PS SARUBIA, SEOUL (KR)
For this exhibition of PS SARUBIA, BoMin Kim selected several scenes from black-and-white documentary photographs created by American traveler Elias Burton Holmes in 1899 that depict the streets of Joseon as the source of her works. The artist reconstructed a man wearing a manggun(a traditional Korean hat made of mesh) and women performing a traditional dance into continuous scenes that give the impression of watching a slow screen. These works break away from her previously established methods of constructing landscapes in which the present and the past were mixed by using materials from the past. In other words, the work provides a point of view that seems to go back in time and stare at a scene for an extended period of time. In her work, the man wearing the manggun is silhouetted which obscures his face, so the afterimage of his slow movement in the air is emphasized more than the figure itself. The gestures of the dancing women also seem to disappear into the darkness of the background, but the figure seems to convey the faint traces of a once-clear existence. Kim equates the traveler's gaze from a distance with her own gaze, while making an effort to capture the ghostly mediation of history as she depicts these scenes. In doing so, Kim evokes a sense of sadness for the lost world.
I Was Far Away (PS SARUBIA, Seoul, 2019)
Recently, Kim has shown interest in the historical period in which Korea’s ports were opened to outsiders, and the ways in which the gaze of others intervened and the influence of western culture. The following two works suggest that the subject of interest of Kim is the restoration of relations with the lost world along with the migration of modern Western civilization; Second City(2017) embodies the changes brought about by Western culture through Jemulpo Port at the time of its opening, and Train(2018) centers on a railway station that virtually connects Seoul and Pyongyang, which are now disconnected. Kim’s method of cross-editing real scenes of modern cities, which she has consistently used in her landscape paintings, with techniques associated with traditional East Asian painting reflect her concerns as an evolving artist who has moved beyond the bounds of her traditional training. In Kim's works, An Gyeon and Jeong Seon, Isabella Bird Bishop, a British woman who visited Joseon at the end of the 19th century, and the current time period in which the artist herself lives are connected as one axis and become spatialized. In this respect, the artist gives herself an identity as a time traveler who visits different time zones in order to overcome a sense of disconnection from the past. The artist has already explored the nature of time travel, which is a persistent theme of Kim's work, through works such as Sunshine(2010), which depicts a landscape in which the globe rotates like a pendulum in a studio where light falls. In Room(2018), which is part of this exhibition, the point of contact between different dimensions realized in the studio is depicted through the scene where light shines wonderfully and illuminates the room. Images such as ships, trains and airplanes that are repeatedly drawn in her works are also icons related to departure or travel.
The wandering traveler rejects anchored landmarks and reconstructs reality from her own point of view, moving in and out of physical boundaries. Kim seeks to reconnect with reality by calling out the lost through the time traveler's point of view. Through the traces that remain only as data, she rediscovers the world of ghosts that are latent in our collective memory. While these apparitions have lost their place in reality, Kim provides us with an opportunity to look at them once again. In this exhibition, Kim uses the gaze of a foreigner witnessing the last gestures of a rapidly disappearing world amid the waves of modernization, and she connects traces of the distant past that were once part of us. Utilizing the traveler’s gaze, Kim brings to light a lost world disconnected from the tyrannical gaze of the Japanese colonial period and cultural obsession with tradition. _ Eunjoo Lee (2019)
