Art Space Pool presents the solo exhibition of the artist Kim gun-hee(b. 1969, Seoul), 《White-Out》(4 Oct-31 Oct), as 2012 Pool Production’s fifth exhibition. Having her studio near the Paju area, she has come across Odusan observatory, Dora observatory, Imjingak Peace Nuri Park and cemetery of enemy soldiers, etc. The exhibition displays more than 60 of her new paintings on the landscapes she encountered. Her works convey the superimposed social symbols inherent in the appearance of landscapes and reveal personal memories and psychological reverberation of an individual that flow underneath almost imperceptively.
The artist focused on the aspect of these numerous borderlines mutually creating ‘diffused reflection,’ aggravating the chaos and fatigue of the viewer’s various viewpoints, rather than focusing on the aspect that these borderlines are mechanisms of nationalistic narrative, each and every one of them. When all kinds of nationalistic border related symbols are superimposed in a superfluous way while mutually creating diffused reflections, the landscape reveals an incomprehensive hole of contradiction and precipitous gap. When collectively narrative landscape feigning objectivity reveals such a huge gap, people are shocked with feelings of emptiness but perhaps, only when we are allowed such a hollow gap, we may be filling up the landscape with our own memory and impression.
Kim gun-hee has named this exhibition, White-Out. As in the expression literally understood as ‘the view turning white’, the phenomenon of white-out is that of losing sight momentarily due to the attack of strong light. Like the crude reality of lined up graves of enemy forces in Paju that do not give any other explanations than just giving case names that made the media go noisy and only a couple of numbers, however, the landscapes in Kim’s art world are empty gaps, mental panic and at the same time, it is also the commencement of a landscape that is being revisited with autonomously fueled memories.
Written by _ Kim Heejin, Director
Choi Jaemin, Assistant Curator
Art Space Pool
