Reminiscing Essential Memory: Myong Hi Kim

Ezra Pound defines a poetic image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant.”
Myong Hi Kim’s painting has that poetic force, which relates to the instant of poetic perception—the instant that brings the past rippling into it, be it from yesteryears of personal life, history, or time immemorial. The viewer may stop short, however, mistaking it to be the painter’s imaginative fantasy taking her magically into another space, or observing the artist’s painterly construct—the “intellectual and emotional complex.” The setting of such construction contains now and “not now” simultaneously in the object of perception, as it thrusts the viewer beyond the object depicted, beyond the horizon of perception in view to a new horizon.

The emergent horizon captivates the viewer; this captivation makes the moment of perception momentous. The viewer’s task in looking, then, may lie, in part, in trying to figure out how the painter shapes visual forms in her paintings, allowing the sensation of being taken out of time. A look at how a painting enhances or obliterates the passage of time, or how it displaces the viewer out of the common passage of time, may reveal the artist’s way of shaping visual form and thereby enlarging the scope of appreciation for the work.

Let us first consider the ordinariness of Myong Hi Kim’s objects. There is nothing sublime or even strange about the objects that appear in her work; quite the contrary, they are intimate and particular, and also common and familiar. They refer to ordinary situations of life, be it a portrait of a child at play or at study, a woman at her daily tasks, a branch with colorful blossoms, a neighboring brook, or a patch of brambles. But remarkably, whatever the subject matter is, the very common person or scene approaches us with uncommonly universal understanding about the person or the landscape. The utterly common is made densely sophisticated, first of all, by her delicate treatment of minute details of each object and, more fundamentally, by her particular angle of painterly vision.

I am suggesting that it is the painter’s angle of vision, together with her technique of descriptive detail, which reveals the locally precise nature of the relationship between everyday common man and man in relation to nature—the cosmic man. That is to say, the minute details of the common everyday object are configured by the painter’s particular angle of vision, which contains the angle of the human as a species in nature, not as a social being loaded down with class, gender, or history. Details are the means of pushing the boundaries of figures bound by such categories. Her dialectic of details opens up the seen, reaches for the essential past, and becomes the promise of a new understanding of homo sapiens and their habitat.

In the process, virtually infinite descriptive details translate an ordinary face, a common landscape, or a common myth; the painter demonstrates, in every step of the way, how different a descriptive painting is from representational work. Her painting does not represent an existing form or shape, but describes them beyond that existing form and shape. Her encircling detail promises a new vista beyond the boundaries of the object, whether it is a face or a landscape, through some essential memories embedded in embodied memory.

The graceful gazes of her expressive portraits, for instance, are not of particular characters with desire, greed, ambition, or even suffering, but of states of mind of common humanity, evolved or distilled from millions of years of survival. They convey ultimate states of being refined through collective human memory, chastened and become innocent and knowing simultaneously. In this visual world, her expressiveness dictates our unconscious presuppositions of thought.

Myong Hi Kim’s paintings appear to be separating and merging, at the same time, the diurnal and the nocturnal—light emerging from darkness and darkness shaping images to suggest knowledge filtered through the darkness of a chalkboard. Looked at this way, the nocturnal nature of the blackboard the painter uses in place of the canvas has a horrific symbolic significance (the unknown, the buried, the exegetic…in short, “the other”), but darkness is more than symbolic in her painting. It is part of the actual process of bringing light into darkness—painting as the darkness being lit up to be perceived; that is, the diurnal as the rendered nocturnal. Her paintings contain both the actual and the symbolic other, objectified with all the stuff of dreams and collective consciousness.

The reality of night, which takes up half of our lives and ought to be close to us and yet forever dark and mysterious, is an operational part of Kim’s painterly world. Leaving the white of conventional canvas, she takes up the darkness of the unseen, not yet confronted. Leaving aside the contextual significance of history, classroom, children, education, society, etc. inherent in the chalkboard, the blackboard subverts ordinary notions of illumination through perception in light. It suggests the hidden rather than the seen, the nocturnal rather than diurnal, the dream world rather than the cognitive world, and imagination rather than analysis.

The painter enters into the rich, collective, and remembered space of heightened conditions, significantly, through the ordinary—the realistic, the specific—and draws out the hidden by having it interact with what lies beneath our subconscious darkness to emerge onto the surface. In this sense her paintings are not depictions of some reality by imitating or mirroring it. What her painting dredges up is not an appearance but an apparition surfaced from the depth of the night, of the immemorial past recorded in the history of our species. The apparition is in the mind of the viewer, of course, called upon toward some space not yet discovered; she is taken to the brink of passing into another reality.

What Myong Hi Kim is able to show the viewer is how intimately linked this other reality is to ordinary objects in the immediate surround of life; it is within them, not separate or distant from it. In fact, only through the minutely reticulated experience with the ordinary can one glimpse the liminal. This painter reveals a fundamental truth: what is valued in art is not apart from the ordinary but intimately linked to it and to our common perception of daily reality. Her art enables the viewer to experience concurrent imaginative freedom in an extraordinary perception of ubiquitous common objects described to their brink of disruption.

Myong Hi Kim literally and symbolically brings forth images by letting them emerge as if from the background of the chalkboard, as very detailed descriptions of objects take shape as they light up. The first painter to use darkness to place luminosity on hyper-realistic figures may have been Caravaggio. Kim retains this strategy, along with classical painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer, illuminating objects by showering light upon them while they are surrounded by darkness with extraordinary subtle variations of light. The base of her surface—black or dark green depending on the chalkboard—may allude to original cosmic chaos as well as to revered art-historical status, from which light, the soul of painterly art, persists.

As in Caravaggio, she relies on hyper-realistic descriptions of common people set in fantastic backgrounds; however, unlike the late Renaissance painter, her aim is not to reveal individual personalities. She seeks to excavate remembered time to see where we are. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the imaginary opens up space for discovery—the individual character for Caravaggio and the mind image for Kim. The method of discovery is similar, but the subject matter differs greatly. Although Myong Hi Kim’s use of darkness is as dramatic and firm as Caravaggio’s realism, her images are never uncouth or brutal. She prefers gentle, mysterious expressiveness far from Western naturalism that demands brutal corruption of form and content. A strong relief of shade and light allows her a different kind of realism, one resembling the momentous existence of bodies as they are.

Poetic drama, like the universal character of Myong Hi Kim’s hyper-real figures, occupies a unique place in contemporary Western-style art, with postmodern freedom to link eclectically and to create a lineage reaching both East and West. In Forced Dislocation (2002, 830 × 120), light from the left holds the viewer in an absolute aesthetic experience. Each white birch in the foreground precisely reveals its texture, while girls in colorful traditional costumes appear like momentary apparitions from another world. The reflected light makes the birch trunks seem to generate illumination from within, lighting the forest. The light falling on the girls’ faces penetrates their beings beyond the history of dislocation; they take on life as illuminated spirits of the figured past.

How the work of Myong Hi Kim is viewed naturally varies, but it often settles into a mood of serene understanding of human dreams in history. Such is the viewer’s participation that separation and merging between painting and viewer seem to occur simultaneously. How does the painter make realistic figures appear arrested yet floating in serenity while uniting the viewer with the painting? The viewer becomes anchored in the serenity of the mood, united with the dislocated, with all of humanity or the lost, as light flitters into her forest.

Kim’s visual narrative begins with minutely detailed figures of ordinary people—children, women, old people, the culturally dislocated—placed in the foreground against a dark, dreamlike background of imagination. She sometimes enhances this juxtaposition through contrasts such as past/present, stillness/motion, moment/memory. What remains constant is the antithetic contrast of foreground and background: light against darkness, structure against chaos, figural against abstract. These contrasts generate new configurations of ideas and relations, bridging the seen and unseen. The space the painter opens arises from two structural sources: heightened reality of the object and the unstructured.

At times, realistic depictions of disparate realities are superimposed. The gigantic jar posed against a turbulent sea in Dragon (2007, 120 × 90) exemplifies this. The jar takes dominion over the sea, recalling Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar.” The power of the image deepens as clouds in the sky and on the jar merge, and the painted dragon twists as if ready to leap into the sea.

Sometimes the painter inserts a window of video motion juxtaposed with the super-stillness at the edges of the image. While video motion introduces narrative time, it also disrupts the affirmation of aesthetic reality, reminding the viewer she is looking at a painting. Through this superposition, the painter relinquishes perceptual control, allowing the viewer to actively participate in creating the liminal. The realistic foreground captivates instantly, then releases the viewer to envision another reality.

The other reality alluded to by these stylistic juxtapositions touches our psychic bases of childhood and histories of cultural dislocation shaped by migration, globalization, and technology—the common condition of humanity in the 21st century. Though rooted in the painter’s biography of living between New York and Naepyungri, Korea, her narratives of dislocation resonate broadly, situating the viewer as a citizen of a globalized culture suspended between East and West. Her apparitions exist within society and sensuous particularity, yet their spiritual freedom situates them within the ideal realm of art. Her consciousness dredges from the subconscious something eternally human, bringing the space/time prior to consciousness (“not now”) into the present.

Like late Renaissance masters, her works direct attention to grace and gesture through infinite gradations of light and darkness. What they convey, however, is not individual characterization but what is human: universal childhood, universal lived time in a woman or an old man. Her realism, like theirs, is combined with the fantastic. Unlike Raphael’s dragon in Saint George and the Dragon, however, Kim Myong Hi’s dragon—painted on a jar—takes dominion over a realistic sea.

Wolhee Choe
New York, March 22, 2012