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KOREAN
KOREAN
Korean artist Nampyo Kim's visually enticing and lively exhibition "Instant Landscapes" offered a relatively gentle, if not subtle, satirical take on contemporary life and human nature. Consumerist fairy tales for our times, the vividly colored canvases on a white ground, as in fashion spreads, draw on both Eastern and Western traditions, combining both calligraphic brushstrokes and landscapes-as-still-life in the Eastern manner with the gestural abstraction and photorealism of the West.
All are still lifes of a sort. With nature never out of the picture the surreal juxtapositions have the crisp directness of advertisements.
In these fictions, chic shoes and handbags hang suspended from but not attached to tree limbs. They are surrounded by dynamic, stylish beasts bedecked with unnatural trimmings- such as a muscular horse, with artificial fur attached, wearing a necklace of Native American-style feather braids.
The only connection the objects in these images have with the natural world in which they are situated is that they are products of it- whether animals or vegetable. In Instant Landscape- Zebra #3 (2009), two striped beasts, one bearing a designer handbag with a scarf looped through, emerge from a waterfall as if to descend on a highway bridge below, where four tiny zebras peer over the sides, close to a high-hell shoe sans mate.
In Instant Landscape-photo #1 (2009), a zebra crashes through a torn landscape photo of a lake scene, its head popping out of the back of the picture while its hind, with artificial fur affixed to the tail, sticks out in front. This tattered landscape is set in another one, by the sea, where a shredded photo of a lion is affixed to a post in the water.
The consumer products are high style and anomalous in these works, but they are also seem to fit the context. Where nature is fragmented, the products are intact. These sad yet playful images, celebration nature and lamenting its destruction, are filled with charm and absurdity.
-Barbara A. MacAdam