누웠던 자리: Jiye Kim
Gallery Chosun will present Jiye Kim’s solo exhibition 《누웠던 자리》 from July 24 to August 7, 2018.
Jiye Kim works mainly with ceramics, shaping and transforming everyday forms. The smooth, light-reflecting surface of clay can resemble skin or glass. As the eye slides across it, attention shifts to grotesque shapes paired with unexpectedly bright colours. When working with clay, Kim understands sensations such as humidity, texture, density, and tension through the familiar and physical idea of closeness.
While viewers encounter only the finished works, the pieces subtly draw them back into the process of making. Their surfaces feel as if they have already been touched, or invite touch, stirring impulses and memories. They become something both familiar and strange, something that feels known yet still asks to be explored.
However, Kim’s work is not closed off or gloomy. When we look at art that opens up a personal world, we feel an impulse to peer into the artist’s inner life, briefly becoming a kind of peeping tom. If a work invites curiosity but refuses to respond to the viewer’s gaze, it is like inviting guests only to turn one’s back on them. Kim does the opposite. She does not ignore the gaze or pretend not to see it. She meets it directly and seems, instead, to move into the viewer’s inner world.
The slightly opened ends of her work resemble flower buds, borrowing bodily sensations that feel both fragile and erotic. Humans eat and speak through the mouth. These lip-like forms appear shy, as if receiving the viewer’s feelings, while at the same time exposing their own interior and speaking outward. Eating is the act of bringing something that is not the body into the body. Speaking is the act of sending something drawn from within the body back out. In this way, the beginning and end of in-and-out movements are one and the same.
In this exhibition, Kim extends her previous work to share these sensations more fully. At the same time, she seeks to heighten touch as it is delivered through sight. The phrase “touching with the eyes” may sound poetic, but in Kim’s work, the tips of the fingers become the end point of the gaze.