김춘미 : 회화 위의 대기적 신체 (Atmospheric Body on the Painting)
아트앤컬처
2시간 19분전
본문
Kim Chun-mi: Atmospheric Body on the Painting
Yoo Jin-sang / Professor at Kaywon Art University
One of the most intriguing issues raised by Kim Chun-mi's paintings concerns the artist's body. A prominent sign of the transition from modern to contemporary painting was the audience's realization that every artist's body is unique. It was understood that not only are the bodies different, but the artist's body is shaped by numerous conditions attached to it—such as habits, symptoms, psychological fixations, stereotypes, trends of the times, and acquired learning—and that this shape exerts a decisive influence on the movement and action of the brush and paint, as well as the resulting outcomes. The fact that the artist's body is a decisive element in painting became evident after Abstract Expressionism. Above all, attempts emerged in which artists themselves studied their own bodies, identified their characteristics, and utilized the movements of joints and muscles as tools to derive constants and variables. In the examples of Picasso, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, and Joan Mitchell, we can discover a history in which such radical transformations have renewed and redefined painting. Through the development of 20th-century painting, the body evolved into the most essential tool, evoking affect alongside the flexibility of the brush and the elasticity of the canvas. Among them, Twombly and Mitchell invented a completely new painterly body. They erased all traces of familiar notions known in painting and began to record truly unfamiliar painterly phenomena that no one had ever seen. From this, an adventure toward the 'outside' of painting began. Kim Chun-mi's paintings are situated within this remarkable lineage of painting history. Here, it is necessary to examine what that entails.
Choon Mi Kim, The Drive, 2026, Oil on linen, 180 x 220 cm © Artist, Rian Gallery
Choon Mi Kim, Si-i, 2026, Oil on linen, 180 x 250 cm © Artist, Rian Gallery
Choon Mi Kim, Smudged Asterisk, 2026, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm. © Artist, Rian Gallery
There is no answer to the question of what painting is; there are only examples. What distinguishes painting from drawing is that, like the human body it is, it is composed of flesh and blood. In oil painting, it consists of grotesque or sensual surfaces where sticky or dripping bodily fluids and tangled masses of dried flesh are intertwined. The materiality of oil painting, sometimes drenched and sometimes thick, evokes the body even more clearly through the dripping pulp of wounds, sexual traces, decaying organic matter, and stains violently splattered here and there. It is inevitable that oil painting entails a sensual sensation, and the reason the viewer cannot take their eyes off an oil painting is the synchronization between their own body and the canvas. And the painter makes all these elements into an irreversible event on the canvas. There are two verbs: 'to apply' and 'to mark.' 'Applying' is spreading paint across the surface of the canvas. The movement of the brush builds layers on a given plane and area slowly, intentionally, and sometimes through repetition, for the settlement of paint on the canvas and the chain effects it will bring. 'Buried' is different from this. Its essence is not the paint. The paint is merely a trace inevitably and incidentally left behind by an 'unexpected event' or 'physical passage.' For example, <Si-i> is the word 'Si-i' written in red on a space filled with bright blue scribbles. In Kim Chun-mi's work, 'calligraphy' is not only an important formal element but also an conceptual 'event' occurring within the painterly spatiotemporal realm. In other words, 'Si-i' becomes something different from its original form or meaning during the process of writing it. What is important here is the nature of the event that occurs. This event arises not from the artist's intention, but from an 'external force' passing through the artist's body. The artist moves toward the space where that force originates, induces it, provides the impetus for it, and allows it to pass through their body. 'Si-i' refers to an empty space that belongs to neither semantic nor morphological term, while simultaneously remaining as its trace within the painting. This is similar to the 'non-organic events' that occur in the bodies of dancers such as Merce Cunningham. Just as a dancer reconstructs their body to allow 'non-organic' forces to pass through them, the painter also reconstructs their own body quickly and precisely. The purpose is not to reveal meaning, but to capture the conditions surrounding the generation of meaning.
The title of this exhibition, *Isobars In Down*, can be translated as "isobars inside a winter padded jacket." Isobars are lines connecting locations within the same atmospheric pressure zone on a map, much like contour lines. While painting in a cold studio during the Korean winter, wearing a thick padded jacket, the artist experiences their body transforming into an intangible flow of air. *Low Pressure* is a work that demonstrates how the artist's body transforms into a stage. The blue shadows cast by the frame and the lighting in the left corner, the air that is coldly blue and thin, the distant night mountains in the background, and the long green grass in the foreground all possess the conditions for drama. Then, two intense blood-red stains take center stage in the frame, much like protagonists. The artist titled this scene "Low Atmospheric Pressure." This could be a story about a melancholic, quiet, and low-key tragedy, or it could be a narrative of love and passion in the Arctic, where bright, long nights continue. All of this stems from the flow of air passing through the artist's body.
*Shared Stems* is a diptych depicting swaying red lines cutting through bright, crisp emerald air. The long lime-green lines slightly in the background and the dark lines in the foreground, resembling redroot pigweed stems, appear to form a counterpoint between two distinct bandwidths. In the space on the left side of the right-hand screen—that is, close to the center of the overall picture—these two bands intertwine, collide, and create crosstalk, raising the temperature. While the air surrounding this event is tinged with pink, the red lines, appearing like grass, on the other hand witness a moment that repeats itself eternally, much like historical witnesses. *Sea of Thin Light*, conversely, is composed of thinly superimposed layers of yellow, green, and blue air instead of intense lines. As the title's "thin light" suggests, the canvas is filled with the bright light of the canvas, delicately and sensitively piercing through the layers of paint. The artist's task is to draw that light up and transform it into a scene. The screen is divided into three sections: a yellow area at the bottom, a darker blue above it, and a higher area with a light green tint. Very restrained, blurry lines cut across the space between them. Like mythical beings appearing on a stage in the dim light, they pass through slow, sticky time in a thin atmosphere.
What stands out in Kim Chun-mi's paintings is speed. Her works are filled with lines drawn with a single brushstroke on a white canvas. In many cases, only a few intense trajectories remain over blurry traces that are quickly brushed or sometimes smudged. The canvas is filled with traces of detachment, indolence, negligence, and gaucherie. Her paintings defy all expectations. What ought to be there is missing. Instead of the scene remaining incomplete, everything becomes indecipherable debris and surplus. An incomplete, strange, and unfamiliar scene that seems to systematically escape from desire. That is where Kim Chun-mi's paintings resonate. Instead of painting, the artist executes something that deviates. It is an encounter with a continuous liberation that even the artist herself cannot explain (indicible). As seen in Kim Chun-mi's artist's notes, it is the witnessing of this and that that bypass the moments of life, and even the artist herself cannot know how they become imprinted in the painter's mind and pass through the body. The painter transforms the fragments of memory and sensation arising in her body into painterly moments and records them on the canvas. Sometimes with short, intermittent brushstrokes, sometimes with sharp, impulsive, long lines, and sometimes with blurred, smudged traces. The task the painter must undertake is clear: to move toward the most dangerous choice in orchestrating the relationship between her body and the canvas.
Regarding her palette, which generally uses primary colors such as red, yellow, blue, and green in their raw form, Kim Chun-mi states that it is influenced by the colors of nature. However, her colors are rather conceptual than representational. Instead of the presence of objects associated with the colors, the materiality of the colors themselves stands out more. In fact, in many cases, Kim Chun-mi's paints evoke nothing other than themselves. The red she uses appears to have no actual connection to any natural object. *Lemony Red* is painted solely in pinkish-red, bright green, and blue. There is no "lemon-colored" yellow in this painting. The color indicated by the title exists only in the viewer's mind. Absence leads to an intense presence. Due to the red that covers the entire canvas, the absent lemon color fills the hidden side of reality, much like the "lemon" in the poem by the poet Yi Sang. In Kim Chun-mi's paintings, a minimal palette, a minimal spectrum, and minimal intervention of light appear consistently, almost like a rule. The paints are thinly spread over the white canvas or simply traverse it. Most of the light is the light from the original canvas. For this reason, his paintings may appear unfinished, but conversely, it is precisely because of this that the canvas retains the purest light source—namely, the white of the canvas itself. The palette of primary colors he employs elicits maximum saturation and color combinations through this light. Even the faintest nuances of paint draw out their presence to the extreme. The most beautiful light in painting is the light emanating from the surface of the white canvas. This light sublimates the paint into immeasurable variations, following the intensity, elasticity, and rhythm of the moment the artist's body touches the canvas. The reason we are immersed in this is that these events are astonishing. This is the essence of painting. *Key in Landscape* is painted solely in yellow, blue, and red. This painting is a work that most dramatically elevates the white light of the canvas. Here, the "key" refers to "resolution" in a musical sense. A mass of red emerges in the foreground, piercing through the layers of yellow and blue air. In the upper left, the shadow of this protagonist is projected into the void. There is only the bare minimum of gesture. The reason we can gaze for hours upon the traces and debris of this clear and concise situation is that it is remarkably intertwined with the nature of our existence. A single painting is composed of hundreds of billions of events. Our gaze surveys them as a whole and stares endlessly at their details. The events revealed by the details are imprinted in every corner of the viewer's mind. And this process repeats infinitely. Kim Chun-mi's palette does not need to be complex, for her painterly structure is already premised on inexhaustible combinations.
A painting consists of only a single frame. In the age of data media, where humanity consumes tens of millions of frames a day, the existence of 'one-frame' art is akin to a miracle. Viewers of paintings today are fundamentally different from the audiences of 50 years ago. Before approaching the work, they have already consumed countless images, information, and knowledge, becoming filled with context and meaning. Kim Chun-mi’s painting-machine changes all of this. What they discover in her work is a strange place. There is no painter, no data, no clock, and no gods. A place where there is no one and nothing, yet filled with countless clues from the world. A completely different place. An 'other world' in the truest sense reveals itself. The narrative and the flow of time within that place are generated entirely within the inner self of the person facing the painting. The painting he gazes upon is scarce, sparse, and left behind. It brings to mind Barthes’s remark about Twombly, "Non Multa Sed Multum" (not many, but many). A place where things are sparse, yet many are taking place. A place where no one is present, yet everyone is there. An empty plateau, a climax boiling up amidst the silence, a cry of unknown meaning, an exceptional moment repeating infinitely. This is where Kim Chun-mi's paintings are heading.
Courtesy of: Rian Gallery
ⓒ 아트앤컬쳐 - 문화예술신문
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