Myong Hi Kim’s Imaginary Realism and Deja-vu Vision

Kim Hong-Hee

Anyone who sees Myong Hi Kim’ paintings, whether an art expert or a novice, finds himself disarmed and has a rare experience to enter the state of self-purification. Where does this fascination of her paintings come from?

Painting As a Wife of a Painter

In order to approach the art world of the artist, we should first look back on the trajectory of her life. This is not only because she has lived a very unique life, but also because the trajectory shows a rare unification of life and occupation which has gradually established itself. As is widely known, when we discuss the work of an artist, and particularly a woman artist, the focus should be on her life itself in that the life as a woman shaped by sexist ideology of patrilineal society inevitably defines the area of the artist’s activity and influences her art. In approaching women’s art and women artist, therefore, it would be desirable to preferentially ask how she has overcome the special condition of being both an artist and a woman living in a given society and in what way she has been engaged in art history and its theoretical underpinnings.

Myong Hi Kim was born in 1949 and grew up in Japan and the UK, following the footsteps of her diplomat father.

After returning home, she graduated from Ewah Women’s High School and enrolled in the department of painting at Seoul National University. During college days, she discerned ‘the contradictions in the deep-rooted, paternalistic Western-orientedness’ and was deeply absorbed in Korean beauty, which reflected in her master’s thesis titled “A Study of the Pattern Painting in Hwagak Crafts (Hornwork).” She has her first solo exhibition in Goethe-Institut Seoul in 1972 and came to know Chaseop Kim in 1973 when she worked as an art teacher in Ewah Women’s High School. After working as a member of “Expression group” in 1975, she moved to NYC to attend Graduate school at Pratt Institute. In 1976, she married Chaseop Kim at New York City Hall and settled down in SoHo, an art district in lower Manhattan. ‘In order to solve financial difficulties peculiar to a painter couple,’ she gave up her studies and began to work at the New York Branch office of Hankook Ilbo. In 1978, for professional and economic freedom, she resigned from the newspaper company and started her own business as a boutique owner in 1978. Since then, living as a wife of a painter and professional lady, she has kept on drawing in every spare moment, not to forget the fact that she was a painter. From 1981 to 1986, she made several long trips across the United States and overseas to Egypt, Mexico, etc. The drawings that she made with a fine brush before and during the trips attracted the eye of Giyoung Jeong, the director of One Gallery, who invited her to hold her second solo exhibition at the gallery in 1987. The exhibition gave her recognition as a prominent painter due to her unique style, characterized by honest-to-goodness content and a simple style. While traveling in New Mexico, located in the southwest and western regions of the United States, she had an opportunity to meet American Indians, have her pictures taken with them, and paint them, feeling deep affection for and a kindred spirit with them. In 1990, when she could stand the conflict over her identity as an ethnic minority no longer, she determined to leave New York and returned home after fifteen years’ away. Then, instead of living in Seoul to repeat the ills of the American material culture of the 1980s, she settled in a remote mountain village in Gangwon Province, finding a home-cum-studio in a closed-down school in Naepyeong-ri. It was the moment when she was finally able to begin her life as a professional artist for the first time in her life, like that of her husband. Calling herself ‘a witness and experiencer of the field of Naepyeong-ri, the forefront of the collapsed agricultural culture,’ she ‘compensated for the sense of loss about her lost time through meeting with nature and the souls of lost children.’ After spending the 1993 winter in a loft in SoHo for cultural refreshment, she again devoted herself to work in her studio in Naepyeong-ri and had her third solo exhibition at One Gallery in 1995 after eight years since her second.

Between Reality and Imagination and Between the Present and the Past

Myong Hi Kim’s work is basically rooted in the world of allegory and symbol. While her paintings are highly detailed depictions using hyperrealism techniques, she has always one foot in the world of imagination. This world of allegory, based both on the dualism of reality and imagination and on the diachrony between the present and the past, was comprehensively explored in her figure paintings painted in fine-line drawing in the 1987 exhibition under the theme of allegory, and in the blackboard paintings in a new style that evoked a sense of loss in the 1995 exhibition.

More remarkably, her series of figure paintings, packed with literary implications and allegories, makes a feminist statement. By inspiring the women in the portraits with feminist and historical consciousness, she makes them allegorical. These allegorical portraits begin with quoting well-known historical or mythical women represented by masters. Using the complex-image technique, the artist allows these images to confront real women in the real world. For example, in The Rape of the Sabine Women (Gana Art Gallery), the women being carried off by soldiers in Poussin’s painting are put side by side with a white sturdy women living in New York; in Running Woman (displayed in the New York exhibition), Apollo and Daphne represented by Bernini meet a female marathoner; and Endless Thinking is a portrait of the artist pounding garlic in a kitchen with a painting of great Greek philosopher on the wall― an expression of the self-contradiction and dualism of a woman painter who is always in her own little world when doing house chores.

Aside from these allegorical figure paintings that focus on the idea of allegory itself, her landscapes could be also considered as allegorical. As is shown not only in the paintings she produced during traveling in Mexico, but also in the ones of wild flowers in the Naepyeong-ri grove, her landscapes are not a sight of Mother Nature that is sublime and awe-inspiring, but a part of mysterious and profound nature. Kim selects trivial parts of nature with the eye of a woman, such as a clump of grass that demonstrate the tenacious vitality of life, a piece of cloudy sky, a rock bed washed by the sea waves, and reinterprets them as the subject of her allegorical landscapes.

Blackboard Painting as a Metaphor for Loss

Kim’s 1995 exhibition drew attention particularly for its blackboard paintings. This new type of painting grew out of the sketches that she did on the blackboards in a disused closed primary school with oil pastel. This ‘readymade’ canvas, in all probability, must have caught the eyes of the artist who is always sensitive to her surroundings and has a sharp insight into them. However, the meaning of the blackboard expands beyond that of just a canvas. Discarded blackboards serve as a metaphor for loss and nostalgia, and Kim emerges from the sense of loss by juxtaposing this one aspect of the neglected history with her memory. This is shown in the most symbolic and condensed form in The School Excursion Day When I Was Absent. A Postman, too, is an imaginary messenger who bridges between loss and recovery. And the symbolism of the figure in her paintings reinforces its effect through a sophisticated pictorial strategy: due to the simplified, abstract background, the figure, depicted in great detail, achieves a sense of pictorial reality that is realer than reality, which thereby enhances the symbolism of the subject.

The 1995 exhibition presented not only her recent works including blackboard paintings, but also her black and white and color drawings made with pencil, charcoal, and pastel on paper. Among them, the most impressive is the series titled “Twelve Animal Guardian Deities.” By placing these imaginary animals in the daily setting, the artist comes and goes between symbolism and reality: Brave Chicken stares at us with one leg lifted up to the horizon where the sky and the ground meet; Snake gloomily coils itself indoors beside the silhouette of the artist; two Dogs, standing outside the door, are watching Chaseop Kim who is absorbed in something; and Dragon depicted on a surreal, blue-and-white-porcelain jar that stands in striking contrast to a backdrop of the sea and clouds. All other landscapes and figure paintings such as Wild Flowers in a Grove and Children from Seoul are equally allegorical, different from other landscapes and figure paintings.

Curative Feminism of Senses of Belonging and Identity

In Kim’s paintings, some viewers may find that a feminine sensibility and the consciousness of feminism underlie visual vocabulary. With her feminine eye and sensibility, she observes her surroundings and represents it in a feminine style. This feminism was highlighted to have some thematic importance particularly in the 1987 exhibition, which showed Kim developed a unique feminine style to convey that feminist content.

The artist’s feminine style is first characterized by a find brush and detailed description. Her line drawings not only reach the height of feminine touch, but also overwhelm masculine vitality with the power of delicacy. And her highly detailed depiction also enhances and intensifies femininity. However, we should pay attention to the motifs chosen by the artist. She never paints something grand. Instead, she only portrays everyday scenes or figures such as nameless wildflowers and weeds on the roadside, middle-aged neighbor ladies and children, postmen, and so on. In comparison to the themes of ‘grand narrative’ that Chaseop Kim has explored to inquire into historical truth, cosmic principles, etc., her paintings that deal with neglect and anonymity is about ‘small narrative.’ She sees the world from a perspective different from her husband, or more correctly, a man. This may well be called the eye of the Other. Obviously, she feels with a feminine sensibility and speaks with a feminine voice. The blackboard painting titled Hicheol’s Mother represents the unchanged role of a woman who is engaged in agricultural work in spite of the transition from agricultural to industrial societies. As the artist herself asked, what result would come out if human history is calculated in terms of feminine labor?

Myong Hi Kim puts feminism into practice not only in her work, but also in her everyday life. However, this is the feminism neither of a victim nor of an activist, but can be considered as a kind of ‘domestic feminism’ which praises feminine care as a virtue. During her New York period, she had to earn for the livelihood of her family on behalf of her painter husband. But this was not a mere indiscriminate sacrifice, but a choice of her own free will, based both on the belief that there can be no spiritual independence without economic independence and on the judgment that she was more capable in practical terms than her husband. As if offering a lucid summary of the view of life of Myong Hi Kim as an individual and that of art of her as a woman painter, she says: “If the world of Chaseop Kim’s paintings, led by his understanding of history, is likened to a son, that of mine, Myong Hi Kim’s paintings, focused on the psychological world, to a daughter.” Rather than separatist feminism that would result in senses of difference and alienation, she pursues curative feminism that creates senses of belonging and identity.

Imaginary Realism and Deja vu Vision

Why is it that her paintings that just look simple and plain depictions with no particular style or technical skills appeal to the emotions of the viewer so powerfully? Why is it that the realistic portrayal of an ordinary looking woman with no makeup is so fascinating? This may be because Myong Hi Kim has brought a new kind of realism to painting with the style-less style and the skill-less skill. If we dare to classify her paintings, they belong to the category of realism, since this self-declared ‘witness and experiencer of the field’ deals with the problems of reality, using realistic visual language. However, it is not the kind of ‘socialist realism’ that provided a theoretical and formal foundation for South Korea’s Minjung Art Movement and thereby has been typically associated with realism in this country. The artist’s realism can neither be socialist in that it puts metaphor before ideology, nor be naturalist in that it assigns a bigger role to imagination than to observation. By overlapping poetic inspiration, inner experience, and latent imagination over objective facts or social truths, she creates a kind of ‘subjective realism.’ This is also reflected in the literary taste for nostalgia, symbols, allegories, tales, and so on, and surrealist expressionism which linger by her paintings. She proposed a new form of realism, mixed with imagination, which could be defined as ‘imaginary realism’ that combined the veristic Mirror of Zeuxis and the imaginary Mirror Pygmalion, to borrow the terminology of Gilbert Durand who delved into the archetype.

The paradox or dualism of imaginary realism is the key concept to underpin Myong Hi Kim’s realism. This is why a surrealistic reality that far exceeds the sense of actuality of realism pervades her paintings, in spite of the fact that they are executed in a Hyperrealist style with the photo transfer technique. Not only the imaginary representation in the series of “Twelve Animal Guardian Deities,” but also the blackboard painting series of “Loss and Nostalgia,” including The School Excursion Day When I Was Absent, are all the product of imaginary realism. This is also true of her figure paintings, such as Hicheol’s Mother and Playing Ball, and other ones drawn from nature such as Bridalwreath and Lily. The moment you separate a figure from his real context to create a monumental portrait, he leaves from reality and enters the Imaginary. However, Myong Hi Kim’s imagination always takes deep root in both reality and the present and is grounded on the future-oriented perspective that tries to overcome the loss in the past. Accordingly, her paintings are bright and healthy, having a strong appeal that can be shared by everyone. The appeal and fascination of her paintings, after all, seems to come from the fact that her imaginary realism is ultimately the representation of the ‘deja-vu’ vision that wakes up the archetype or subconscious of man. Her deja-vu vision that dwells not only in the dualism of reality and imagination, but also in the diachrony between the past, present, and future, reminds you of the double vision of photography that captivated Roland Barthes. Photography that is supposed to perpetuate the moment has the fateful dualism in which the subject and its photographical representation are identical, but at the same time, can never fully be. Possibly, it may be that it is this double vision that constitutes the essence of Myong Hi Kim’s imaginary realism and the origin of its epistemological impact.

Gana Art, 1995 July/August