Construction: Youngae Kim
In this latest body of work, Constructions (2010), Youngae Kim has constellated material traces of time and change. While the works exude sense impressions, they leave viewers free to construe (interpret) the constitutive elements. These are abstracted and distanced by the artist through interventions of scale, mark and colour. Towards what end? One possible answer is to engage us in contemplations of the nature of change – the fundamental factor informing all life and structure.
As with Domus (2002) and Vestigia (2005), two previous exhibitions by Youngae Kim, Constructions further extrapolates this artist’s exploration of time, manifest in structures and surfaces around us. While the scale and palette are remarkably varied, the signature language remains subtly modular so that all of these new works cohere and converse, part of an ongoing continuum. Here then is another pensive study of how we live, interpret and understand our world.
“I source my materials in demolition yards. Like the fragments of fabric in a domestic sewing box, discarded building materials can tell us a lot – not only their own history, but also something of their subsequent alteration, the maker’s purpose, their aesthetic or aspiration … Discarded materials are rich with past stories and future relevancies. To pause and consider a fragment of timber is to recognise that nothing is simply ‘surface’. Everything has its communicative layers and sub-strata, traces of time and history.” [Youngae Kim, 2002]
Traces of history and tradition, particularly architectural materials, have informed Kim’s work for over ten years. The Byok Corrugated (2001) pulped, cast works and the collegraph, Jib (2002) series, exemplify this.
Traces of the byok and jib ‘architecture’, particularly their modular aspect (almost bojagi-like) are discernible in this latest body of work. But there is also a significant shift. The linear perspective of the earlier work (closely associated with perceptual consciousness) has dissolved, giving way to something simultaneously more sensory and cognitive. This has been achieved through a shift in scale and format.
Whether ‘landscape’, ‘portrait’ or simply square in large or small formats, the materials in Constructions require (and reward) close reading. Whether brilliant Klee or broody Turneresque in colour, these are meditative abstractions – not representational works.
Their power to arrest us hinges on their power to evoke change. Towards this end, each construction is a material concert of natural and manufactured alterations, in ways subtle and surprising. Visually, the timber’s natural, incidental splits combined with the artists different saw cuts (with and against the grain) rhythmically emphasise line and movement.
This musicality is orchestrated through a varied repetition of timber ‘mosaics’ in various scales complimented by a spectrum of pigmented gesso applications. Form, structure and colour ripple. They create rhythms and reverberations of change. Nothing in these constructions is static, fixed or finished. Each viewer must construct their own field of vision, their own response to Kim’s conceptual and aesthetic language. Such is the freedom of pure music – the most abstract of our art forms.
Consider the rich yellows and reds; crescendos and diminuendos of warmth evocative of the rising and setting sun. Then again, this visual radiant ‘music’ might evince the resonant notes from a set of traditional Korean So pipes, or the sound of laughter.
And what of the gray and white works? Graced with whispers of stencilled, blue lettering, what times and places might they allude to? Is Kim scrutinising the symbolism of letter forms, or the distance between printed words and meaning? Are these works commenting on the structure and power of language that defines us in ways that are familiar yet sometimes unnoticed and constantly evolving? The gray work surely reminds us that life reverberates in the spectrum between black and white, something which Kim further explores in the inky drifts and depths of the larger, most rhythmic ‘black’ works. They are as multifaceted as the magnificent Tripitaka Koreana, stored in endless rhythms at the Haein Temple in the mountains near Daegu.
Like the ancient Tripitaka Koreana, could these works be commemorative signs, quietly calling attention to nature’s durability and human transience? Do the saw cuts, for example, function like a micro-theme of technologies and human effort? Do they suggest, if not a harmony, then at least an accommodation between the mechanism, the maker and the material? Whether light or dark, Constructions invite close reading.
Free of any obvious representational motifs, these large and small gesso works are not empty abstractions devoid of signifiers. Despite the artist’s interventions, the materials are still rich with their own growth rings and splits; the effects of weathering; and traces of the materials original use in times past.
With Constructions this artist invites and encourages sensorial and cognitive awareness. She does so through delicate yet robust orchestrations of discarded materials. Kim has subtly altered the materials’ previous identities in order to avoid finite associations. Thus, if there are references, it is the viewer who will supply these, since the forms themselves have been stripped of what Malevich called the imperative of representation – the illusion of life or an object captured on the two-dimensional plane. The result in Kim’s work is a series of highly sculptural constructions that offer not only a sense of infinite change, but also the inherent transience this involves. Change informs all life and structures.
From debris Youngae Kim constructs meditative forms of great beauty and simultaneously critiques the very notion of permanence.
Dr. Cassandra Fusco,
L’Ile Bouchard, Loire.