so is BoMin Kim. In response to this existential question, Kim says, "I Was Far Away" (solo exhibition, 2019). Instead of affirming where she is now, she detours into the past tense, stating that she was somewhere in the past. She has been trying to portray her perceived Now-Here (solo exhibition, 2011) for quite some time. Since her first solo exhibition in 2006, she has been painting "urban landscapes" of Seoul and Incheon, where she has "traveled, looked, wandered, and lived. However, even after repeatedly moving and drifting, the place she is now in still seems to be a Foreign Country to her (solo exhibition, 2022). In the end, the artist decides to travel instead of settling down. She looks to history to find out when the moment is, and wanders around the city to get a sense of where she is. She is a seemingly common but surprisingly rare type of artist who travels through time and space and paints the experience of her journey.

  Kim began painting cityscapes of Seoul in earnest in the late 2000s. In her early works, she experimented with various forms, such as combining ink and taping techniques and varying the point of view, in order to capture the old and sprawling city. However, the metropolis of Seoul is a spectacle that, in the words of Guy Debord, "unites what is separate, but it unites in only in its separateness," so it cannot be perceived as a whole, even if you look at it and paint it over and over.* Imagine the city center of Seoul, where palaces of the Joseon dynasty, Japanese colonial architecture, and modern skyscrapers are jumbled together rather than mingling together. As such, the city is a "united and divided" spectacle that mixes multiple temporalities, and no one can experience it directly. We can only be observers or onlookers, scanning the city through "the sense that is easy to become the most abstract and mystified, sight." As a painter, she realized that she could not fully recreate Seoul through changes in materials, techniques, and visual effects. To avoid being overwhelmed by the city's spectacle, she saw the need to understand its historical foundation. Finally, the painter leaves now and here to travel through time and space.

  Both her travels and her paintings are four-dimensional, with a time axis added to the spatial coordinates. For her, a sense of place is inseparable from the history of the place. As poet Su-Young Kim wrote in his poem, "Whenever I cross a modern bridge, I suddenly become retrospective," BoMin Kim travels and paints places that remind her of past history. Therefore, she chooses places that have accumulated time and history as the main subjects of her paintings, such as the Gwanghwamun gate, the Sungnyemun gate, the Han River, and the open port in Incheon. Inevitably, her travels through time and space are accompanied by the study of history. She doesn't just depict the current state of a place, but also summons past events and figures related to the place. The artist’s strategy of juxtaposing the past and present is a natural result of her depiction of a city where tradition and the present are mixed. To resist the spectacle that "paralyzes history and memory" through concealment and deception, she mobilizes all of her senses, thoughts, and will to painterly rearrange and reconstruct the memory and history a place contains.

  Kim is particularly interested in Seoul and Incheon from the enlightenment period to the Korean War. She believes that the inflection point that made this place seem like a foreign country was in the modern era, when the transition from tradition to the present and the influx of Western culture took place. Her sharp sensitivity to the gap between tradition and modernity is also related to the world's narrow perception to see and call her as an Asian painter. There are still anachronistic misconceptions about artists who use paper, brush and ink, such as that they are the guardians of tradition, or that they are old-fashioned people, not modern. In fact, she is indifferent to the instrumental perception of modernity that frames the issue of tradition and modernity as a dichotomy of continuity and discontinuity. For her, modernity is just “being there” as an existence that precedes the essence. When she looks for material for her paintings in photographs, videos, and films taken in the early to mid-20th century, rather than in history books that only record the genealogy of power, it's not just because she needs images. It's because she believes that the camera captures a subject's existence as close to reality as possible, regardless of who took it and from what perspective.

   The artist is well aware of the fate of the traveler who cannot help but observe the existence of the others. The fate of a painter is not much different, and her paintings may be an open window, but they cannot become the landscape outside the window itself. Just as time is irreversible, she acknowledges that there is an absolute gap between herself and others in history. Therefore, she often depicts the past, as seen through photographs and videos, as if they were a landscape outside a car window or airplane window. She distances herself from the past as if she were watching the landscape through a window passing by, but sometimes she gazes at a scene closely and for a long time to import her feelings to the past. For example, it is unlikely that she would have looked at the psychic's dance and the girl's playing in water with dry eyes, but painted them rather with a slightly trembling hand. Kim's unique, tearful impression that is shown in her paintings is created as ink and pigment seep and smear with water on silk, ramie, and hemp fabric she often uses.

  The moment she utters the words "I was far away," she is already not here. She is always traveling, which is why she answers in the past tense, delaying the proof of her presence in the present. "Now is when, here is where, and who is me?" she asks back, transposing the word order of her initial question. In this sense, her travels through time and space were never meant to find the only "now, here, and me," but rather to relate to the myriad "when, where, and who. Artist Kim's attempt to travel and draw all the time and space in the world is an ongoing process.

  * Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 22. All sentences in the following text that are quoted directly without reference to the source are taken from the above book.

  _ Seokwon Choi(Assistant professor in the Department of Oriental Painting at College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, 2023)

• The Circumventing Paintings

  The Visible   BoMin Kim paints the landscape of the “hic et nunc.” Her paintings “place emphasis on the urban environment as a landscape while mobilizing Korean traditional painting techniques.” With the mountains and streams painted using traditional techniques next to modern-day high-rise buildings, piers, and objects painted using tape in one frame, it seems at a glance as though two different time periods are coexisting in her works—the past represented by the traditional style and the present represented by the subjects—but to the artist, the present is a progressive form of tradition or a new version of it. That is, to Kim, the present is neither severed nor distinguished from tradition. Likewise, the artist does not distinguish cities from nature, nor people from cities. To her, Seoul is a giant scenery, and the city as a place of daily life is not a landscape external to us but internal as part of us. Her urban landscapes flaunt their presence with protrusive composition and a bird’s-eye view, revealing themselves through definite forms and detailed depictions. (Independence Gate[Dongnimmun], 2006;Map of Gahoe, 2009).

  The Invisible   What’s missing from her paintings are people. Inside the artist’s studio there lay around paper and painting tools as if she had been painting there until just before (The Root, 2012; The Mist, 2010), and there’s even Ahn Gyeon’s Mongyudowondo, a source of inspiration and motif for her work (Mongyudowon, 2005), but the artist herself is nowhere to be found. The bus, void of both a driver and passengers, stands meaninglessly on the road, and there is no one passing by the bus station in front of the airport either (The Doves, 2007; International Line, 2006). It is bizarre that there isn’t a single person depicted in the paintings of Seoul—even traditional landscapes frequently feature old villagers on excursions or literary men in gatherings. Only around when the artist painted the landscape of the Gangseo-gu area there appear people in their entirety, which is to say, people as subjects of emotions and . Though more like a figure from a folktale, the woman with long hair is throwing herself over the cliff, crying with her arms tied around her knees (The Sadness of the Moon, 2014; The Caveman, 2015).

  The Finally Revealed   Figures from the past and the present appear in Kim’s recent mural-installation works as in some of her paintings, but the figures from different periods never appear together within a single frame (The Trains, 2019; The Well, 2020).The figures are presented as separate drawing pieces, demanding to be seen as individuals who are complete on their own, without comparison or reference. Among them, the portraits of women draw attention. Though the images are derived from old newspaper articles, whereas the men sit in an oblique angle or stare vacantly at the ominous sea, the women seem willful and in motion. They gaze at themselves in the mirror or head toward Geumgangsan Mountain where women are prohibited (Mirror1900, 2017; Entering the Mountain, 2018).

  The figures become more and more flexible in form as opposed to their photographic and fixed appearance. Whereas The Sea of Ttanquilty (2015–2016) captures in one frame the evolving shapes of the moon in different phases of the lunar cycle, Kim’s recent works demonstrate more use of ink-and-wash tones and less of linear and detailed description of forms. This change seems to be associated with her choice of medium and subject. Kim began painting on silk in 2015, a material that’s paint-absorbent and therefore suitable for rendering vivid color and also sheer in property like film. It is likely that the artist no longer needed to adhere to the more precise and detailed mode of depiction to make the most of the characteristics of her medium.

  Around 2018, Kim begins to pay attention to the moving figures in American traveler Burton Holmes’ video travelogue of Seoul produced in 1901: the man putting on a flytrap hat, the dancing women, and the woman walking down with a parasol. When it comes to rendering a moving subject, capturing the overall silhouette is more important than capturing the precise details. Then, let’s shift our eyes to the artist who captured the movements of these figures. Why was she interested in them? Why did she choose to gaze at the moving people instead of the still landscape? It is possible to interpret the people as part of the landscape based on the artist’s previous statement that the city is a part of us, but it would be more accurate to say that the artist finally “began to reveal” the people for viewers to see. Kim’s landscapes as we’ve seen have always captured places that aren’t scarce in real life. They may have been portrayed as empty but there have always been people staying in and passing through them. It’s as if Kim intentionally made a detour before arriving at the people as her subject.

  Just as the artist believes that there is no right answer to painting, a change in an artistic practice does not necessarily mean progress. It would be more appropriate to see the shift as a natural course and a result of ceaseless attempts. Nevertheless, we must look keenly at the distance between the artist and her works. If the artist merely observed the urban landscapes earlier in her career, she now sometimes tells her own stories through others’ voices and other times walks right into the frame herself. As such, she has learned to control the distance at her will. And in that sense, the psychic who bridges the living and the dead or the woman with a burning heart in her paintings become indistinguishable from the artist (The Hug, 2018; The Burning Heart, 2018).

  Kim’s works imply that tradition is not a destination but a direction. This message, however, isn’t delivered instantaneously. Her paintings circumvent the idea because one who soars high is bound to appear small to those who cannot fly. 

  _ Gyeyoung Lee(2020)