Space Cottonseed

READY KNOWN: Shinil Kim Solo Show

Opening Reception: 

10 January 2014, 7 – 9pm

Shin il Kim has been interested in obscuring the borders of categories set by human senses. This idea is well expressed through videos, pressed line drawings, and sculptures comprising letters and characters. His videos mostly express images as lights, which tear down the boundary of each image. His colorless drawings pull down ideational preconceptions that we have about colors. His letter sculptures project vague limitations derived from the categorization processes of language that refer to things or emotions. 

In his upcoming exhibition at Space Cottonseed, Kim will present his new series of works that leads us to think about visibility and invisibility, and believing and reading. It is a journey to find a clue of an image, a word that was believed to be invisible, becomes alive as soon as you can read. The artist states that it is not easy to change perception of an image once you read it as a text: a word, a meaning, defined by a society. We believe more what we can read then what we can see.  

Kim graduated from the Department of Sculpture of the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts and majored in media arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His works were exhibited at the Singapore Biennale 2006 and the fifth Seoul International Media Art Biennale – Media City Seoul 2008. His works are housed in various collections including Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, the Kim Chong Yung Museum, the Queens Museum of Art of New York, and the New York New Museum of Contemporary Art. 

Artist Statement – READY KNOWN

While characters and letters have always been used to denote meanings, they cannot completely explain an object on their own. Rather, it is within the perception of the person reading or writing the characters and letters that a concept is shaped. 

The series of my letter sculptures present literation of a concept in itself. However, it is difficult to read or recognize and almost impossible to interpret it at first sight. As the audience looks at the work, after they have understood the content of the work, the role of time and reason that require the audience to recognize letters is reduced. Instead, it is through intuition, along with the audience’s voluntarily interpretation, that the content of the form of the work will occupy his/her recognition.