SANSUMUNHWA, SEOUL (KR)
BoMin Kim's solo exhibition The Isle presents the trajectory of the artist’s landscape paintings. Following a journey of the heart, which Kim quietly addresses in her paintings, the artist crosses isles that form an archipelago, and the trajectory of landscape maps the path through the territory she has passed and evokes scenes of another isle that she will soon reach.
The Isle, (Sansumunhwa, Seoul, 2021)
What stands out Kim's cityscape/sansuhwa(山水畵, a traditional East Asian painting depicting natural landscapes such as mountains and rivers) is her gaze aimed down at the city from above. Within her earlier paintings, the origin of the gaze is ambiguous, perhaps coming from an imaginary body as it looks down or a bird's point of view. Occasionally, airplanes passing by indifferently or kites flying quietly take the position held by birds in traditional paintings, but the position of the artist’s body remains unclear. Over time the artist’s portrayal of distance has gradually narrowed, and as she passed the overlapping times from ‘one side’ to ‘the other side’ as a kind of ‘time traveler’, her imaginary body took shape, and the audience’s body and gaze reached the ground.
Kim now flies through the clouds. In The Isle, most of her works actively reflect the movement of the artist’s own body. Her canvases are composed as if looking down from the window of an airplane, suggesting the artist’s perspective as she observes the view from her seat. The scenes outside the window present a downward looking view from a high place reminiscent of her cityscape/sansuhwa. In these works, rather than an ambiguous position that suggests an imagined body, the artist’s position is clearly discernible as she views the scene from an airplane.
Like smoke hiding the stage transition between curtains, clouds and mist flow outside the window following the trajectory of Kim, while also obscuring the scenery she will render next. As she has done throughout her career, Kim will continue to contemplate her identity as an East Asian painter, as well as her relationships to the historical material on which she draws the landscapes that she depicts. The Wreck(2021), the most recent work featured in the exhibition, consists of a total of twelve paintings arranged in a row. The gloomy blue light continues to glimmer in the window, and the flight is not yet over. The collapsing of time and identity will lead the artist to the next isle, a land she seeks to visit on her continued artistic journey. _ Jiyi Ryu (2021)
