Art Space Pool opens its 2011 Pool Production Series with a solo exhibition “Surfacing” by the artist, Kim Dong-kyu(b. 1978, Seoul). As the first solo exhibition by Kim, “Surfacing” features total 12 works of drawing, painting, video and performance from 2008 to 2010 that address his critical examination of ethical signs in the society and his acts of activating the nearly defunct signs.
With his background from literature, Kim belongs to the kind of artists group who reads reality and object as signifier, and pursues the internal structure and system that holds the meaning. This artistic attitude of reading into the object through the lens of signs and systems in contemporary art, rather than musing upon visible appearance and materiality for the substance, has revealed multiple layers of societal topographies. Incongruence and co-figuration, surplus and polarization, trauma and chasm, most recently hysteria and the sense of absence are some of the narratives disclosed by the help of acuteness to the societal signs.
Kim shares the similar attitude of depth and intensity to the signs, but slightly differs in kind. The family snap shots, traffic guiding dummy installed at construction sites, statues of book-reading children found in almost every local elementary schools, letters of apology by students, holy sculptures on the streets, folkloric Buddha statues worshipped for pregnancy are the kind of signs Kim interrogates. They are the signs that direct and buttress a system of mental guidance and communal belief at a much profounder function level of a society. Such signs operate its function by reminding/marking individuals with ethical values of mutual trust, promise, apology, sincerity, sympathy, dream and hope, not as a specific didactics but as a minimal living condition of humans. Kim deplores not only at the fact that such signs of ethics as family, education, creation and mental training are degraded under the overriding secular signs, but also at that they are easily adopted and misappropriated for social acknowledgement within the system of competition. Kim’s much deeper irony is paid to the relation between “the good and the right” that often negate, contaminate, fight and hurt each other in this efficacy-evaluating system.
Such ethical values cannot simply be discarded or replaced with “better new” virtues, but could perhaps be rearticulated in revised forms. Various processes and acts of pulling them onto to the state of awareness out of the state of abandonment, that is, the gesture of reactivating perished ethical signs alive, are Kim’s practice ; re-presenting the blank faces of his family even in dust(Pursuit, 2008), drawing a blank manuscript paper instead of adding written letters to it(Lyrics, 2009), animating a letter of apology after repeated acts of transcribing(Tremor, 2009), chasing the presence of students in shut-down schools(Greetings, 2010), applying the act of consuming the Buddha’s noses for fertility even to secular holy statues on the streets(Grind and Consume, 2010), and finally, performing a metaphoric drag of Buddha statue from mountain to Seoul(Surfacing, 2010).
Here and now in the local scene of contemporary art, various methodologies of detour, flight, refusal, recomposition and ritual are proposed by artists as a performative suggestion of alternative value systems to the pretension and falsehood of local reality. Kim’s practice could be referred to a classical ontological pursuit of individual human being, but the artist defends the suspicion of self-indulgence with conscious focus on performativity and apology. Kim states that apology can only be made from the fostering of thorough self-consciousness that approves its own malady and will to heal it. Performativity is the process of self-consciousness and apology manifested and shared with other beings. This is what makes Kim Dong-kyu’s practice of surfacing and regenerating different from the tranquil contemplation of ontological philosophy and monumental didacticism of enlightenment.
Heejin Kim (Director, Art Space Pool)
