Kim Jin – The Flesh of Things Represented by Light

Kim sensuously represents fragmentary thoughts about Hegel’s ‘owl of Minerva,’ lighting for riot-suppression (suggestive of public power and violence), miscellaneous things on his studio table. In her paintings colors, texture, and lines coexist without outline defining the form of objects. The artist said she was captivated by calligraphy by the Chinese artist Wen Zhengming (1470-1539). She was attracted by the brushwork, tremendous power of Wen’s brush strokes, and exquisiteness in a finite space. It seems Wen’s work served as momentum for Kim to reconsider the possibility of painting. Audacious brushwork, agility and speed from segmented brush strokes are sensed in Kim’s painting. Physical property revealing the trajectory and order of brushwork also stand out. Her brush strokes are not simple lines but connote color and material. Her brushwork is free of rational judgment and composition: it is sensuous arrangements of material bearing color.

Kim’s painting is akin to still-life painting featuring daily things, pervasive in our lives. In a naked state things are beyond our want and desire, transcending any specific situation. Transcending a specific situation means a situation is too much for the subject. If the subject intends to access the arena of objects, the subject should be ready for death, giving up its true nature. The domain of things is a sphere distant from the domain of humanity or arena of want and desire. To approach the sphere of things means descending to the level of animal, discarding humanity, as Gilles Deleuze stated, or coming the level of the sense or flesh as Jean Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty cited. The object is not distinguished from sense. The object becomes a mass of senses. If we come to the domain of objects, things and humans tangle as a mass of senses. Sartre thus regards sticky texture as ontologically the most intense trait. Stickiness means a melting of objects as a mass of senses. Kim Jin is also lured by masses of sensual texture of a thing, and the light the thing emits. She pays attention to the world of things departing from connections with devices and situations. In this sense her paintings depict things on the table in unintentional brushwork and still-lifes erasing or destroying the system of the referent, with the inherent colors of things wriggling like a mass or light. This is dazzling light, violent light, scaring light of desire making us lose our sight of capitalism; the light of bringing life to dead things. The things of her still life paintings are not dead: the French ‘nature morte’ referring to still-life, means ‘dead nature’. Kim’s painting is characterized by a plethora of brush stokes, projection of excessive light, space with a destroyed perspective, gaze concentrating on a thing’s skin, and emphasis on the flesh of a thing. She contacts the flesh of being through the flesh of painting. Kim represents pathos she feels in things through sensuous brush strokes, paint’s materiality, the possibility of painting by light.

Park, Young-taek (Kyonggi University Professor & Art Critic)