Cheonae Kim:
In Black-and-White and Living Color
by Dean Sobel
If expressionism and pop art had the greatest impact on art of 1980's namely, figurative expressionism and appropriation art--then minimalism has provided the greatest challenge to artists who have emerged during the last ten years. This generation -- which includes such well-known figures as Janine Antoni, the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Rachel Whiteread -- has breathed new life into this oftentimes hermetic and overly cerebral movement. Beginning with objects that refer to the basic formal elements of classic 1960s minimalism (simple geometric shapes, serial presentation, floor orientation), these more externally motivated artists imbue their images and structures (gnawed chocolate cubes, printed stacks of paper, and mortuary-like slabs, respectively) with content, feeling, and expression.
Cheonae Kim brings a similar approach to painting. Like others who question the authority of modernism's strict stylistic and theoretical codes, she adds a new twist to a highly familiar style—in her case, geometric abstraction. Using the simple vocabulary of minimalism, she investigates what possibilities might remain in the heavily mined territory of abstract painting. Unlike many artists of the past two decades who developed ironic twists on modern painting styles like Op (Ross Bleckner), hard-edge (Peter Halley), and color-field (Laura Owens), Kim is completely earnest about her task.
This is especially evident in her black-and-white work of the l99O's. Throughout that decade Kim made tight, minimalist compositions of interconnecting vertical and horizontal black lines set on white backgrounds. At a time when many artists moved freely between styles, imagery, and media (often within a single artwork), Kim never deviated from her narrow path. By limiting herself to this strict approach (almost an "anti-style"), and setting aside such matters as depth, color, gesture, and form, she was able to develop a singular, compelling visual language that she could reiterate in a number of variations.
The linear patterns in Kim's paintings, drawings, and prints of the l990's might initially be discounted as mere formalist exercises. Their taut structure emphasizes the flatness of the painting surface, and their "abstractness" rules out a connection to anything in the observable world. Beyond the potent visual qualities of her work, however, Kim also developed an abstract symbolism. As the artist has stated: "The horizontal line (in these works) signifies the passive or death. The vertical line signifies the active." Amplifying this idea, she reminds us that "a tree grows vertical, and when you die, you are laid out horizontally." Kim also saw parallels between her distinctive black marks and the linear quality of the characters in the Korean alphabet. Thus, her markings constitute an abstract "vocabulary,'' one that is especially significant for this Korean-born artist.
By inserting impassioned subtexts into works with otherwise "cool" visual properties, Kim creates a distinct resonance in her art. This is especially apparent in the culmination of her black-and-white work, the epic 100 Days (1998), a series of one hundred thirty-by-thirty-inch panels. Clearly a departure from her modestly scaled earlier work, this series was an attempt to bring her delicate monochrome markings into the realm of mural painting, foretelling future Iarge-scale projects. Here the associations with minimalism are especially strong. It took Kim nearly three years to paint the panels, and the project must have required Zen-like concentration, reflecting the artist's intense interest in the process of making paintings.
The geometric linear structure and randomness of design in 100 days at first give the impression of a machine-printed circuit board or a map of computer code. On closer examination, it becomes clear that Kim created these lines (literally thousands of them) by hand; each panel has slight imperfections, detectable underdrawing, and other evidence of the artist at work. She intended each panel to represent a single day (while they look similar, each displays subtle differences, echoing the idea that every day has both familiar and unique qualities). The intersecting lines are reminiscent of a maze, a recurring metaphor in Kim's work for the complexities of life.
In 1998 Kim abruptly abandoned her black-and-white works and began making small (usually no larger than eight inches square), exquisitely rendered panels consisting of delicately applied color. Using an extremely flat vinyl-based paint known as flashe and so-called highload acrylic, Kim built up luscious, color-saturated skeins of paint, which - with their dry, papery appearance - demonstrated a new concern for surface quality. This change in direction was precipitated by the fact that she, understandably, had tired of the highly repetitive and restrictive black-and-white works. She found an antidote in these meditative paintings, which raised basic questions about color. In a few examples, she favored the softer, "romantic" hues associated with the works of postminimalist artists such as Brice Marden or Agnes Martin. More frequently, however, Kim employed bright, even brazen colors like cherry red and vivid orange--a startling choice for an artist who had previously worked only in black.
Today Kim boldly employs a full chromatic range. She has also become more deeply involved with other painting issues, such as proportion, surface, harmony, and spatial relationships, all of which are evident in the wall murals conceived for the Hammer Museum. Kim based the design for the lower lobby wall on a grid, as in her earlier work, though she has strategically trimmed the left and right sides of the composition to upset the impression of perfect symmetry. The squares and rectangles that compose this colorful image are not arranged randomly, as they might appear to be at first, but are coordinated to create a single, balanced image with complete harmony.
Kim's aggressive use of color is unlike the approach and outlook of leading minimalist painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, who usually preferred unmediated primary or second-an] colors, wary of the symbolic relationships more evocative colors might suggest. Kim's cheerful paintings resist such limited readings, with colors derived not only from nature but from computer screens, Technicolor and animated films, and ordinary paint "chips" as well. She has also consciously summoned the push-pull principles of color theorist Hans Hofmann. Certain color forms appear to hover in space, while others seem to recede into the formidable wall surface, creating an uncanny sense of depth and rhythm.
Since beginning her color work in mid-1998, Kim has periodically returned to black-and-white for large, architecturally based projects. In late 1999 she used large panels of black polyvinyl chloride board to "draw" on the concrete exterior of the Milwaukee Art Museum. The panels created a syncopated visual pattern that intervened throughout the museum's ordered brutalist facade. Kim's similar black-and-white mural for the Hammer Museum stands humbly distinct on the upstairs wall. Though the image reads like a vast enlargement of one of her works from the 1900s, it lacks the linear quality of those earlier examples. Instead, the forms read like sculptural volumes, with the negative white areas nearly equal to tile painted black forms. The impression of a maze is greatest in this work, which is executed on such a grand scale that viewers can visualize their bodies moving through the confined, corridor-like spaces the artist has constructed.
Cheonae Kim carries the viewer into a world she helped create. By merging her art into environments, she has taken her biggest step toward bringing her unique variant of minimalism into the realm of human experience. Unlike the work of her formalist predecessors, Kim's art has symbolic meaning that, once untangled, has significance outside the walls of an artist's studio. Her recent large-scale projects add the elements of participation and even theater (in an old-school, "action painting" sense), becoming part of the total environment. By bringing the art object and the viewer to a point of intersection, Kim's art brings experience, and thereby the world, closer to us all.
Dean Sobel is director of the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado.
Notes
1. All quotations from the artist are culled either from conversations with the author or from Kim's unpublished notes.
|
