Cindy Ji Hye Kim: Drawing the Unseen

In Conversation with Casey Carsel

In her latest body of work, created for an upcoming solo exhibition at rodolphe janssen titled Riddles of the Id (12 May–18 July 2020), Kim gives the supporting elements of painting their own starring role in the traditional picture plane. For three of the presented works, including Riddles of the Id (2020), she has carved figures and objects into the stretcher bars, with two of those paintings also executed on silk organza. Presented off the wall, the silk organza paintings are illuminated by the light from the windows, the images on the stretcher bars—the silhouettes of ribcages, parental figures, and other objects melding with and complicating painted forms, such as vines and mice—cast onto the fabric's front-face.

With compositions populated by archetypal characters, Kim's paintings appear potentially allegorical, yet no definitive moral conclusion ever fully comes to the surface in the artist's work. Instead, characters remain ensnared within the wheels of their tense scenes, with any opportunity for relief from corporeal and psychological chaos only leading further into the id's labyrinth. Recalling an unbreakable cycle, a circular motif serves to emphasise this feeling of entrapment in Reign of the Idle Hands #4 (2020), a circular canvas reminiscent of a phenakistoscope—a Victorian-era toy in which drawn figures on a circular piece of cardboard are animated when the cardboard is spun. But where the phenakistoscope should produce movement, Reign of the Idle Hands #4 is imprisoned in a single moment...MORE

Image: Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Reign of the Idle Hands #4 (2020); 8 Hours of Slumber, Labor & Leisure (2020) (left to right). Exhibition view: Riddles of the Id, rodolphe janssen, Brussels (12 May–18 July 2020). Courtesy the artist and rodolphe janssen. Photo: HV photography.