Phase Haze: Kim Beomjoong
Kim Beomjoong’s works, made by drawing countless pencil lines on jangji paper, are extremely delicate. When describing something minute, people often compare it to the thickness of a strand of hair, and some viewers may indeed be reminded of images resembling evenly spaced samples of hair in his works. If hair feels too literal, one could instead describe them as monochrome drawings in which differences of thickness, brightness, and texture unfold in endless variation. The innumerable lines that coat the surface are at once the bones and flesh of the image, its subcutaneous layer and its skin.
Kim’s monochrome drawings, realized using only pencil, are not limited to vision alone but connected to other senses such as touch and hearing. Vision, especially conceptual vision, operates through reduction. Modernist criteria like the “conditions of painting” still function today like aesthetic verdicts measuring “purity” of painting. Yet abstract reduction accompanied by conceptual rhetoric has never enriched art, nor has it made art autonomous or free. It has often turned art into little more than an empty slate onto which anything can be projected.
What remains of modernist rhetoric, reinforced by the authority of history, is power entangled with vested interests. The grid that affirms the flatness of the picture plane, the ascetic palette limited to black and white, and the performative quality of infinite repetition and difference are aspects that connect Kim’s work to monochrome painting. Yet in his case, reduction to certain pictorial elements functions as a minimal starting point for expansion. Interpretation does not accumulate arbitrarily from the outside but arises from what the artist has densely folded into the work itself. Much of this relates to time.
His works foreground a bodily, auditory sensibility that responds to conceptual visuality. Kim’s monochromes can extend into chains of association that include black-and-white photography, the piano’s black and white keys, musical notes or letters on white paper, or stars shining against a night sky. This is not a reduction to conceptual vision, but an expansion toward shared, cross-sensory perception.
In the grid and spiral structures he frequently employs, a sense of directional expansion is already present. The former extends vertically and horizontally, the latter in a spiral. One suggests the inorganic, the other the organic. Matter and energy, stacked and condensed one by one within an invisible framework like a grid of units, seem to wait for the chance to be released and unraveled. The monotone surfaces drawn with finely sharpened pencils are delicate yet forceful. The lines appear to know where they are headed, like the orbits of stars.
Clusters of lines positioned within each cell of the artist’s latent vertical and horizontal divisions all move in different directions. Like people sharing the same place while thinking different thoughts, each follows its own trajectory. Light entering from somewhere illuminates each state of steady flow. His works are carried out with certainty, like a monk reciting scripture, a calligrapher writing characters, a musician playing a well learned piece, or a fish or bird sensing the Earth’s magnetic field to find its way.
Actions performed over time leave traces in space. Within the finite space of the picture plane, time is densely accumulated. Some artists have marked time by writing numbers sequentially across a given space, but the language of form can be richer than numerical codes, though richer also means more ambiguous. In Kim Beomjoong’s work, the invisible flow of time becomes visible. By contrast, what is visible, spatial, and still can be bound to finitude. In daily life we do not see time itself, only clocks. Invisible time is qualitative, while the visible clock is quantitative.
Objects made by hand differ from the indifferent recording of time. Seen up close, the paper fibres scratched by the pencil rise from the surface. The fibres of dakji are pulled loose by friction. Because of these traces, his works are intensely tactile. The grid boundaries, where pencil marks accumulate most densely, feel especially rough. While finely detailed images often emphasize illusion and invite the viewer to look beyond, his work joins minuteness with tactility.
If images expanding in all directions could be heard with ears, they would be tactile. An artist with acute sensitivity to sound says that when resolution is high enough, sound reveals its texture. Some sounds feel cold or warm, others rough or smooth, hard or soft. Some sink into depths or hover in the air, others curl inward or spread wide. Contemporary society tries to simplify sound into codes called audio files, but there is a world of sound that resists such reduction. Kim does not seek abstract codes. He tries to make visible sounds that belong to the real. His focus lies where the body and matter meet directly.
The grid itself produces texture, yet within his grids other textures emerge. Raised paper fibres inscribe the image with the same force as skin being scraped. If it were skin, it would be a wound. A wound, without time to heal, surges repeatedly through a fixed time and place and is sealed while still unhealed.
Wounds and healing have become common terms for describing contemporary culture, usually centered on wounds one has received rather than those one has given. Yet if the wound is primordial, healing may not be possible at all. If, as Freud wrote, birth itself is trauma, perhaps a wound can only be healed in death. Paradoxically, acknowledging death and being willing to face it may be the closest one comes to healing. Those who devote themselves to art rather than livelihood sense this kind of death at every moment. In Kim Beomjoong’s work with its repeated lines dissolving into dark boundaries, there is an attitude of embracing death. Just as light exists between darkness, life exists between deaths. If life is finite, death is infinite. Between two infinities lies the finite. Filling or emptying the fixed surface of the picture plane is a matter of the intensity and density embedded in trajectories that circulate within divided fields.
It is the result of the energy the artist invests reacting with the materials of paper and pencil. As such, it bears witness to both the artist’s presence and absence, like a time that once existed and has now disappeared. Precise ranges of light and shadow pulse densely within their given places. By introducing subtle differences into each divided unit, the artist emphasizes that every material carries its own vibration. External order and uniformity function and devices that draw out differences.
Reality, despite its apparent variety, often sounds like the monotonous hum of machines. Art seeks a different sound. In his drawings, a sound can be sensed rinsing from deep darkness. It is the sound of time approaching and receding. As lines are drawn one by one and layered, night turns into day and day into night. There are boundaries where change occurs, yet we cannot fix them exactly. Can we ever pinpoint the moment night becomes day, or define the precise edge between the colours of a rainbow.