CULTURE SHARE: The Grenchus Foundation @ Kate Oh Gallery Exhibit The Pursuit of Happiness
Artist Statement:
My work can be understood in the category of the commonplace. The themes of my works comprise content that contemporaries sympathize with. There are the stories we might have experienced once in a lifetime as well as things we may do and feel in ordinary life. In my work, disconnection between art and ordinary life virtually does not exist. Because subjects and situations in my work are what we do as habits and unconscious actions, when viewers appreciate my work, the use of certain discourses or theories are meaningless. What is required in appreciating my art work is not a certain theory or reflective, artistic attitude but an attitude that does not filter reflection or prejudice.
My work should be seen as casually as possible. However, this does not mean contemplation, but that they should just be perceived instinctively. Therefore, my works don’t require deep thought and reflection but a sharing of the artist’s point of view of the subjects that present the works and ordinary spoken stories. My works don’t intend or force social change but they lead to some of the changes in consequence. They may be possible from merely getting rid of certain prejudices, distorted gazes, or ideological perspectives.
“The Pursuit of Happiness”
Gyoung Min Kim’s art depicts the quotidian, or at least this is what the artist putatively imparts upon us, when speaking for their work. In their artist statement, Kim underscores that we ought not to approach these works with a reflective attitude or theoretical arsenal, but instead take them in “as casually as possible.” However, the quotidian is approached side-on Kim’s work, as there is a stroke of the absurd and comical that charges these sculptures.
For instance, in one sculpture, a man is seen in mid-motion; a lush, green scarf billows in the invisible wind while his arms, coated in a crimson cherry-red sweater, are articulated balancing seven blocks, each painted with a series of vertical stripes adorning the nine faces of the cube. His silvery-dove dress shoes are also comically absurd, protruding outwards like those donned by a stereotypical circus clown. A beam colors the man’s face and his large dotted eyes gaze upwards. On top of his jet-black hair are another tower of cubes, which he keeps balanced. The sculpture could easily be taken in as merely a comical scene, plucked from an anime or cartoon strip. But, merry and simple though they are, the absurd also runs a concurrent thread throughout.
Other sculptures are more quotidian and enjoy a far more subdued comical nature, insofar as they display relations between animated figures that bear a realistic relationship to those of the empirically observable world. In one such work, a man is displayed in blue jeans and a dress shirt, hid head titled, and his body perched on a coal-colored bench. He speaks on a wireless phone while, on the other end of the bench, sits a woman whose plum shirt and white capris compliment the man’s attire. One of her sandals is kicked off and curiously absent, while she grins, also talking on her phone. Perhaps this work is truly quotidian, as it could be plucked from a scene at Central Park, or any first-world urban park; but, under the cartoonish surface (cartoonish solely due to Kim’s stylization), is a chamber of isolation. This is communicated by the spatial distance between the two phone-tethered figures: they are disparate from one another and similarly disjointed from whomever they speak to. This is, of course, a rather common scene in our digitally-reticulated contemporary moment, given the ubiquity of digitality. Nevertheless, the work draws our attention to this harrowing reality, where scenic park benches are often populated by those burrowing in their phones, at the expense of the possible social interaction or aesthetic engagement at hand.
~PhD Philospher & Art Critic Ekin Erkan
