Harper’s is happy to announce Castaway, New York-based artist Ho Jae Kim’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Throughout his rigorous follow, painter Ho Jae Kim examines questions of liminality: the artist renders scenes of existential transition and disorientation, transcribing the wayward architectures of purgatory and different entrapped states. In Castaway, Kim continues to analyze the aesthetics and impacts that colour this psychic in between. He considers the movie Forged Away (2000) as a cultural reference from which to deal with such inside reckoning. Within the blockbuster movie, Tom Hanks performs a person abandoned on an island; with few instruments and assets, he should learn to endure the trauma of solitude. He personifies a volleyball to deal with his loneliness, naming it Wilson. As Kim sees it, Wilson doesn’t solely operate as a cloth object. Like an art work, Wilson is the product of inner and exterior rumination—he embodies the protagonist’s psyche.
For Kim, the profession of an artist fosters the form of psychic alienation invoked by an uninhabited island. To supply work, an artist should have interaction in persistent self-reflection: they have to endure a weak means of questioning their concepts, realizing them, after which ushering them into public viewership. The artist’s studio can thus be seen as a website of unprecedented hardship, but additionally nourishment—a spot that challenges courageous souls to uncover troublesome truths. Kim encapsulates this schism within the work Studio Island. Right here, a nude determine sits beneath the shade of a palm tree, portray hatch marks on a big canvas indexing time. The portray, just like the determine, seems obscured, enshrouded by the darkness that probably awaits in a close-by jungle. However past the tree, mild emerges: speckled beige brushstrokes colour a superb sky and a sandy seaside, like a silver lining of readability after troubling introspection.
This meditative scene, like most of the featured works, seems weathered by its layers. Kim’s intricate course of entails sketching, digital rendering, chemical transferring, and including thick swaths of ink and pigment. The resultant works incorporate dense impasto, harboring the essence of many marks and ideas constructed into the material of every visible aircraft. This intricate course of takes heart stage within the textural work, Legendary Island. Right here, a determine is engulfed by unforgiving terrain: compact coats of stirring gold, pink, and navy shade the forlorn intersection the place the ocean meets the sky. The unyielding brushwork shades a person who holds up a dripping vessel in entrance of the ocean—a prized discovery amidst the pitfalls of survival.
Finally, all through Castaway, Kim sustains a tone that yearns for rescue. Throughout these scenes of lonely strife, the artist’s protagonists attraction to be saved from distress. In the identical breath, nevertheless, Kim uplifts the data that arises from a state of putting up with isolation. It’s inside these moments that one is pressured to deal with the interior workings of the thoughts and spirit, narrowing in on the inquiries and reasonings that drive us ahead. Castaway demystifies the worry of being alone. On this transferring exhibition, Kim reveals the latent perception derived from durations of solace.
