Suyoung Kim started out her series by drawing the postmodern works of renowned and established architects that are now a natural part of the European daily life. Notably, residency-occupied buildings of Le Corbusier appeared often in her nascent works as they emanated an utterly discrete atmosphere from previous European buildings while simultaneously being nestled in the city unaffectedly, striking her with their authentic rhythm of the vibrant city. This rhythm is visible in both the city as a whole and the structure and color of its buildings, and the artist centered on the analogies and distinctions born from the substitution of the structural language of form by the painterly language of form as she weaved these figurative elements into flat paintings. This moderately strays from traditional paintings that strived to realistically portray stereoscopic subjects on the plane, or the act of thoroughly rendering the subject flat and abstract to prompt attention to the painting's inner composition; Instead, it focuses on the inevitable discrepancy that arises as the artist continuously takes notice of the subject and translates it through various media-the artist's body, photos, canvases, and brushes. Scenes that were constructed to expose the entire building's contour in her early works gradually came to appear as if they accent the variations between subject and painting while amplifying parts of the building rather than its overall figure. She similarly seemed to highlight what emerges from within the subject through her Both Sides series, or to be more precise, the gap between the real and the stereoscopic subject projected as a plane that develops amid the subject and the artist's gaze directed at that subject. From 2014, Kim started expanding the split screen to triple or quadruple divisions as she depicted the moments when overlapping buildings appear flat in our eyes despite the gaps between them. But the density of paint on the canvas is the most noticeable change during this period. Starting from this term, Kim refrained from displaying the intervals between subjects in her paintings and started coating paint more heavily and coarsely than before, as if she strived to express depth through the thickness and texture of paint. In her 2018 solo exhibition View & Hide, Kim presented works stressing her subjects' profoundness. This is because the artist started pondering over inserting elements of time in her paintings from 2016, which led to an emphasis on the shadows draped by buildings along the passage of time and the expression of light and color that reflects differently upon slight changes in angles and curves. Windows are not only reflected by light, they also reflect the landscape they hold within. Likewise, the artist's gaze seems to linger in the subject for a longer length of time, and the artist's imagery reveals itself as the time of gazing elongates. Now, the buildings-or the image of the buildings-become a united body at the point they encounters the artist's gaze, then are transferred to the canvas alongside the artist's emotions.
Read MoreOn one hand, her paintings hold numerous elements content-wise as well. Symbolic postmodern buildings built by famed European architects were about the creation of a completely new structure of the individual and society living in a "metropolis" style unit of co-living. The initial architectural paintings of Kim had tiny human figures drawn in them though they weren't introduced in the exhibition. This lets one infer the artist's fundamental attitude towards architecture in her paintings. We can first imagine small beings drawn in a landscape, which do not symbolize semantically reduced humans or-in other words-"human alienation," but rather prompt one to look at the lives of people relating to each other inside the landscape called the city. This is because the landscapes of the building-girded city are not just fragmentary emotions called "alienation" or "deprivation," but those that have come to be nature itself where its members are required to live within communal lives and complex relationships.
Text courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.