MYONG HI KIM :

PURSUIT OF SIGNS by Eric Jay

Myong Hi Kim is always seeking signs. While employing icons to interpret an inchoate, ever-changing reality. Myong also seeks her own identity among the signs. In symbol and image she gives value to the objects of her perception, simultaneously, the relationship of these disparate images gives definition and texture to her art.

It is a mistake to think of an artist's landscape as a meadow, or a portrait as a person being painted. The still-life is never still if it is good - rather, it vibrates with the artist's life. Likewise, the cloud, the tree, the people, the objects on a kitchen table, are representations of the artist : they are the signs in which the artist explains herself. For symbols are more than the pieces in a puzzle of perception. They are the compass that locates a center-that which makes the artist who and what she is.

Myong Hi Kim's skies have grown over the years, pushing smooth charcoal backgrounds off the picture. Her clouds may resemble the ones on an open plain only because, like the ones which inspired them, they contain many shapes, spirits, the bulging intimations of the liquid they are composed of. We see in them thick, dark chasms, deep as canyons Myong draws with painstaking, obsessive love and craft. Her river swells with winding lacelike lines. It is the tortuous complexity of these lines which imply the fluidity of water. But the water is a metaphor : we do not follow the river to its source, but the lines to theirs.

The making of art is, like all junctions of the mind, a binary operation. There is the subject and that which the subject suggests - its opposite, or some cultural antecedent. This is natural and unextraordinary when we consider that signs, like animals and plants, reproduce, mutate, develop new modes in which to survive conditions which change seemingly with the sole purpose of testing and destroying them. Some artists with hold their intentions ; they will present a modem figure, or a tree, and never explore of reveal where. in their experience of dreams, their subject came from, or what it might suggest. But no matter how well they cover their tracks their work will always contain more than their subject, it will always reveal their perspective, what they think, do, dream, where they come from, in short - their context. No artist escapes interpretation, except through the backdoor of misinterpretation. Every work is both text and context - product and process.

Myong Hi Kim's work is honest and strainghtforward, containing both text and context. When she draws a Mayan totem she washes it with the red earth of the Yucatan. In a self-portrait, the subject grinds herbs for a dinner of fried hish. The fish and eggs and garlic lie on the table ; the woman's head is bowe. In the right hand corner, through a mental window, two togaed senators from a Poussin painting confer on the steps of the forum, their togas contain bright color, the only color in the drawing. They belong to the woman's daydream. She meditates and adopts the most basic symbols of power ; the myth is iconically entered in her mind, poised against her domestic task.

Likewise, when Myong draws a woman marathoner she does not leave us to guess at a motive or point of reference. Rather, she draws the famous Bemini sculpture of Apollo and Daphne, just at the moment when Daphne's skin tums to bark, to the left of the subject. The runner must then be interpreted by the fabled nymph who chose to become a tree over domination by a male god. The determination of the woman runner's face bears out the comparison. But the merging of myths here is not one-sided : just as the past explains the present, so the present modifies our perception of the past.

All of Myong's work may be taken as a dialogue : petals and leaves of color thrust into a detailed landscape of grey ; glaring light cast over poignantly drawn faces. One fo Caravaggio's boys, carrying his creator's signatured fruit-basket, stands against Myong's sky. The rushing water of one picture is yoked with the still woods and march of another. Always there is the introduction of symbols, their comparison and assimilation, beyond time and space. A story is told ; how an eastem artist navigates her mind in the world ; the manner in which an artist finds symbols and places them in their new context. No doubt, this is the only story worth telling.

-Extract from 1987' brochure