Contemporary Korean artist Inbai Kim utilises a pared-back visual language to interrogate the inherent social biases attached to sensory cognition and its communication.
Read MoreInbai Kim was born in 1978. He received a BA in Sculpture from Hongik University's College of Fine Arts, Seoul, in 2003, returning to the same department to undertake his MFA, which he completed in 2009. He continues to live and work in Seoul.
In sculpture and installation, Inbai Kim's renditions of the human form flicker between abstraction and representation. The resulting surreal artworks question the stability of the ideological structures that underpin contemporary cognitive frameworks.
Much of Inbai Kim's work asks, where does one discrete object—such as an individual person—end and the next begin? The resultant works push to the precipice between abstraction and discernible figuration.
One such work is Rising Fastball (2010–2011): a surreal portrayal of a baseball pitcher mid-pitch. The artist vividly captures the essence of the motion, transforming the figure into a contortion of movements and moments spliced together into one form.
Inbai Kim's work frequently emphasises a mistrust of the art historical frameworks that surround representation. His formative solo exhibition with Arario Gallery, Seoul, titled Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes (2014) goes so far as to request the erasure of the three elements that form the basis of Western visual language (points, lines, planes).
In the exhibition, the artist sought to examine the limitations of the dominant systems of cognition within which the world and oneself are generally processed, morphing figures across the two rooms of the show into semi-abstract gods of representation.
One room of the exhibition was painted a bright white, representing reason and structure, while the second, a darkened room, represented for the artist something more complicated. In both rooms, torsos of various sizes were rendered in hyper-realistic detail and blended into geometric heads.
The head of a seated figure in the light room, Flash (2013), is abstracted into two conical points, like straightened bull horns. In the second room, small gold figures illuminated in the darkness, such as Don't Pull (2014), appear to be frozen in torturous poses, indicating the violence that lurks beneath the surface of any system.
In his sculptures, Inbai Kim often seeks to build an alternative to dominant modes of cognition and representation. In the title of his first solo exhibition in China, 愚者 Child (Arario Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), based on a Korean word that used to mean 'fool', the artist reflected on the ways in which a more child-like view of the world might be wiser than its adult counterpart's viewpoint.
Inbai Kim has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include: Do you remember love, Perigee Gallery, Seoul (2020); Eliminates Points, Lines and Planes, Arario Gallery, Seoul (2014); and Turbulent O'Clock, Doosan Gallery, New York (2010).
Group exhibitions include: A Season of Meditation, Daegu Art Museum (2022); Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art From the Sigg Collection, Bern Kunstmuseum (2021); and Compulsion to Repeat, Seoul Museum of Art (2019).
Inbai Kim was nominated for the 21st SONGEUN Art Award in 2022.
In 2023, Inbai Kim was announced as one of 13 artists chosen for the Korean Artists Abroad programme supported by Korea Arts Management Service.
Inbai Kim's website can be found here and Instagram can be found here.
Articles on Inbai Kim have been published in various journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Artforum.
Casey Carsel | Ocula | 2023
