Haesook Kim Examines the Organic
By Marco Antonini
Courtesy of the Artist.
Haseook Kim’s "Weltanschauung" exhibit at the Tenri Cultural Institute is a show of generous insight into the art of majestic installation. As I approached the gallery I was awed by the work, seeing it still through the window, with little raindrops running vertically along the glass panes, the walls of a transparent box holding undiscovered treasure.
It is autumn, again, and Kim’s multi-layered leather sculptures look like giant dry flowers, the kind of booty we could find and bring back home from a November walk in Central Park. The artworks bring themselves to the spotlight organically, even in the relatively tiny exhibition space of the Tenri Institute. Some smaller works evidently suffer from being juxtaposed against the bigger ones, which involve the visitor most. Complex and multifaceted, Kim’s work always deals with issues of decay and mortality.
The choice of leather (just one of the many organic materials Kim has experimented with) is part of her greater interest in the natural: Weltanschauung, a "vision of the world," a time-influenced, generational emotional fluxus. The title of the exhibit suggests the metaphysics involved in such rough yet beautiful pieces; the elasticity of dried skin, of dead tissue stretched to the limit by metal cranks and hooks, serve as shiny reminders of the artist’s active role in what is otherwise an almost faux-natural art. The irregular cuts of ochre and brownish skin comprise a composition, a structured beauty. Soft, almost invisible layers of paint (the color palette is limited to grays and ochres) add to the whole, creating new reliefs and subtleties. Standing in front of one of these works, one gets sucked into a tactile vortex of substance and lost therein. One finds themselves walking the line between organic and inorganic, going deeper and deeper into an endless cave, without a guiding light to move toward.
Kim’s fascinations with death and decay are as relevant as her interest in the mysteries of post-mortem ritual. Her works recall elaborate monuments to death in a variety of cultural traditions and commemorative rituals. She makes efforts to breath life into the morbid. The developments from life to death and back to life are the most interesting aspects of Kim’s recent work. There is no stillness in her sculptures. Instead, the edges move in spectacular synchrony with their center, rotating slowly as if struck by invisible winds. The center moves, too, aimed at attracting the viewer into the deeper, hidden layers of the work. This richness and attention to movement as it is present in nature, in all the nuances of inner-outer tension, unfortunately gets lost in the crowding redundancies of the exhibition layout: it’s easy for the visitor to feel confused or even overwhelmed.
Nonethless, "Weltanschauung" is an exhibit you want to go and experience personally. Should you stand too long in front of any single piece, you may find yourself seriously wandering, moving towards darkness or light, and reexamining your own connection to the organic.
