Past Exhibition

KIM, who was born in 1950, conveyed the realities of life in Korea on canvas in a hyperrealist manner in the 1970s. His long-time subject matter, bricks, has now become the artist’s trademark. KIM’s bricks, presented in a neutral and mechanical representation of real bricks, can be considered as Korean reinterpretation of Hyperrealism. KIM’s paintings are so distinctive that they paintings are clearly distinguished from traditional figurative art as well as American Hyperrealism, which the artist was influenced by. Thus, what characterizes his work is not hyperrealist technique - it is simulacre, whereby an image becomes independent from the original, turns far more real than the original itself and functions as its own reality eventually.

In Kim's paintings, bricks exist only as images. They appear to be bricks, but they are in fact merely images; we see the image and mistake it for a brick. In this way, the painting skillfully dismantles boundaries as it moves back and forth between the real and the image. Rather than being a receptacle to contain the real, the canvas is a tool for confirming the two-dimensionality of a virtual image unconnected with the real. Because the bricks seem so real, they give the viewer the impulse to touch them.

Shadow is another important element in understanding Kim's paintings. The artist has said outright that he has painted shadows rather than bricks. He carefully shapes a surface embedded with sand grains of a single color, as though leveling the ground. It is shading alone that transforms those grains into bricks, and it is entirely through the adding of shadow that the artist generates the effects of a divided surface, of some parts projecting outward and others falling inward, of bricks appearing jumbled or stacked high. Thus, the secret behind Kim's ability to produce an illusion of reality by giving the appearance of brick forms, or by giving them expression, essentially lies in shadow.

Because Kim's paintings are so realistic, they have often been categorized as hyperrealism. The artist has a different idea, however. "People often categorize my work as hyperrealism, but the bricks in my paintings are all an illusion. They are all 'virtual bricks.' For me, bricks are merely the subjects that express my artistic world; the bricks themselves are not important. The theme of my work is repetition and formativity," he says.