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Arario Cheonan
43, Mannam-ro, Dongnam-gu
Cheonan-si, Chungcheongnam-do
Korea 330-160   map * 
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Sailing
by Arario Cheonan
Location: Arario Cheonan
Artist(s): Ci KIM
Date: 18 Jul - 22 Sep 2013

Arario Gallery hosts CI Kim’s seventh solo exhibition at Arario Gallery Cheonan. Hadori, in northeast Jeju Island. Hugging farm lands and a mountain to its west and a reed field along the coastline to the east, this town is the home of migratory birds and a place of retreat for CI Kim, where he spends over half a year.

CI Kim’s solo Exhibition presents sculptures and installations he has prepared over an hour’s walk from his Hadori workshop to Seongsan Ilchulbong, repeating his daily routines. The works consist of discarded objects he found on the beach nearby the studio, such as an abandoned buoy, plastic or scrap metal pieces. Considering his status as a collector and businessman, the act of “collecting” may be equally applied to random objects in Nature and art works he has been compiling from all around the world for over 30 years. A rusty fridge or sea-water drenched Styrofoam chunks are all transformed into his self-portraits, the moment they don a pair of boots or glasses. From objects that have served their use and are now defunct, CI Kim finds the traces of time, and turns these materials still containing vestiges of their voyage into new art objects through his unique perspective.

The piece CI Kim has been focusing on lately is a solid color painting made of triangle-shaped corrugated cardboard. He speaks of the concentration of force and its tension, and the order of space found in the triangle. Pythagoras, a mathematician from Ancient Greece, had found that the perfect balance and order of right-angled triangles come from the formula among the three squares surrounding the right-angled triangle. CI Kim’s triangles are also born from one square. The triangles, located in a space where the vertical and the horizontal meet, pull diffused forces together and occupy the center of the space. They establish a tensile force within the given space through the concentration of shapes and colors.

Meanwhile, this exhibition also introduces representative works that show CI Kim’s past decade as an artist, along with the pieces he produced in Jeju. Simple and honest acts such as taking photographs, plucking, pasting, piercing, pouring paint, or balancing provide the viewers with a glimpse into fear, efforts and self-esteem CI Kim experienced while trying to figure out how he would understand and digest the new world of “art,” a sudden addition to his life as businessman Kim Chang-Il, without anyone’s advice or guidance. Starting from these early gestures, CI Kim gradually experienced with new materials such as tomatoes and iron shavings, and the monopolization of images found in popular media such as magazines. This process could be seen as a dynamic voyage, an act of “sailing” across the vast expanse of water called art. The sense of comfort embedded in the word “Sailing” as a paradoxical ring to it – perhaps not only because of the world’s prejudice against brave journeys into unexplored grounds or self-propelled solitude and fear. While the difficulty in defining the style – a pattern or goal - of an artist who produces many works and series could be understood as a problem one faces in turbulent, dynamic voyages, this exhibition may be an opportunity for the viewers to find a place where the artist’s past and present converge, peeking into such points of projection. Also, through such connections, we hope that the viewers would be able to come a step closer to the works of CI Kim, the name that has always been associated with titles such as one of the 100 most prominent art collectors or Arario Gallery.

 

Courtesy of Arario Galery 

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