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Incorporating elements of sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, Kim’s work explores the body as a contested space; both apparatus and object, in which gesture and labour provide opportunities to question the ways we produce and consume images. For this, her first solo exhibition in the UK, Kim presents a multimedia installation made up of printed wallpaper, framed images, and a single channel video: continuing themes explored in her show ‘Kaput / 갈래머리’ at Gallery Chosun, Seoul earlier this year.

 

‘KAPOT VAN’ - literally ‘devastated by’, or ‘broken by’ in Dutch, a phrase which, left incomplete, shorn of (pro)nouns, points to an unidentified and unattributed physical or emotional trauma - frames the exhibition by matters of the head and heart. The choice of Dutch is not incidental; the first language of gallery founder Jeroen van Dooren, this gesture is both a play of context and a displacement that signals Kim’s reticence towards language and by extension the question of who speaks and who does not, or cannot (the gesture, for Agamben, being a gag, either one that ‘hinders speech’ or an ‘improvisation’ when at a loss for words).

 

The exhibition itself takes such play a step further, through images and accumulations of sculptural gestures that probe the absurdity of the physical body, in particular the head (‘caput’ in Latin), as a rudimentary corporeal entity (the noodle, bean, nut, loaf, meathead!), in relation to the mind (where our desires and emotional ‘heart’ resides), and the visage - the semblance that distinguishes, but also renders us alike.

 

Wrapping around the space to a height of 278 cm, the wallpaper covers the gallery’s three partition walls in a silkscreen ‘pattern’ of gestural sponge marks. Reminiscent (and expropriative) of various abstract art, including Art Informel and Action painting, if resolutely indecipherable these marks are open to interpretation, their repetitive splatters, stains, scratches, and smudges pointing towards the drudgery and toil of domestic labour, as well as the space of the body, its residues, biology and scatology. First executed in ink on acetate, before being transferred to silkscreen and irregularly printed by hand in shades of brown acrylic, no two rolls of paper are the same, and what might at first glance appear a pattern, lines the walls of the gallery in the guise of ornamentation alone.

 

As in Kim’s previous wallpaper installation works, framed images of models torn from fashion magazines are presented in a line level with the upper edge of the paper; on this occasion in one corner split between two walls, with others posted daily to the gallery Instagram account. While in the past these groups of images have been based around some common expression, pose, or gaze, here the selection is more disparate, each model caught in a moment of supposed melancholy, upset, heartbreak - or at least their confected image, staged as such for the purpose of selling designer clothing, makeup, or perfume, as well as the intangible fantasies that go hand in hand.

 

Either making eye contact, or looking away in a moment of interiority, these speechless figures, just out of reach above (our heads), test us in much the same way as the wallpaper behind is revealing of our individual psychology (the forms we see in the patterns). Removed from their original context, we encounter a series of singular constructions, avatars of charged emotional states that reflect the preconceptions and unconscious we bring with us and invest when viewing images, as much as what is literally before our eyes.

 

In contrast, the final element of the installation adds visual movement and sound to proceedings, via a short video work shown on a Sony PVM 14 inch monitor, exploring the face of another model only in much greater proximity. Chosen for its size (relative to the human head), the monitor sits directly on the floor, laying the face on screen against the ground, as the camera moves deliberately yet erratically over their features, panning and zooming as if charting terrain, sometimes in sync with the accompanying music, sometimes disregarding it entirely.

 

Taking its duration from that of the soundtrack - a piece by Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn from their infamous collection of experimental recordings ‘Musique Phénoménale’ (1961), the video also assumes the same title, ’Broken Nose’ (‘Nez Cassé’), and is indeed perhaps better described as a kind of music video, just one in which the camera (and its unseen operator) produce a ‘dance’ in relation to the face on-screen.

 

Dubuffet is the principal connection here; an artist whom Kim has referenced and appropriated in previous work, principally via his ‘Corps de dames’ series of paintings - iconoclastic, though disconcerting deconstructions of classical female archetypes, in which nudes are depicted as matter, flattened and splayed across the canvas (though the impression of bodies broken, skinned or even flayed alive is also unavoidable). It is with these in mind that Kim makes use of the recording, Dubuffet’s music bringing his primitivism more expressly to the fore, as well the presence of his and Jorn’s own bodies as performers, which Kim sets in uneasy juxtaposition with the model’s face.