In the Moment: Multiplicity and Transcendence in Meeyoung Kim’s Abstract Oeuvre
Andy St. Louis, art critic
Young artists tend to look forward rather than backward. With their whole careers ahead of them, they tackle technical challenges and explore new ideas without much regard for the receding path that has led up to the present stage of their practice. Every new exhibition offers a platform to present their most recent developments, whether introducing a new series of works or continuing to develop a particular methodology. It is not typically until later in their artistic journey that they pause to fully take stock of the broader trajectory in their creative evolution and orient themselves toward subsequent pursuitsin their practice.For Meeyoung Kim, tracing this progression comes at a timely moment, one in which her reflections on the past inform a new approach to painting that marks a turning point in her painterly progression.
Throughout human history, artworks have always functioned as vessels that transport the viewer to a specific place and time culled from the artist’s lived experience or excavated from the far reaches of their imagination. It is through one’s encounter with artworksproduced at different points in an artist’s careerthat relational context is gleaned, cultivating a holistic awareness of their changing psychology over time. When examined as a collective body of work, these individual moments in time suggestacognitive momentuminstilled with a directionality of its own.Although “momentum” is fundamentallycomprehendedin terms ofmovement, it may also be extrapolated as a measurement of the physical transformations that take placefrom one moment to the next. A slowly melting icicle, for instance, may appear to lack momentum in the conventional sense, but it nonetheless reveals a rate of change that accelerates as its frozen mass dwindles into nothingnessduring a sunny afternoon.
Temporality is of particular significance in Kim’s paintings, which visualizeplant life and natural phenomena characterized by their constant transformation. Rather than depicting isolated moments, however, shereveals environments in flux by condensing sequential impressions of the landscape into a single frame. This imbues her works with a pluralistic dimensionality that is at once familiar and uncanny, like a timelapse composed of myriad overlapping images. Despite apparent similarities to multiple exposure photography, which induces a surreal sensibility by layering two or more distinct subjects in one print, Kim’s abstract approach achieves a more complete representation of reality by emulating the nature of visual perception itself. After all, the human eye is comparable to a camera only in the most primitive sense – whereas a camera can only capturea cropped perspective of the world ata fixed focal distance, our eyes are capable of registering stimuli both near and far and across our entire field of view, which yields a sensory experience that we perceive as objective reality.
As a rule, abstract modes of expression do not strive to emulate human vision. Even so, abstractionsare capable of generating spatial awareness by engaging the brain’s proclivity for pattern recognition and differential resolution, leading to perceptions of depth amid an array of indeterminate painted forms with indiscernible relationships. Throughout her career, Kim has consistently negotiated the dialectics of abstract space in relation to the flatness of the picture plane, and in doing so suffused her works with visual momentum that has taken a circuitous course over time.
At the outset of her career, Kimforged a sense of internal depth in her paintings using a structural methodology in which the paint appears to be pushing against the canvas surface from behindas if trying to break through the picture plane and into the empty space between the viewer and the artwork. By inserting linear grids and meshes that completely engulf the visual field of these works, she interprets the flatness of the painting’s substrate as a permeable constraint beneath which masses of color arevisibly held back. The materiality ofher painted layers is what ultimately lendsher early paintingsan impression of depth, although she soon began looking tothe tenets of color theory – warm colors advance, cool colors recede – in order to simulate spatial modalityin her subsequent body of work. Much more lively in terms of composition and form, Kim’s paintings from this period tend toward more uniform applications of color. More importantly, however, their potential for fostering a sense of depth is effectively neutralized by a highly gestural approach to mark-making and pronounceduse of repetition that combine to formulate vibrant and vivid abstractions, but also compress the visual field into a single plane.
Before long, Kim developed a new strategy to overcome the two-dimensional stratum of canvas through the addition of voluminous daubs of paint in the samegestural manner as her flat brushstrokes. In this way, vigorous accumulations of paintacquirea materialitythat is ontologically distinct from that of the picture plane, thereby breachingthe dimensionalhorizon and entering the realm of tactility – not only outward toward the viewer, but also horizontally from the edges of the canvas itself. The vibrational energy that emanates from her most complex implementations of this technique, wherein the entire visual field is saturated with thick streaks of cross-hatchedpaint over an underlying color gradient, attests to the efficacy of this approach in achieving the apotheosis of perceptual depth using oil paint.
Looking atKim’s most recent works, this textural hallmark is notably absent yet the sensation of depth elicited by these paintings remains palpable, if altogether disparate from a perceptual standpoint. Theconversion to a new medium – acrylicpigment on unprimed linen – allows for exceptional paint absorption that elicitsan appearance ofink stains than rather than brushstrokes. Moreover, the translucenttones of layered of delicately painted ovoid forms precipitates a dizzying visual experience in these works, heightened by faintly swirling lines that evoke scratches on a windowpane overlooking the entropic flow of colorful contoursbeyond.
While such an approach recallsher early experiments in distinguishing the flat screen of the painted surface from its internal space, Kim’s new worksevince a different type of dimensionality thatimplies an expansivecontinuity beyond the scope of theirfixed length and height. This perceptual paradigm is rooted in the proposition that the abstracted landscapesthey visualizeare not contained by the dimensions of a rectilinear frame, but instead unfold throughout three-dimensional space in the immersive environment of the real world. In short, the painting is conceived of as an incidental presence thatprovides a portal to an uninterrupted visual field as it exists in the mind’s eye.
Kim thus subverts the epistemological premise of Western landscape painting as a reproduction of reality – and its use of single-point perspective to objectify the depicted image and reinforce Cartesian partitionsof the self and external reality – by contriving to assert her paintings as reality made manifest. In so doing, she orients her perspective to align with the ideals of the Eastern ink painting tradition, which organizes pictorial space in correlation to an embodied perception of visual stimuli that proposes an integration of oneself with the surrounding environment. Thistranscendental methodology rejects the artifice of a stationary viewpoint in favor of a mutable one, substantiating a “true view” of the landscape that approximates the spatiotemporal experience ofactually moving through it.
As an abstract painter, Kim has long concerned herself with the psychological implications of her imagery. She does not depict panoramic views of mountain ranges nor recognizable organic elements of plant life, instead resolving to express the landscape that she carries within herself. Her works lack any pretense of an empirically accurate rendering of the world – they surpass mere visuality and give rise to an unmistakable immediacy and authenticity that resonates in the mind’s eye rather than registering as a cognitive schematic of identifiable signifiers. Intensifying this sensibility is Kim’s deft use of repetition and variation in her brushwork that patently conveys the inimitable rhythmic vitality of nature – a principle derived from the traditional Eastern painting theoryofgiunsaengdong(氣韻生動), which invokes the animate reality of the landscape as a dynamic continuum of endlessly flowing energy.
When viewed in such terms, Kim’s paintings trigger a sublimation of the self in accordance with theineffability of thevast natural world that they evoke. The spatial modulation intrinsic to her mode of gestural abstractionestablishes a visceral perception of depth that envelops the viewer and blurs the boundary between where the painting ends and the mind begins. In turn, dualistic distinctions become untethered from sensory experience, consummating the viewer’s totalistic union with the landscape and reifyingthe boundless infinity of the ecological sublime as a reflection of the mind itself.