Memories and Metaphors of Insignificant Beings
ACC Featured Artist Kim Seola
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Artist Kim Seola
Kim Seola has been always enticed by haiku, a Japanese poetry consisting of highly distilled words based on close observation on life, Sergei Parajanov’s films that usher viewers into underlying meanings by visualizing the sense of touch, and the sentences of Franz Kafka that embrace the question of fragility. Kim has lived in numerous cities, observed, listened, and painted. She is interested in infinitesimal beings that remain after all else have left, and fragments from collapsed bodies that flow here and there. She explores the movements and sounds of these insignificant beings, and translates them into her painting and installation projects.
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It is covered with countless fine, short hairs. They look like hairs on an insect, or the cilia of a protozoan. Also noticeable are webs of what looks like fungi or bacteria growing in dark and humid corners, scattered here and there. Those wriggly legs of this strange creature look like they might come alive at any moment. Its appearance is truly bizarre. The painting feels unsettling and hair-raising, to the extent it is difficult to see it for extended time. “What is this? Why would anyone paint something like this?” Muttering these questions mixed with discontent, many visitors turned their backs away from the paintings. Some visitors even left a note in the guest book, expressing their displeasure in blunt words. Kim Seola’s paintings were difficult to understand or accept for many. However, the situation changed after the COVID-19 outbreak last year. People began to take more interest in seemingly insignificant beings hidden from naked eyes, like the coronavirus. As such, more and more people became more accepting toward Kim’s works. For many works of modern art, their meanings are not readily apparent. However, as viewers learn about the artists’ experiences, interest, and intentions, the artworks begin to feel more accessible and interesting. The same can be said about Kim’s works. The images in her works were not created out of thin air; they had been slowly conceived by the artist’s sensibility and imagination. That is to say, to understand an artist’s works, one needs to understand the life that the artist experienced.
Kim Seola was born and raised in Jungheung-dong, Yeosu-si, Jeollanam-do in Korea (old Yeocheon-si). The area is home to the Yeosu National Industrial Complex. Growing up, Kim saw more and more factories being built across her town, and the desolation and disappearance of villages around those factories. In fact, many locals had to leave their home after getting sick from pollution from the petrochemical complex. Despite the environment, Kim loved poetry and paintings. She always dreamed of becoming an artist. To achieve her dream, she majored art in college. However, when she graduated from college, she was not sure if she should continue her artistic pursuits. She wanted to decide on her life path after separating herself from her familiar routines and environment and challenging her limits. That is why, after deep deliberation, she decided to study in India. When she went to India in 2008, the country gave her the experience of strangeness. During her stay there, she experienced total collapse of her ideas and norms that she had harbored for a longtime. After enrolling in Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) of Baroda, she approached art from an entirely new angle. She began to draw objects around here, and soon focused her interest on small and insignificant things around her such matches, feathers, barks, ashes, and insects’ wings. Then she saw it, from her paintings of small and insignificant beings; the image of her old hometown.
Erased Homes (2015) was Kim’s first project after her return in 2014. As Kim was not physically well when she returned to Korea, she frequently went mountain hiking. One day, she saw the slough of a snake. Looking at the empty husk, she was reminded of her hometown and those empty, collapsing houses after all neighbors had left. She also thought about her birth home, which was destroyed in a fire during her college years. The snake slough, her hometown, and her birth home were all empty shells devoid of life. In her paintings, these fragile shells are tangled with each other into strings that come back for eternity. They also look like islands aimlessly floating on water. Erased Homes is a metaphorical representation of the sceneries that wander around her inner soul, only to resurface from time to time as hurtful memories.
Silent Voice, Acrylic on paper, 77 x 210cm, 2015;
Breath to Breath, Acrylic on paper, 75 x 155cm, 2015
After Erased Homes, Kim’s works took an even more unique turn. Heard, Silent Voice, and Breath to Breath are prime examples of this period of her career. All created in 2015, these paintings are linked with similar interests. Heard features a sea shell-like creature with short hair growing across its body. On its top, the creature has an organ that opens up like an wound. As suggested by the title, this organ is not a mouth, but an ear. The artist created this new creature, imagining a primordial being who carefully listened to smaller beings and kept their sounds at heart. While Heard depicts a being who listens, Silent Voice shows a creature dying a silent death. The artist used to closely observe small, dying insects. She realized that the little creatures can only flap their legs without making a sound even when they die from the pain that a human would feel if the spine were rattled. Based on her experience, Kim created creatures resembling the human spine and fully covered with small hairs. Breath to Breath also features a creature born of her long observations. Looking at caterpillars slowly wriggling their way forward, she focused on the folds in their bodies. The folds, to her, felt like the marks of life similar to the growth rings on a tree stump. Each fold seemed as if it was left by each breath that the creature took to survive. Her observation found its form in a creature with a protruding and wrinkled abdomen and a hair-covered body. The three pieces are alike in that it shows bizarre insect-like creatures with parts resembling human parts. These are creations of her imagination and her deep interest in religions and myths. That is, the characteristics that comprise her art were formed in this period of her career. The three paintings were featured in the 11th Gwangju Biennale in 2016 held under the slogan, “The Eighth Climate.”
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 significantly raised people’s interest in environment. The ACC also organized an exhibition on environment called Equilibrium, At the Boundary Between Human and Environment, where a number of Kim’s works were shown. Among the exhibited works was Metaphor, The Messenger of Death created in 2019. The motive for this particular work dates back to 2017. For three months, from September to December, the artist took part in a residency program at Bank Art NYK in Yokohama, Japan. Being a port city, Yokohama has a very humid climate. Perhaps for that reason, she saw fungi growing in corners all across the town. Whenever she saw fungus growth while walking on the streets, she was reminded of life and death, and the insecurity of today’s world. Because the realm of these microorganisms is dominated by corruption and death. She kept those images of fungi in her heart for a while, and began to unravel them on the screen in September 2018, at the ACC’s ACT Studio. Each day and out, she draw countless fine lines on the canvas as if meditating. She repeated the process for six months, and a form began to appear over the overlapping lines. The fungi resurrected from her memories, and grew like a great forest where all roots are connected together. This strange and bizarre creature looks like it is spreading fear and restlessness like a grim reaper who leads a person to her death. The feeling is intensified by the images between the strands, which look like broken wings. Metaphor, Messenger of Death depicts an apocalyptic landscape from the artist’s imagination.
Kim’s other works featured in the Equilibrium, At the Boundary Between Human and Environment included the Nine Dark Openings series. The series consists of three paintings created in 2020: Broken Sound, Rumor, and Symptom. These paintings show eerie shapes set against dark backgrounds. These types of shapes consist of two overlapping images. One is associated with the nine openings in a human body. The images of the bodily orifices come from Kim’s memories about her hometown. As mentioned earlier, being in close proximity to an industrial park, her hometown suffered from severe pollution, to the degree that the town was called a ‘land of death.’ Even though many locals suffered from ill health, it was difficult to prove the causality between their symptoms and the pollution. All they had as evidence was their sick bodies. Kim Seola reduced their scarred bodies into organs associated with the nine openings. This idea was inspired by a passage from the Buddhist classic Milinda Panha, which describes human body as a “large would with nine openings,” and the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita, which says human body is a “city with nine doors.” The artist imagined those dark holes as open spaces deeply connected with other life forms, and thought about the different types of pain that one would feel when the spaces are closed shut. As such, the three paintings contain images of auditory, visual organ, and excretory organs in broken states. The other image type is related to the small creatures that she had met so far. These creatures are insignificant beings that remain in an empty town after all else have left. They are also the microorganisms that are dying in a corner on the outskirt of a city. Kim Seola felt that broken human bodies resemble these small, dying creatures. To Kim, all of them felt like metaphors of her painful memories and unstable life. As such, in Broken Voice, the broken cochlea is combined with an earthworm that is curled up and dying. The combination invites the viewer to imagine a situation where the voice is not delivered. Rumor brings together an eye that cannot see with dying spores, implying a rumor that started with a misunderstanding born of the inability to see. Symptom combines a clogged excretory organ with squashed insects to express symptoms of distorted beings that failed to find their way outside. Kim’s Nine Dark Openings series continues with the fourth installment, The Sound of Breathing (2021), currently on display at the Posthuman Ensemble exhibition at the ACC.
Rubber band for venapucture, Tourniquet, Variable Size, 2021">
Rubber band for venapucture, Tourniquet, Variable Size, 2021
Throughout her career, Kim Seola had focused on paintings. However, for May Today, a special exhibition commemorating the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Uprising held during the 13th Gwangju Biennale at the Old Gwangju Military Hospital in 2021, she revealed her first attempt at an installation piece. Before starting the project, she walked around the now emptied hospital building, which is one of the historic sites of the uprising. Looking around the building, she felt as if the building was imbued with innocent citizens who died from the wounds inflicted by torture and violence. She felt she could here the constant murmuring of past memories that still remain vivid in Korean history. Kim imagined a creature whose body itself is a testament to what transpired in the building. She found a delicate plant growing on a wall inside the hospital, which reminded of a large colony of fungus-like microorganisms growing on the wall as if trickling down on the surface. Then she took notice of a small space used as a one-bed hospital room during the uprising. A corner of its bathroom wall seemed like a place where such organism might grow hidden from sight. Then, she began to choose materials to give a concrete form to the lifeform. She asked herself what would be the material most frequently used on the bodies of citizens treated at the hospital, and found her answer: the rubber bands tied around patients’ arms when taking their blood. She purchased yellow rubber bands from a medical shop. Then she scorched them, burned them, and dyed them in dark colors in resemblance of the old hospital interior that still preserve the soot from fires in the past. This process may be interpreted as her attempt at preserving the memories that remain in the room by using the soot as metaphor. The rubber bands were recreated into an imaginary lifeform that remembers the history of the place, and reveals itself to visitors as if it has been inhabiting the corner of the hospital room for a long time.
When Kim Seola discovers a small and feeble creature on a street, she has a habit of stopping to observe it for a long time. Then, she returns to her workshop and summons its image that she committed to her memory. She repeats the process of remembering, and the reality begins to mix with her imagination, gradually changing into unique images. She then ponders what those images represent or symbolize, thus clarifying the images even more. Only then, she begins to work on the project after determining the painting’s size and materials. Her process is about ‘summoning’ the images that form in her memories and ‘restoring’ them. This process of summoning and restoration requires her to dedicate herself to paining, in silence, for prolonged time. Kim contemplates on, and creates images of, insignificant beings in her own way, at her own pace. And she once again dreams of leaving for a far and strange place, to continue her quest for unknown images.
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Written by Baek Jong-ok icezug@hanmail.net
Photography by Kim Seola altnfgkreh77@naver.com
2021.12
