Good Woman Under the Sun
By Koan Jeff Baysa
Jungwook Grace Rim paints repetitive circles that hold biological and philosophical implications. For Rim, a New York based artist and participant in the 2001 Venice Biennale, painting these forms is a meditative process that "empties the mind and realizes moments in time…made with many thoughts, without thought, and to lose thought." Read as biomorphic abstractions and microcosms of her belief system, the circles appear in chains, concentrically, or in botryoid patterns, invoking visual mantras that may serve as equivalents of void, raw energy, or humankind.
In The Entrance to a River I (2003), Rim’s de Kooning-inspired painting in ink, acrylic, and oil on canvas, circular forms and trailing drips frame a central clearing and horizon. A thin wash, a foil for her brusque brushwork, mutes the vibrant underlying colors; sharply delineated, over-painted spheres in chains, clusters, and morulae referencing "vital life forces," float in the foreground.
Belief in personal destiny permits Rim to see the canvas as a metaphoric frame upon which fatalism is manifest. In The Eyes(2002), she uses a wash to push the surface of newspaper text into a subliminal presence then overlays hand-written queries and comments in English; text in Korean abstracts the painting further. Her organic shapes evoke figurative associations and share the canvas with perseverative marks. Rim’s intention to "flow with time"–a desire, perhaps, rooted in her battle with a life threatening illness thirteen years ago–empowers her to paint at the edge of her consciousness and control, with shifting isomerization of "being is not being"and "not being is being." The result is works that are at once becalming yet disquieting.
Rim invests her remarkable paintings with affirmations of life and transcendence, fulfilling the destiny foretold by her name in Chinese characters: "good woman under the sun."
