Choon Mi Kim

“A place, a space, a time, a line—nowhere and everywhere: dimensions that enfold then re-open. Neither abstract nor representational, Choon Mi Kim’s paintings layer sensations, emotions, and memories into constantly transforming environments. She rotates her paintings as she works, putting them on the floor or on the wall, treating them almost like another being with which to interact or choreograph.

What is the difference between a color and a mark? Geometry and a smudge? Are those characters: can you read this? Yes and no: reading is seeing, as writing is drawing is painting (trained as a calligrapher, Kim points out that in Korean the verb 그리다 (grida) means both “to draw” and “to paint”), but Choon’s gestural brushstrokes, which can verge on the alphabetic or syllabaric, don’t make meanings the way letters might. They tempt the mind’s taxonomical impulse, and instead place you firmly back into the spot where you don’t yet know, can’t yet know, back to the spot where “to know” and “to experience” synonymize.

So: I experience the hole. That’s what I’ll call it. That white-ish circle at upper left—below the painting’s boundary and under a thick red mark—can’t help but read to me like a center of gravity, as if I’m seeing this painting, Perched, in three dimensions, over and over again.

After the hole, I experience red. Can I say that? That I experience red? Kim recalls the experience of looking into her grandmother’s agungi, a wood-fired stove, the lone orange-red light on the dark island, and wishing she could reach her hand into the fire. The beauty of the forbidden. Boundaries. Blue lines that emerge like improbable architectures or bowing leaves recede into what can’t be depth, and return me, again, back to the surface.

In this exhibition, Ringing, the paintings are called by lone nouns (Heads, Leaves), terms that conflate landscape with types of organizational plots (Sea Lot, Birch Lines), or by participles (Perched, Quenched) and a gerund (Ringing itself). I see no leaves, not exactly. I see no parking lot, or not without the power of suggestion. I see a verb as an adjective, a verb as a noun: an action almost stabilized—or a fixed item set in motion. Everything being something it isn’t, so to speak; everything exactly as it is: the verge of recognition making everything newly beautiful, wondrous, formidable, strange.”

—Drew Zeiba

Choon Mi Kim (b. 1983, Incheon, South Korea) received her MFA from Goldsmiths in London and Korea National University of Arts in Seoul, and her BFA from Hong Ik University in Seoul. Her works have been exhibited at Ilwoo Art Foundation, Seoul; Songwon Art Center, Seoul; Ginny on Frederick, London; N/A Gallery, Seoul; and Commune Gallery, Vienna, amongst other venues. Her work is included in the Rubell Museum, Miami, FL. She lives and works between London and Seoul.