Gallery 2 presents Shadow Box, the debut exhibition of Suyeon Kim, which is a solo show for an artist chosen as part of the rising artist program supported by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. Kim makes three-dimensional installations with photographs she collects, and then recreates them in paintings. The processes are visually bound up with each other in terms of content. Accordingly, the exhibition consists of 10 paintings derived from installations that she presented at her previous show, and new installations to be the base for her subsequent work.

Comprehensive landscape represented in painting from photography

The basic element of Kim’s work is the images many people sent to her. The artist produces an installation with hundreds of images people sent as replies to a specific word or question, by cutting and putting them in a space. Kim also creates paintings by representing the installation in frames, as if taking photographs. Her paintings to be displayed at the show are derived from part or whole images of the installation recently exhibited at a group show in Seoul Art Space Seogyo. The words Kim presented to people when she collected images were ‘blackout’ and ‘landscape’. Based on the images people sent, she produced three installations combining the night sky, a building, and a tree. Noticeable is that the artist only uses her hands, excluding any digital manipulation in the whole process of her work. Addressing the photographic images as the real, the artist uncovers the multiple layers of space-time in work, generating a paradoxical point like a shadow expressed with the texture of a printed surface and lighting effect.

A botanical garden as an aesthetic stage

The artist collected new images for The Botanical Garden to display at the show. Through e-mail she asked “You have your own garden. What do you wish to see there?” under the condition to exclude plant images. Kim has completed works by adding the images collected to the plant images she got from an illustrated plant book. The Botanical Garden was created as an aesthetic space decorated with people’s choice to conceal the ugly.

The discovery of events

Kim’s work stems from photographic images of real things, but concludes as inexistent imaginary scenes. The artist ushers viewers to her work’s multiple structure, allowing them to lend meaning freely in the medium of each individual’s state and memory, then recompose this as their own ‘event’. In this process she makes viewers undergo a sense of loss for absent objects and desire to meet them again simultaneously.