Rendered mostly in black and white, and in a cartoonish style, Cindy Ji Hye Kim's paintings and drawings may appear harmless at first glance. Up close, however, scenes of violence and impending catastrophe abound. With a recurring cast that consists of household items, flies, anonymous female bodies, and a family of three, Kim explores the otherwise invisible structures of image production.
Read MoreDomesticity and hazard mingle in Kim's work, subverting the expected safety of homes. In the painting Demonstration/Illustration (2017), for example, a glove is stuck to a wooden silhouette of a woman by a kitchen knife; its fingertips are wet with what appears to be splatters of blood. Another work, with the tender title Love Letter (2017), shows the inside of a human head, which is infested with flies, and a broken pencil that runs through its ears.
Another recurring imagery in Kim's work is that of SPAM, an American invention that made its way to Korea during the Korean War and has since become a staple there. Kim, who moved to Canada when she was 12, first began using images of SPAM in 2017 as a way of presenting a distinctive and commonplace item in an unfamiliar setting. In her solo presentation The Celibate Machine at New York's Interstate Projects in 2018, the artist showed a nude-coloured model of the SPAM tin with the words written in Korean.
Kim developed her family of three characters while she was an undergraduate at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, where she received her BFA in 2013. They are archetypal characters, marked by their non-facial features: Mister Capital, a top hat-wearing man; Madam Earth, who flaunts a beehive hairdo; and the schoolgirl with contorted poses. The artist told Ocula Magazine in 2020 that 'Faces are never empty enough—they steal the mystery from the characters and occupy too much of the viewer's mind.'
The family has appeared across Kim's practice, such as in the paintings shown at her solo exhibition Verses from the Apocalypse, jointly presented by New York's Foxy Productions and Helena Anrather in 2019. Inspired by the structural composition of the 16th-century Dutch painters Bruegel the Elder and the Van Valckenborch Brothers' paintings depicting the story of the Tower of Babel, Kim used such elements as scaffolding and stretcher bars in her paintings to expose the physical boundaries of image-making. In Mister Capital (2019), for example, the gentleman's portrait is built out of bricks inside a scaffolding, while the backside of the painting shows small Mister Capital characters that have been carved into the stretcher bars.
Selected solo exhibitions include Riddles of the Id, rodolphe janssen, Brussels (2020); The Sword Without, The Famine Within, Fraçois Ghebaly, Los Angeles (2019); and Tick, Helena Anrather, New York (2017).
Kim lives and works in New York.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020
