Kim Hyun Ju

Things that disappear, and things that can’t disappear
Hyun Ju Kim

Painting is a work to dress colors on a quadrangular plane and gives shapes on it. Colors and shapes are inevitable intervention. Pictures cannot be realized without them. Although an empty canvas itself absent of colors or shapes/brushing may exist as a practical objet, it becomes a thing or a sculpture, not painting. Thus, in order for painting to be painting, at least colors and physical traces should be put on. How this intervention needs to be done is an important issue in modern art. Many attempts such as creating flat screens by evenly laying paints, creating homogeneous screens by saturating canvas fabrics with thin paints, or maximizing substance and material properties of color paints are trajectories that abstract artists have made since the early twentieth century. The attempts to realize painting with only flat screens and paints by removing specific objects that point out the outer world and excluding the depth have gone away when the minimalism that represents practical things has appeared. However, it never means that abstractness is meaningless or has no possibility. It is needed to deal with various possibilities of abstractness more in depth escaping from limiting painting with only the logic of flatness. Indeed.

HyunJu KIM puts multi-layered colors on a tetragonal canvas. Smooth and thin liquid paints/colors flow and permeate on the flat surface as if they caressed, and get solidi fied. After a particular color’s put on the screen in certain status, another color gets put on over it. Moving gradually and slowly from dark colors to bright ones, a film is formed and the width is realized. Pictures are physical like this.