Log cabin romance: Hyena Kim
Hyena Kim draws people. Her works, which can be called “performative drawings”, range from very small pieces about the size of A4 paper to large drawings up to three or four metres wide. They often include texts that look like diary entries, or texts placed within the images, so that words and images are read together. While text and images are frequently combined in art, in Kim’s work they can be roughly described as a “confession” and the unseen site or “stage” where that confession takes place.
Her work moves between direct emotional expression and a formal strangeness that cannot be fully explained by emotion alone. Her drawings, like those of the artist Leon Golub whom she has mentioned, focus on groups of figures that can be described as “split portraits”, shaped by extreme suffering and experiences of mental collapse, along with descriptions of the landscapes that surround them.
Many people appear in Hyena Kim’s drawings, but they are often shown in similar, simplified forms. They exist within spaces divided by broad areas of colour or patterns, each absorbed in their own episode. The images are usually divided by a horizontal line that recalls a horizon, and the figures seem to rest on shifting layers of ground. In earlier drawings, this line sometimes appears as a simple horizontal, gestural stroke. As in the outside the land but trapped within it. Many figures appear to be self portraits, people she knows well, or carriers of emotions projected onto them. They are sometimes shown like masks, and at other times as swollen, red, bloodshot alter egos.
When speaking about Kim’s work, one often ends up using the phrase “it seems” or “it appears”. This is because the figures in her drawings are shown as mask-like, depersonalized beings without pupils. Their only clear unit of existence is their outline and the space enclosed by that outline becomes their reality. Within these shallow contours are vague, blurred shadows that mix with or seep into the layers of the ground.
This unavoidable penetration between space and figure emphasizes that the people in her drawings are not objects of emotional projection. Instead, they resemble unknown natural forms, like mushrooms growing out of a landscape. Each has its own colour and presence, but their meaning does not allow for subjective sympathy or identification.
Her work also recalls large-scale drawing installations made of spontaneously torn pieces of paper, as seen in the work of Raymond Pettibon. In drawings that stress the backs of figures, there are clear echoes of Jean-Charles Blais. Related to this is one of her most distinctive works, which draws attention to the idea of front and back. Her figures, when seen from the front, remain unreadable, but figures shown from behind immediately invite empathy. To mark their pain the artist depicts gunshot wounds on their bodies.
When thinking about Hyena Kim, especially in relation to subjective and conceptual drawing traditions such as German expressionism, one idea stands out. Drawing cannot produce real difference or distinctiveness through intuition, expression, or bodily gesture alone. At a minimum, it needs a formal structure that can be read and interpreted.
Put more simply, drawing filled with symbolic stories and emotional lines must also contain clear signs that point to the structure of the world the artist is building. For that to happen, such a world must exist in the first place. The difference may be subtle, but it is undeniable.
Kim’s talent is clear. Some of her drawings reveal a striking yet controlled complexity. What is needed now is for that world to fully take shape within her thinking.