Art Projects International is pleased to present the first U.S. solo exhibition of works by Myong Hi Kim. The exhibition features paintings in her signature medium of oil pastel on chalkboard and will be on view from January 12 to February 25, 2012.
Myong Hi Kim’s oil pastel on chalkboard landscapes may depict children or empty sky-bound vistas or sunlit water and leaves, but nothing in Kim’s work is as it seems; she explains, “... the vision that I present is that of apparition rather than appearance.”
Since 1990, one of Kim’s studios has been in an abandoned schoolhouse in rural Korea. She also has a studio in New York and says, “... the difference is between city life and rural life, not between the United States and Korea.” In the school, the original chalkboards first served to block the bitter cold; later, they became the grounds for Kim’s signature works.
Kim had a peripatetic childhood and continues to travel to create. The black road of “Navajo Route” leads to New Mexico and references the Navajo experience and in many ways Kim’s own experiences. Kim’s landscapes are universal places set in a universal time. It is more than a metaphor to say the light of the historical past is with us now; we live in a time when we eagerly discuss starlight that has reached us, just today, from billions of years ago.
Through her careful rendering of light effects, Kim shares her understanding that events are never discrete and are of multiple spaces and times. In “Borrowed Landscape” a pond flickers in sunlight. The affect of the sun is visible; it sets the leaves across the pond alight, but the sun itself is not visible in the sky. Kim suggests that the scene as first viewed by the artist was also an apparition, a trick of the light.
About the Artist
MYONG HI KIM was born in Seoul, Korea. She lives and works in New York and an abandoned schoolhouse in Naep’yong-ni, a tiny mountain village in Kangwon Province, Korea. She graduated from Seoul National University and studied at Pratt Institute, New York. Her solo exhibitions include: Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2012); Art Projects International, New York (2012); Tong-In Gallery, Seoul (2007); Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2003); AD&A Gallery, Osaka (2001); Won Gallery, Seoul (1995). Her work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwachon, Korea; Ho-Am Art Museum, Seoul; Whanki Museum, Seoul; National Assembly, Seoul; and Ewha Women’s University Museum, Seoul. Her work is represented in major public collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwachon, Korea; National Assembly, Seoul; Whanki Museum, Seoul; and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea.
