Robilant + Voena is pleased to announce the exhibition Mutations, a selection of recent works by the Korean artist Minjung Kim (b.1962).
“I looked at the paper: I saw a world that was full”
Minjung Kim
Minjung’s collages project the viewer into an affected world, an environment cadenced by the interchange between vast monochromatic plains and large flowerlike shapes. The main body of her work is made up by contrasting techniques and styles; the immensely colourful works entitled Full of Emptiness, realised by concentrically building up layer upon layer of varying sizes of paper circlets with holes burnt out of their middle, and the monochromatic, silken Insight pieces, executed by overlapping a single sheet of rice paper burnt using incense. The two large works titled Tension, with their linear accumulation of thin strips of red burnt paper evoke a feeling of infinite perfection, similar to the shell of a nautilus. Among these collages, the exhibition also includes other varied techniques presented in Minjung’s work, the delicate crystal sculpture Without Gravity. The juxtaposition of the horizontal enameled glass panes produce both the form of a cube and behind the image of a sphere, giving of the feeling of an object in motion.
The layering and overlapping consistent across Minjung’s collages create chronological channels that suggest the transience of time. This passing of time is further represented by the burning of the paper itself. The invisible flame and the paper which, being burned is only present by its complete absence, effectively symbolise the movement from the solid to the void, two opposed principles that in part form the basis of much of Oriental philosophy.
Minjung Kim was born in Gwangju in the Republic of Korea in 1962. From the age of six, it was her families wish that she study painting under various teachers, including the famous water colourist Yeongyun Kang, and, between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine, Oriental calligraphy. This latter study allowed her to understand the fundamental precepts of Asiatic speculative tradition. When in 1980 she enrolled in the Hong Ik University in Seoul, Minjung had already received a very thorough artistic education, which was completed through her study of Oriental painting under Taejin Ha, Sunom Song and Sukhchang Hong. Once her university course had been completed in 1985, she took a Master’s degree at the same university with a thesis on the four basic materials in ink painting (rice paper, brush, ink pigment and the pigment grinding stone). In 1991 she decided to move to Italy and enroll in the Brera Academy in Milan. Here she studied less the basics of European painting, which she had already tackled at her university in Korea, than the analysis of the works of the Western artists who, during the 20th century, studied Oriental painting. In particular, certain works by Paul Klee and Franz Kline prompted her to approach a new aesthetic direction that took her progressively away from the figurative tradition of her country of origin towards an investigation of the expressive value of marks and maculas, two stylistic elements that combine perfectly with the “process-based view of the world” and the ability to “channel the energy”, both of which she learned in her study of calligraphy. This change of direction was also dictated by, her attending courses of the Brera Academy held by Maurizio Bottarelli, who focused his lectures on the perceptive quality of maculas and on experimentation in water colour techniques. The last two years of her academic studies, and the period after attaining her diploma, were spent with Diego Esposito from whom Minjung learned the basics of avant-garde concepts and the expressive freedom that typifies the more recent artistic trends.
Minjung has exhibited in Europe, China and the US and recently had museum shows at the Palazzo Bricherasio in Turin and the Guanshanyue Art Museum in Shenzen. She currently lives and works in Italy, France and the United States.
