BYRON KIM

Byron Kim is a critically acclaimed artist whose work balances formal ingenuity with conceptual sophistication; beginning with his breakthrough work Synecdoche (1991-ongoing), Kim’s work has become synonymous with complex series of paintings that deconstruct the ways we organize and define contemporary identity. By focusing on and recording basic signifiers found in culture and nature, for example in skin colour, Kim’s work elegantly diagrams the fraught constructions that underlie social values. By creating ongoing serial works that build an index of his subjects, the artist is able to create layered meditations on a theme, thereby building a dynamic inquiry that expands beyond the work itself—asking, ‘how are we all connected to the greater whole?’

This logic of pursuing a subject serially is the basis of the artist’s longest ongoing project, Sunday Paintings on display in K2. Beginning in 2001, Byron Kim began his Sunday Paintings, committing himself to a single painting of the sky every Sunday. Training his eye upward and recording what he sees on a uniform 35.5 x 35.5 cm canvas, Kim has created a highly personal inventory of hundreds of paintings. To these idiosyncratic works, depicting hues of blue and grey punctuated by clouds, the artist has added short journalistic entries in pen or pencil directly on the surface of the work, as well as recording the specific time and place observed. In his often droll notations, Kim captures the mundane and profound details of the everyday, juxtaposing the personal with the archetypal symbolism of the sky. The installation at Kukje Gallery will feature approximately 48 paintings completed from 2007 to 2016.

Complementing the subject matter and methodology of his Sunday Paintings, in K3 Kim will exhibit Untitled (for ...), a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the nocturnal sky in the city. As opposed to the limitless starry black of the rural sky, night in the city is circumscribed, intimate, and so each of Kim’s Untitled (for ...) paintings is named for a friend or family member, someone who he thinks about while walking in the city alone at night. Using two different sizes of canvases to frame his observation, the installation consists of a number of large works and several medium-scaled works. In both of these lyrical series, Byron Kim displays the rare balance of aesthetic complexity and intellectual rigour that has made him such an important artist of our time.