CHUN HWAN KIM
Solo Exhibition
Sep 24 - Oct 7, 2008Insa Art Center
Since some time ago, I have found my mailbox full of all kinds of advertising prints instead of delightful letters from my friends or family.
My everyday life has been gradually encroached upon by extremely various kinds of products and the information media gushed out by consumerist society and a rush of images caused particularly by the spread of computer and the popularization of the internet.
My works are the response to a mine of information which our society in a mad-dash consumerism provides every hour in the name of novelty, and the cultural chaos in daily life created by a new mechanism to produce, consume, and accumulate images.
The formal technique used in my works is, generally speaking, collage. To 'coller' makes it possible to from a new relation to reality by incorporating the fragments of reality in the space of representation. In other words, it establishes a fresh connection between reality and I who do collage in the constant interrelationship with the objects of this world. Advertising prints and magazines are the objects which represent the aspect of our daily life vividly more than anything else. They can most effectively capture how we eat, drink, wear, and enjoy. I would like to show them in a direct manner. My collages are neither mere exemplifications of ideas nor projections of feelings, but the ways of perceiving reality at different times in everyday life and finding the identity of oneself in society. And they are clearly marked off from the traditional type of collage in that they do not cut off some concrete images or appropriate parts of particular images to reorganize pictorial elements.
I begin by collecting advertising prints and magazines around us. Then, I tear each page off them, crumpled it one by one, and paste it repeatedly on a wooden panel, until I get a thick lump of paper. To crush papers is not only to transform them but also to destroy the images in them. The fragments of images modified in this way are accumulated in a panel so densely that they can increasingly bring about the conflicts of images and the decrease of meanings. The process to glue papers in a panel is not that of organizing the pictorial composition, but that of making correspondence between me and the crumpled papers, that is, not that of confrontation but that of mutual exchange. As each piece of paper is pasted one by one, it creates its own forms throughout the panel and naturally, my breathing follows each phrase. I do not control the whole process. Neither leave it to chance. By embracing these chances, the picture plane becomes full of visual autonomy and variety.
Cutting the surface plays an important part in my works. I owe this to my childhood memory that I was deeply impressed when I saw gigantic lumber born into a new form by a sawing machine in the sawmill owned by my father. This was a process of transfiguration and leaving traces by cutting and elimination, that is, not destruction but the beginning of a new life. Severance discloses the various appearances of papers created in the working process. It conjures up the diverse traces lying in hiding in the process of collage. It shows both inside and outside, both surface and depth simultaneously in the same picture plane, blurring the boundary between them.
Consequently, it opens a new passage from the external to the internal world.
My collages are a simple shelter where the various movements and the essential materiality of paper are alive, breathing. When the cutoff papers guide our eyes to the inside, the waves of severed folds are spreading with the marks of the surface. These waves of wrinkles call the memory(the materiality of paper and the repetition of activities) in. Thus, the collages in my works are the space of memory. And
this memory is not a mere recollection of the past but a journey to find the genuine meaning of everyday life.