Youngsoo Kim’s solo exhibition

play,

Adagio in Sonata

Solo Exhibition  / 2015. 06. 24 - 30

@ Gallery 1898

Adagio in Sonata

(Playing with Love – Slowly)

I have been working on the subject of people since 2000. It is based on the emotional empathy and compassion that comes from life, such as femininity, nudity, war, relationships, the island of the unconscious mind, and philosophy of life.

These were expressed as the truth of the joys and sorrows that were pushed into my unconsciousness in my work.

And as I got older and looked back on my life, I began to think, ‘Isn’t life just about playing music?’ Accordingly, since 2008, he has been drawing various series focusing on the theme of ‘Life is like playing instrument’.

‘Homo ludens’, ‘playing man’, a concept proposed by Dutch historian J. Huizinga (1872-1945), represents the topic and motivation of my work.

The act of drawing, as well as the images that come up with emotion, are due to human instinctive desires. Desire rises to the sea of ​​emotion and dances before being controlled by reason, combined with empirical philosophy, and expressed in the form of painting.

After the invitation exhibition ‘Drawing for Sonata’ at The K Gallery in Insa-dong in September 2012, the artists I referenced in my work were Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn. Gorky went beyond Cubist tendencies and expressed the essence of objects through free curves. In his paintings, color is a soul that wanders between lines. Richard Diebenkorn represented nature as the simplest color field division.

The straight lines between surfaces spread out on a flat surface serve to remove the weight of nature and connect the surfaces into a single mass.

These two artists each approached the essence of objects with organic curves and vertical and horizontal geometric division of color fields. The dots and planes of a painting ultimately have their energy as lines.

What comes first in my paintings are lines with a sense of movement. The lines move with energy, bringing life to the screen and further representing the musical flow. The color field that surrounds and embraces the lines mainly has emotional feelings, but it also represents reason controlled by the lines.

The strong color contrast represents heightened inner conflict and overcoming it rationally. Through the image of playing a musical instrument, I express myself as the subject who plays life by creating harmony of lines and colors.

Therefore, the image of the human body on the screen is the same as the image of the musical instrument (especially the cello). The cello is very conversational because it is similar in size to the human body and can best express the human voice.

The most basic motifs in my paintings are desire and love. This is because living is constant self-love, and its basis comes from desire.

 Each person's life is music played in their own way. This music contains the emotions of every moment of life. Therefore, playing is the method and purpose of love.

When these thoughts are expressed in paintings, there is no need to analyze whether they are contemporary or not. This is because they can vary from figurative to abstract depending on the artist's sensibility.

 2015 Stella Youngsoo Kim