The Visible

BoMin Kim paints the landscape of the “hic et nunc.” Her paintings “place emphasis on the urban environment as a landscape while mobilizing Korean traditional painting techniques.”¹⁾ With the mountains and streams painted using traditional techniques next to modern-day high-rise buildings, piers, and objects painted using tape in one frame, it seems at a glance as though two different time periods are coexisting in her works—the past represented by the traditional style and the present represented by the subjects—but to the artist, the present is a progressive form of tradition or a new version of it. That is, to Kim, the present is neither severed nor distinguished from tradition. Likewise, the artist does not distinguish cities from nature, nor people from cities. To her, Seoul is a giant scenery, and the city as a place of daily life is not a landscape external to us but internal as part of us.²⁾ Her urban landscapes flaunt their presence with protrusive composition and a bird’s-eye view, revealing themselves through definite forms and detailed depictions. (〈Independence Gate〉 [Dongnimmun], 2006; 〈Map of Gahoe〉, 2009).

〈The Fall, 2020〉, ink on linen, 130.3 × 80.3 cm. Image provided my MMCA Residency Goyang

The Invisible

What’s missing from her paintings are people. Inside the artist’s studio there lay around paper and painting tools as if she had been painting there until just before (〈The Root〉, 2012; 〈The Mist〉, 2010), and there’s even Ahn Gyeon’s 〈Mongyudowondo〉, a source of inspiration and motif for her work (〈Mongyudowon〉, 2005), but the artist herself is nowhere to be found. The bus, void of both a driver and passengers, stands meaninglessly on the road, and there is no one passing by the bus station in front of the airport either (〈The Doves〉, 2007; 〈International Line〉, 2006). It is bizarre that there isn’t a single person depicted in the paintings of Seoul—even traditional landscapes frequently feature old villagers on excursions or literary men in gatherings. Only around when the artist painted the landscape of the Gangseo-gu area there appear people in their entirety, which is to say, people as subjects of emotions and events. Though more like a figure from a folktale, the woman with long hair is throwing herself over the cliff, crying with her arms tied around her knees (〈The Sadness of The Moon〉, 2014; 〈The Caveman〉, 2015).

The Finally Revealed

Figures from the past and the present appear in Kim’s recent mural-installation works as in some of her paintings, but the figures from different periods never appear together within a single frame (〈The Trains〉, 2019; 〈The Well〉, 2020). The figures are presented as separate drawing pieces, demanding to be seen as individuals who are complete on their own, without comparison or reference.³⁾ Among them, the portraits of women draw attention. Though the images are derived from old newspaper articles, whereas the men sit in an oblique angle or stare vacantly at the ominous sea, the women seem willful and in motion. They gaze at themselves in the mirror or head toward Geumgangsan Mountain where women are prohibited (〈Mirror 1900〉, 2017; 〈Entering the Mountain〉, 2018).

Installation View. Image provided my MMCA Residency Goyang

The figures become more and more flexible in form as opposed to their previously photographic and fixed appearance. Whereas 〈The Sea of Tranquility〉 (2015–2016) captures in one frame the evolving shapes of the moon in different phases of the lunar cycle, Kim’s recent works demonstrate more use of ink-and-wash tones and less of linear and detailed description of forms.⁴⁾ This change seems to be associated with her choice of medium and subject. Kim began painting on silk in 2015, a material that’s paint-absorbent and therefore suitable for rendering vivid color and also sheer in property like film. It is likely that the artist no longer needed to adhere to the more precise and detailed mode of depiction to make the most of the characteristics of her medium.

Around 2018, Kim begins to pay attention to the moving figures in American traveler Burton Holmes’ video travelogue of Seoul produced in 1901⁵⁾ : the man putting on a flytrap hat, the dancing women, and the woman walking down with a parasol. When it comes to rendering a moving subject, capturing the overall silhouette is more important than capturing the precise details.⁶⁾ Then, let’s shift our eyes to the artist who captured the movements of these figures. Why was she interested in them? Why did she choose to gaze at the moving people instead of the still landscape? It is possible to interpret the people as part of the landscape based on the artist’s previous statement that the city is a part of us, but it would be more accurate to say that the artist finally “began to reveal” the people for viewers to see. Kim’s landscapes as we’ve seen have always captured places that aren’t scarce in real life. They may have been portrayed as empty but there have always been people staying in and passing through them. It’s as if Kim intentionally made a detour before arriving at the people as her subject.

Just as the artist believes that there is no right answer to painting, a change in an artistic practice does not necessarily mean progress. It would be more appropriate to see the shift as a natural course and a result of ceaseless attempts. Nevertheless, we must look keenly at the distance between the artist and her works. If the artist merely observed the urban landscapes earlier in her career, she now sometimes tells her own stories through others’ voices and other times walks right into the frame herself. As such, she has learned to control the distance at her will. And in that sense, the psychic who bridges the living and the dead or the woman with a burning heart in her paintings become indistinguishable from the artist (〈The Hug〉, 2018; 〈The Burning Heart〉, 2018). Kim’s works imply that tradition is not a destination but a direction. This message, however, isn’t delivered instantaneously. Her paintings circumvent the idea because one who soars high is bound to appear small to those who cannot fly.⁷⁾

1)The artist’s statement
2)The artist’s statement quoted from Kang Hong-goo, 「The Geography of Painting: In the Niche Between Real and Imaginary」, 2010.
3)The artist sometimes installs two drawings side by side to create symmetry and other times uses a series of drawings to represent the continuity of a dance or a movement.
4)As opposed to the viewers, who recognize the change in the expressive technique as a major event, the artist seems to see the change as something meager—as simply having gone from gureukbeop (outlining before coloring) to molgolbeop (coloring without outlines).
5)Burton Holmes is a renowned traveler and filmmaker who coined the term “travelogue,” sharing his travel stories while screening video records of the travels around major cities in the United States. Some estimate his visit to Korea to be in 1899, but in light of his record, which states that he crossed the railroad bridge across Hangang River from Jemulpo to arrive at the Seodaemun Station, it seems his visit was around 1901, after July 1900, when the Seoul-Incheon Railway was opened all the way to the Seodaemun Station. Holmes happened to encounter Lee Jaesun, a kindred of Emperor Gojong, and was invited to the royal palace where he screened his film in front of the emperor and imperial staff—an event known as the first film screening in Korea.
6)In Holmes’ travelogue, the face of the man putting on the hat appears shadowed and dim, but the facial features are recognizable toward the end. This shows that Kim left the face blank because she deliberately chose to, not because she couldn’t make it out.
7)Reference to the song lyrics “The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly,” from the bonfire scene of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of the Lady on Fire (2019).

※ This content was first published in 『2020 MMCA Residency Goyang: A Collection of Critical Reviews』, and re-published here with the consent of MMCA Goyang Residency

Gyeyoung Lee

Past positions include educator at Daelim Museum, feature editor at The Museum of Photography Seoul, senior researcher at Seoul Design Foundation, and feature researcher at Daegu Art Museum. Lee is an exhibition manager who does not restrict any medium and mediates between content of arts and culture and its audience. Lee has continued work in community cinema for more than 10 years.