Skin Deep and Bad to the Bone
By Raul Zamudio
On first viewing of Haesook Kim’s work one is immediately drawn to a luscious, copious display of monochromatic forms that reside somewhere between painting and sculpture. Her work shifts between two- and three-dimensionality because it consists of cleaned and layered animal skins affixed to the wall, yet its corporeality in both figurative and literal terms self-reflexively interrogates its ontology. On the one hand, the skins feign a kind of primeval painting: think of Sam Gilliam’s biomorphic-shaped paintings without the polychromatic flourishes; for the skins also look like corpulent canvas that are not stretched nor primed with gesso. On other hand, the skins concomitantly feel taut but loose and create a slight vortex coming out of the wall that underscore the work’s physicality and sculptural presence. In short, Kim’s works are visual and tactile, simultaneously optical as they are haptic and cerebral as they are somatic.
But Kim’s recent pieces are more than just aesthetic exuberance and formal play of composition evinced in her mastery of materials and their elegant execution into kaleidoscopic sculptural configurations. The works’ formal qualities are pushed to complex narrative ends. Kim’s use of skin as a signifier teeters with a tension between animated surface and a sort of mise-en-abyme; the works exude energy as they are inert, yet paradoxically their inertia is imbued with dynamism. Although her sculptures are immobile to the degree that they are non-kinetic, they are dynamic by virtue of their radiating arrangements that look meticulously composed and randomly precise. They are magnetic with a compelling beauty but also repelling as memento mori. Death has never looked so alive: Kim’s pieces are an erogenous crucible of Eros and Thanatos, respectively Freud’s mythical terms for the Libido and the Death Drive. Others have formally and conceptually employed animal skins to various ends. My first impression of Kim’s epidermis-like wall pieces is that they have an affinity with Nicola Costantino’s latex couture of "human skin" decorated with nipples, anuses and navels.
But whereas the latter targets the commodity fetish and the objectification of the body, Kim’s use of skin is more thematically elusive and encompassing; subsequently it resists singular readings and opens it to a myriad of narrative possibilities. Her work’s sculptural amorphousness with its push/pull and in/out variegations is both the congealing of multiple forms as it is an exploding informe. But things get a little more complicated than that: they subliminally have a gendered dimension, as well, and not so much because these works are made by a woman artist, although it does, if you will excuse you the pun, flesh out more layers of meaning. Within and without, those folds can be detected among such artists as Hannah Wilke’s gum pieces from her S.O.S. series or her latex Rosebud (1976); there is also an allusion to Cathy de Monchaux’s menacing vagina dentata sculptures. But since the works have a tendency to oscillate between such disparities as painting and sculpture, nature and culture, and beauty and beast, they also undermine one gender for another. The quasi, floral (dis) arrangement articulate much about intention; as much as the work conveys an uncanny formalism–because there is such a strong emphasis on materiality–one can become blindsided to their multivalent complexity and polysemous dimension.
There is much to appreciate in these recent pieces by Kim as her work culls many sources from her home in Seoul, as well as her influences garnered through her frequent stays in her studio in New York. Ever the peripatetic artist, Kim has absorbed much and this quite evident in her work that will be shown in November 2004 at the Tenri Gallery in New York. She certainly has defined an altogether different aesthetic impulse from her home country. Seoul has projected an international veneer as being on the edge of what has been fashionably called "New Media". This observation does not betray a Luddite mentality or techno-phobia. Rather, it is to foreground how artists like Kim are inadvertently undermining the hegemony of one aesthetic practice over another. By forgoing established artistic practice, Kim circuitously keeps her work fresh and alive; and, in another way, she has maintained a certain Korean quality.
In one sense, then, Kim’s work is by nature imbued with a criticality meshed from form and content to the degree that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. And this is the strength of her work; materiality, lest we forget, is inscribed with meaning and Kim’s sculptures remind us of this in the most visceral way. Through dialectic of surface and interiority and animal skins turned inside out, these works have a sublime and affective aesthetic that are not only more than skin deep, but are bad to the bone.
