SEOUL
Doosan Gallery
Seeun Kim Pit Stop
SEEUN KIM, (from left to right) Sinus, Collected sinew, and The face of flipping torso, all 2022, water mixable oil and acrylic spray paint on canvas, 296 × 226.5 cm, 284 × 226 cm, and 298 × 245 cm. Courtesy the artist and Doosan Gallery, Seoul.
Painterly abstraction serves as a means of exploring the physical experience of cities in Seeun Kim’s works, which activate sensory impressions of liminal urban infrastructure like tunnels, overpasses, and embankments. These spaces primarily exist in the public consciousness as nothing more than unremarkable linkages between more prominent features of the cityscape, rather than being recognized as discrete elements of the urban fabric unto themselves. Kim’s works resonate with the subtle character of such overlooked parts of the city; indeed, it is nearly impossible to parse any recognizable forms within her colorful, energetic paintings. The inscrutability of Kim’s oeuvre is tied to her distinctive method of abstracting interstitial urban spaces through transposing her own physical sensations of specific sites and locations. She deploys diverse modes of mark-making to visualize her embodied experience, giving rise to complex and dynamic compositions full of expressionist tension. Painting spontaneously rather than sketching out her ideas in advance, Kim relies on sense memories as well as photos to guide her brushstrokes, which
lends a visceral presence to the intuitive arrangements of overlapping gestures and forms that result from her highly physical engagement with the canvas. In the suite of works presented in “Pit Stop,” Kim introduces actual bodily structures into her visual lexicon, collapsing urban scale and human scale into a united plane of spatial awareness. The city is thus rendered as a hybrid body in which anatomical features are conflated with elements of built infrastructure. Works like Room for muscle (2022) and Lines for closure (2022) envision layered spaces of containment, implying curvilinear structures of bone, tissue, and organs that comprise the chest cavity as well as terraced parking structures and elevated expressways. The more overtly organic Actions for positioning (2022) looks even deeper inside the body, evoking a microscopic view of blood vessels, subcutaneous membranes, and intramuscular fat; when configured in terms of the city, these elongated brown and beige masses correspond to the artist’s sensory perception of sand and gravel mounds awaiting the grading of a roadway. The focal point of the show was a grouping of three canvases, stapled directly to the gallery wall in close proximity to give the impression of a triptych. Beginning a few
centimeters above floor level and extending nearly three meters in height, the imposing size of these works amplifies their overwhelming diversity of gesture, form, and palette, which collectively generate an immersive viewing experience of considerable intensity. Sinus (2022) is all lush greens and blues applied in broad, sweeping strokes, aside from a large, beaklike mass that appears as if hollowed-out or desiccated; Collected sinew (2022) arranges amorphous arcs of khaki overlaid with vertical striations of red that resemble fascia and connective tissue; and The face of flipping torso (2022) reveals slender lines of erasure that branch outward from the center of the canvas, breaking up the swaths of densely textured cobalt and rose paint that otherwise dominate the composition. Throughout “Pit Stop,” Kim manipulated dialectics of form and void while subverting dualistic distinctions between the two. Whereas areas of unpainted canvas might conventionally be understood as empty spaces in relation to the rest of a given painting, the lacunae in Kim’s works operate as visual elements like any other, thereby proposing a dependent coexistence between presence and absence. Equating these values also allows for their inversion; foreground and background become interchangeable, thrusting viewers into their own ambiguous spatial relationships with the picture plane. Kim’s paintings thus complete the transference of sensible phenomena—from the artist’s embodied sensation, recollection, and painterly representation of space to the viewer’s visual perception, cognitive interpretation, and physical interaction with that space—which propels her practice into new, abstract territories as she probes analogous allusions to urban and anatomical bodies. A N DY S T. L O U I S
REVIEWS
artasiapacific.com
89