Rhetoric of allegory and feminist politics of Myong Hi Kim

The artist Myong Hi Kim (b. 1949) is relevant to a feminist critique in that she broadens typical social and psychological experiences of Korean women into issues of gender identity and women’s subjectivity. She elevates autobiographical stories and individual narratives into the realm of collective mythology and symbols of community.

The approach to deconstructing autobiography rests first and foremost on her literary sensibilities, humanistic interests and historical attitudes. At the same time, it also seems to stem from the multicultural universality they have gained through living for a long period overseas and continuing, even now, to go back and forth between Korea and the United States.

In 1990, Myong Hi Kim returned to Korea after fifteen years of living in New York with her late husband, the painter Tchah Sup Kim. Having witnessed the negative aspects of materialistic society in the United States, they opted to settle down in an abandoned school in the remote Gangwon Province village of Naepyeong-ri. The decision to start a life there was not random – it was an existential decision and the result of humanistic learning. It was also the product of a wandering journey that had afforded both anthropological reflection and cultural memories. As a form of cultural replenishment, the couple had begun making archaeological travels during their time in New York: visiting the southern and central United States, Mexico and Egypt. In 1997, they boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway for an exploration of Central Asia, tracing the history of the Korean people’s forced migrations. It was in this process that the trajectory of their lives was decided. Until Tchah Sup Kim’s death in 2022, the couple continued this wandering nomadic lifestyle alternating between the United States and Korea in both their life and work.

Kim has shown a sustained interest in themes related to the history and issues of human migration, dislocation, displacement and division, which she has distilled into artistic acts of spiritual evocation, using the abandoned school in Naepyeong-ri as a setting for resurrecting a past in ruins. The precipitating factors for this approach were her discovery of a disused blackboard at the school and the idea of blackboard pictures. She perceived the blackboard not only as encapsulating the meaning of the school as a site of alienation and dislocation but also as a storehouse of memory in its own right – something more than just a drawing board. Through repeated writing and erasing on the blackboard, she juxtaposed the young children at the school (there and then) with herself (here and now). In the process of drawing, she was able to form layers of historical memory that helped recover from the sense of a lost past and recreate the memories of the past in the present. Using the blackboard to encourage reflection on human life and historical reality, the school, which she transformed into a home and studio, became a newly practical space. Out of the school’s remains came creation, where the old blackboards encountering the past gave her the idea of the blackboard pictures that she would settle into creating in her own style.

Emerging from those ruins as atemporal works, the blackboard paintings take on an allegory as cultural metaphor and spatial metonymy, perpetuating impermanence and memorializing ephemerality. Just as allegory does exhibit a retrospectively minded will to ‘recreate’ the past in the present through the borrowing of old images, Myong Hi Kim’s blackboard paintings demonstrate a pronounced allegorical quality in that they transform or substitute the original image and meaning through imagination and fantasy. The allegorical effect of Kim’s blackboard pictures is amplified by the hyperrealistic style that employs photographic copying techniques. The artist had long been producing intricately detailed figurative paintings with paper, pencil, charcoal and watercolours. Using similar media such as chalk, crayon and oil pastel for her blackboard works, her descriptive brushstrokes appeared as gentle traces that heightened the sense of delicacy and elaborateness all the more. This was her discovery of the ‘imaginary realism’ style: using ‘realer-than-real’ depictions to achieve symbolism beyond the realm of reality and phenomena, while transcending realism with an imagination that defines a reality all her own. The allegory that arises through symbols and the imagination evokes human archetypes or a form of déjà vu – a surrealistic effect that is amplified by its similarity to the background of traditional religious paintings, which is created by the blackboard’s exposed blue background.

This allegorical vision, which centres on a duality of reality/imagination and a diachronicity of present/past, comes through clearly in figure paintings where Kim emphasizes a monumental quality by isolating her representational subject from its real-world context. The people she is depicting are actual Naepyeong-ri residents and children, but they are incarnated as symbolic, imaginary beings who allude to a future vision while overcoming the loss of the past. In The Postman (1994), the welcomed mail carrier bringing news to the hinterlands is shown as an imaginary messenger playing a bridging role between loss and recovery; Heechul’s Mother (1994) presents a rural wife performing the ‘woman’s role’ as she silently executes farming chores, alienated from urban culture. The most symbolic work encapsulating the imaginative meaning of the blackboard pictures can be found in the series ‘The School Excursion that I Missed’ (1987–2008), which uses the missed trip as a metaphor for loss. Boat People (2001) which takes its theme from an incident involving North Korean defectors, is produced in pixelated form as a large blackboard triptych, with an LCD monitor and a map of the pre-division Korean Peninsula presented on either side of the defector image. In 2003, Kim created a pair of paintings entitled Child from Northwest and Child from Southeast, using the same child as a model as though repeating a left- and right-sided map. They are allegorical works to imagine a united Korean Peninsula through South and North Korean children who are like alter egos

The artist’s 1997 expedition to Central Asia, tracing the history of the Korean people’s forced migrations, offered an occasion to reflect on histories of displacement. She asked: Why have Koreans been “dislocated” to places such as Manchuria, Sakhalin, Japan, Germany, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, China and the US, without being able to fully set down roots in their country? For the past century, ours has been a history marked by dislocations due to poverty, war, political violence, cultural eradication, the collapse of agrarian society and hunger. (Myong Hi Kim, in ‘The Dynamism of Dislocation’, in Monthly Art, June 1997) With this historical consciousness of her own country, she travelled beyond the Korean Peninsula to the northern Asian continent stretching from Vladivostok to Irkutsk, Tashkent and Samarkand. Her blackboard paintings began incorporating images of the Goryeo-in (Kareisky) people’s sad history of being condemned to forced migration. In Forced Dislocation (2002), she shows a Korean girl against a backdrop of Siberian birches; The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (1999) underscores the pain of diaspora girls through the motif of peaches that harbour multiple symbolic associations; Hybrid (1999) depicts the reality of the diaspora through a mixed Korean Russian woman wearing a traditional Korean hanbok and holding a Taegeukseon fan. In these works, Kim shows young girls experiencing the diaspora as imaginary figures dressed in traditional Korean clothes. In addition to the hanbok, birches, peaches and fans are symbolic and metaphorical materials that transform what might have been historical paintings into allegorical ones.

Kim began producing allegorical portraits of women in the mid to late 1980s and they had already formed an important feminist strand within her work. These early portraits drew analogies between contemporary women and mythical female figures from art history. The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1986) juxtaposed a white woman in contemporary New York with one of the victims of abduction shown in the seventeenth-century painting by Nicolas Poussin of the same title; Running Women (1987) placed a female marathon runner next to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s image of the nymph Daphne. It was also during this period that Kim produced Endless Thought (1987), the precursor for her later self-portrait series. Parodically showing herself in the kitchen with her mind wandering off as she pounds garlic, she inserted the image of Poussin’s toga-clad Roman senators as a thought bubble.

The juxtaposition-based double painting approach that Kim utilized in her early portraits of women would be formalized into a painting-within-a-painting style in her self-portrait series from the 2000s onwards. In Preparing Kimchi (2000), she juxtaposes her self-portrait with a moving video image within a frame of a willow swaying in the wind and a quote from the ‘Virtuous Woman’ chapter of the Oryunhaengsildo (a Korean text from 1797 containing pictures and stories of loyal subjects, filial sons and virtuous women worthy of imitation). Ironing (2006) substitutes the speech bubble with the artist herself and Tchah Sup Kim’s map painting reflected in the mirror, while Preparing Kimchi (2009) and Drinking Tea (2004), respectively, insert archaic language from the Dimibang (Korea’s first cookbook, written during the Joseon dynasty) and the folk tale of Madame Domi, which emphasizes fidelity and chastity. This dual technique of juxtaposing the artist’s own image with the use of classic iconography or language is a metaphorical reference to the division in her identity between ‘artist’ and ‘wife’.

In the self-portraits, which are also portraits of women in general, we discover Kim the feminist: someone who dreams of female solidarity with her feelings of kinship towards the displaced girls of Central Asia. Her undeniable feminism is borne out by the thematic critique of civilization and the incorporation of female ‘little narratives’, the insights and othered vision unique to women and the delicately female styles that back all of these up. As with her activities in 1975 with the Pyohyeon Group – Korea’s first figurative painting movement – she has been writing a new chapter in the history of female figurative painting through her allegorical style rooted in imaginary realism.

In the artistic work of Myong Hi Kim, life and art come together to form a single whole. Because of this, it is impossible to separate her work from the life she has led. The experience of living as a female artist under the discriminatory ideology of a patriarchal society has had a considerable impact on her creative activities. If she shows a tendency to value personal experience and favour autobiographical narrative styles, or to prioritize little narratives over grand ones, and the allegorical, implicit rhetoric of metaphor and symbol over direct speech, this may be because she has learned that this is a ‘feminine’ way of creation. It may also reflect the kind of female self-awareness that could help distinguish her work from mainstream male art.

The artist lives the life of the contemporary individual whose soul has no connection to a singular ‘hometown’. At the same time, she is also a citizen of the world who is capable of attaching herself to any place, East or West. She aspires to liberated lives where she is not settled in any one place, yet her work starts from an intense awareness of the reality of place. While she erased the meaning of ‘settling’ with feelings of roaming and diasporas, she gives new meaning to the reality of now and here with historical insight. Through an allegorical impulse that unites fragments into a complete whole, and through a sense of altruism and global vision that broadens self-consciousness into community spirit, she justify the specific conditions of women and artists and intervene in the male-centred artistic world.