Minjung Kim: The Light, The Shade, The Depth

Minjung Kim‘s artworks exhibit a remarkable intricacy. Rice paper is painted, singed and exquisitely layered to create landscapes that reverberate with the light, depths and mists of perception; or is intricately wound and twisted generating abstract patterns that team with energy.

Collaged out of numerous components, her works always subsume their individual elements into the sensibility of the whole. Using the skills and philosophies developed over decades, Minjung‘s works on paper possess a complex materiality all of their own; combining her learning of the traditional oriental arts of watercolour and calligraphy in Korea, with an informed understanding of Western abstract expressionism from her studies in Milan.

The exhibition will identify three distinct groups within Minjung‘s ouevre: light flooded-mountain landescapes that shimmer through their diaphanus layers of sumi ink-painted and carefully charred paper works with structures that adhere to the principle of order and disorder to create a myriad of individual constellations; and what Ammann characterizes as “the dance of the dervishes”, landscapes in which calm and tranquility are transposed into unrest by the dance of the brush in blue or red — a mark borne by the artist’s mood and honed by years of calligraphic training.

Constancy and animism are opposite yet complimentary tensions in Minjung‘s art, visualizing, as Ammann explains, “the past made present”. Whilst their subject matter is returned to again and again, her landscapes are each shaped by the emotionality of the artistic action.