Self-imposed rules Project: Kim Chaewon
Precious childhood memories cannot be erased. They shape a person’s history. For Kim Chaewon, everyday events and activities from elementary school remain important and form the base of her work.
Perhaps influenced by her father, who studied architecture, she liked to build and decorate her own space as a child. She grew up in the 1990s, a time of cultural confusion. Outdoor play was moving indoors, and life was shifting from analog to digital. An artificial garden was made inside her home. There, she created her own small garden and spent much of her time alone, playing house and imagining stories.
Her play tools were things picked up from the street, gifts, bought items, and imagined objects. Within her own space, she stacked and arranged these items. She also kept small animals such as turtles and goldfish. In this free setting, she built her own visual language.
Later, this private play developed into art through several stages.
First, during her art education, she felt a lack of strong themes and deep thinking. This led her to question what it really means to see. She began going outside, searching for the edge of her own identity.
Second, more than her major in Western painting, it was her experience with many materials that shaped her imagination. She worked with pen, oil, watercolour, metal, and computer programs. In Korea, art often values form over content, and genre boundaries can feel strict. Her wide use of materials may seem out of place in that setting, Yet materials themselves have meaning as objects.
Third, social experiences caused a reaction in her. Hurt in relationships and unable to find sincerity, she returned to the private “castle of play” from her childhood.
In 1997, while attending an arts high school, she painted crowds inside the Gwanghwamun Kyobo Bookstore in oil. Without fully knowing it, she may have been observing the lonely feelings of individuals inside a large, industrial city building. She looked at them from a distance, as if dividing reality and illusion.
This attitude led her to explore the space between reality and illusion. In 2007, she organised a Flash Mob project. It was a performance arranged through a website, a way to escape daily life and seek new communication. This became a turning point, opening her awareness beyond two dimensions.
She clearly developed her own visual language around 2008 to 2009, near the end of her time studying abroad. Though we did not see her childhood play, her later work feels like a return to that “castle of play.” The difference is that childhood play was free and innocent, while her later images came from pain, conflict, bias, and the tension between reality and imagination.
Her work stands between a personal language and a shared one. To build this in-between space, she gives objects and living things clear visual rules. These rules create new illusions. However, the work does not aim for deep illusion. Its forms are flexible and changing.
She creates a closed room in her mind. Inside it, she moves back and forth between a single point and an imagined universe. Through the link between brain and sight, she builds a kind of image dictionary. The objects in it come from episodes in her short life. They gather into her own scenarios. She connects them to social, natural, scientific, and imagined viewpoints. In this way, she creates new fantasy, like poetry, literature, science fiction, or comics.
Everyone has rooms of memory. Their value depends on how they are used. Kim Chaewon finds meaning in small things, from discarded parts to personal themes. The world does not disturb those who search for what others overlook. Art is not about making something completely new. It is about the strange aura that appears when we truly recognise something. Recognition leads to discovery, and discovery leads to creation. In that sense, her imagination will gain deeper sincerity as she continues building her “castle of play,” one space at a time.
Lee Kwanhoon (Curator, Project Space Sarubia)
Translated by Gallery Chosun