My Universe: Hyunsoo KIM Solo Exhibition

Artist statement

My work is a process of bringing out the images from deep inside”. I usually feel surrounded by something vague and heavy. Its size is as big as the universe, but in it I am so small and empty. To get out of it, I capture the calm and shimmering things inside of me and transfer them to the work of art.

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The images usually appear as green lumps, and they are representations of the dense green that I encountered and absorbed with my whole being in nature when I was growing up in Jeju”. The inner landscape that appears as such is not intended to merely reproduce the Jeju landscape, but to express my gaze thrown into nature. Thus, my greens are traces of the inner side left after many times of filtering. Circles and triangles—it does not really matter what each of these shapes means or whether it is a scene that exists in reality. It is the scene that is reconstructed by rearranging the images left in my gaze and memories.

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In this universe where nature and living things coexist, each of us lives in our own way. Today, I want to walk so that I can share what I feel with others. Rather than telling the story of my work to the audience who look at my work, I want them to be absorbed in my work and share their stories with me.

Abstracted Landscape: Implicit Images and Memories in Fleeting Moments

Jeongwon KIM (Curator, Gallery MAC)

“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.”

- from Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

The essay “Walking” written by Henry David Thoreau, American nature writer who is well known for his book Walden, suggests two dimensions of ‘walking’: walking on a country road and walking on a spiritual path. Thoreau says that sometimes we need to return to the wild for ‘nutrition and energy’ amid the ceaseless noise of development and pursuit of convenience of civilization. He speaks of a walk of thought in search of the wildness of the inner world, beyond a walk in the natural world. It is unbelievable that it was written in the latter half of the 19th century because it resonates with us who are living in the twenty-first century. The towering, luxuriant trees and soft dirt roads under the warm sunlight, undulating ripples in the forest lake reflecting the sun, small wildflowers and unknown leaves of grass that are only seen when you stop and bow your head. When we get away from our daily routine and walk in nature, we come to face ourselves and think about the origin and continuation of life, and recover the strength to move forward.

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Born and raised in Jeju Island, a blessed environment where nature and people coexist in peace, Kim Hyunsoo captures the dense green of nature in her works, which is reconstructed based on her childhood memories. Her works represent the ‘forest of calm’, which is densely filled with trees stretching vertically, the lush green forest and the path through it, the ‘forest of waiting’ with a secluded house at the end of the road, the winding ‘country road’ running along with the symbolic shapes such as circles and triangles, ‘eternity in a moment’ in which plants captured at both sharp and round moments are crystallized in the shape of eternity. The world that the painter depicts is ‘landscape painting’, but not in a conventional sense. Kim Hyunsoo’s landscapes are far from perceiving and objectifying nature to reproduce it realistically. She describes her work as “a process of bringing out the images from deep inside”. The images usually appear as green lumps, and she explains that they are “representations of the dense green that I encountered and absorbed with my whole being in nature when I was growing up in Jeju”. She only transfers the images left in her memory and the scenes that her gaze recombines onto the canvas. It is not important whether the landscape transferred to the canvas is a real place or what it actually represents. She merely reconstructs her inner images and memories.

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Born in 1992, Kim Hyunsoo majored in oriental painting in the undergraduate and graduate school of Sungshin Women’s University. Unlike in Western painting, in Oriental painting, the colors underneath are visible on the surface, shapes are drawn not by stacking colors from the background but by individually finishing them. Trees, background, and grass - each of these are colored individually and the depth of color is achieved by applying dozens of layers of paint. Kim Hyunsoo’s colors and shapes are quite implicative. She uses very restrained palette, such as green colors representing forests, leaves, and grasses, and brown colors representing branches and pillars of trees, earth and roads. The shapes are also clear, and her canvas is composed of intensive forms based on the abbreviated symbols, such as circles, triangles, and squares.

Kim Hyunsoo says in her notes for this exhibition titled <My Universe>:

“My work is a process of bringing out the images from deep inside”. I usually feel surrounded by something vague and heavy. Its size is as big as the universe, but in it I am so small and empty. To get out of it, I capture the calm and shimmering things inside of me and transfer them to the work of art.”

As can be seen from the artist's notes, the things transferred to the canvas are those ‘things’ that have been filtered many times in the inner world of the artist, that is, they have been abbreviated and abstracted. She catches, confronts, and ponders on things inside her that are constantly floating. The filtered and crystallized figures are soon transferred to the canvas and speak to us. Kim Hyunsoo’s work is that which resonates deep in our heart, condensed in one very simple and connotative word rather than trying to convey words full of flowery eloquence and rhetoric.

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I started this article with the title ‘Abstracted Landscape’. The word ‘abstract’ has multiple implications. In art, the word is often used as the opposite of ‘figurative representation’, and refers to ‘the action of extracting and grasping common features or properties from various objects or concepts.’ ‘Abstract’ includes abstraction that simplifies by grasping real objects analytically, formatively, and geometrically, and abstraction expressed according to the artist’s subjective view or intuition without actual objects for visual expression. In addition, the word has the same pronunciation in Korean as the one that means ‘to look back on the past’ (chusang, 추상, 追想), and can be used to mean ‘remember’ or ‘recall’. Therefore, ‘abstracted landscape’ in the Korean language has a double meaning.

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First, it can be interpreted as meaning that it is not a realistic representation of the object of landscape, but a non-figurative and non-realistic rendering that is simplified formatively and geometrically. At the same time, it also means rethinking the recollected landscape, that is, the landscape in the memory of the past. ‘Abstract’ (抽象) and ‘Recollection’ (追想). Kim Hyunsoo’s work, which unravels implicit images and memories in fleeting moments, makes it possible to think about the origin and continuation of life like Henry David Thoreau’s walk in nature and mind, mentioned at the beginning of this article.