Sim Raejung Steps into a New Realm
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KOREA ARTS MANAGEMENT SERVICE

Sim Raejung's first solo exhibition in four years, Drowsy-head at Arario Gallery, Seoul, shows a continuation of the dark humour and irreverence that characterise the artist's work while heralding a new direction.

Drowsy-head (4 April–13 May 2023) features 14 new works, including paintings, ink drawings, and a single-channel video animation on the fourth floor.

Entering the exhibition space, bold, saturated colours from Sim's paintings immediately command attention—a departure from the lack of hue in B-301, Sim's 2019 solo exhibition at Arario Museum, where three black-and-white animations dominated.

The animations were projected onto the brick walls of the museum's underground exhibition space, where images of a dubious operating room pulsated under dim lighting. In one video, a mysterious surgeon amputates and re-attaches heads that appear rather content despite the grotesque nature of the act. Throughout the operation, the surgeon is gentle and caring of their patient(s).

Contributing to the odd tranquillity of the work was a low, humming soundtrack by musician KIN, with whom Sim first began to work while preparing for B-301. The music features more high-pitched sounds than low-pitched humming, and creates a sense of horror. The two share a spontaneity in their approach to a work of art/music, with Sim pouring out quick drawings onto paper and KIN creating music impromptu as he watches her animations.

Sim's animations are based on rough, scratchy drawings created with simple tools—pens, markers, and, as of late, the iPad. Many are rooted in the artist's longstanding concern with human nature and relationships, as well as her observations of daily life.

From noise complaints to taboos such as murder or cannibalism, Sim explores human existence, often through visceral representations of desire, violence, and anxiety.

In Drowsy-head, Sim continues to interrogate the conditions of human existence in both familiar and new mediums. Works are mostly arranged in chronological order, beginning with four ink drawings on the left wall.

These include the ink on paper Heck If I Know 1 (2023), showing a dense composition of angular lines with a partial checkerboard pattern in the background. Inside the spirals in the midsection, minute figures recoil in pain, reflecting the artist's distress at the time of creating the work.

To its right, an owl peers sideways in Hello (2023). Lines that echo the bird's silhouette fill the backdrop, save for a small pink oval above its head that reads, 'Hello'. Although Sim draws intuitively, the greeting is timely as it introduces the artist's first-ever paintings.

Painted in black and fluorescent colours, they frame bold propositions: 'I $ Want Your Money', one painting reads. 'Heck If I Know', another states.

Images are no less daring. Fat Cat (2023) depicts a hooded-eye feline in neon pink with mutton-like legs and a seedy smile. Residues of dried paint drip over the title, painted as crude, angular letters in an equally bright yellow that personifies the cat's questionable disposition.

Dripping happy faces overlap in Hat (2023), in which a blue circle wears a hat with the inscription 'Hat'. The 'H' is bolded as if in a child's marker drawing, generating an eerie impression created by the dissonance between the expectation of an artwork and the image at hand.

The doubled faces reference Sim's experience as she was being treated for double vision, which she also draws from in the animation Double Room (2023). Made with an iPad and completed in Final Cut, the single-channel video is projected onto a corner of the exhibition space to divide the work into two adjacent screens.

As with Sim's earlier works, Double Room channels an inquiry into bodily conditions and ailments with a focus on the eye—in one scene, an eyeball appears to turn into goo and falls out of the eye socket, only to be caught by the mouth below.

The eyes in Sim's work—wide and sleepless in Hello, heavy in Fat Cat and Double Room, and images of varying brains in The Human Brains (2022) echo the exhibition title, Drowsy-head, which Sim came across while reading about states of sleep and consciousness.

By contrast, the Korean title, 깨어나니 정오였다 (Waking, it was noon), takes its cue from French poet Arthur Rimbaud's poem 'Dawn'. Paired together, the titles bring forth the cloudy intersection between dreams and reality, sleeping and awakening, and consciousness and unconsciousness.

That murkiness provides room for experimentation, with Sim venturing into colour and the medium of painting to find the image that satisfies her.

Traces of trial and error are more apparent in real life than in photographs, as noted in hints of red underneath the black background in Fat Cat or the faint green behind the lime-green face in Sweetie-Pie!! (2023), which contributes to the motivation to see Sim's works in person.

Beyond the walls of Arario Gallery, Sim has been further expanding her practice by creating her usual suspects in ceramics. A few are currently on view in the ART BOOK zone at the MMCA Seoul, and additional ones may feature in Sim's upcoming solo exhibition at Space Cadalog, Seoul (19 May–8 June 2023). There, the artist will also show the latest instalment of 'Cannibal Kingdom' (2017), a series of animations revolving around a cannibalistic restaurant. In the new work, the human ingredients escape.

With many exhibitions to come, the artist shares the one project on her mind: her ambition to create a hand-drawn feature film. But aware of the production timelines of artworks meant for exhibitions, Sim notes: 'I want to give myself a period of ten years to work on it privately.'—[O]