Stepping into the gallery, a green garden covering an entire wall draws the eye. Enormous plants blanket the canvas, and shrubs of varying heights fill the spaces between them. A black dog lies at ease, becoming one with the surrounding nature. This is not a tropical forest in a distant country. It is the garden the artist tends on Jeju Island, and the dog running freely through it is her own.
The work, titled "The Days," is part of "TOWARDS: There Was Light," a solo exhibition by Kim Bo-hee, 74, at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul's Jongno district. It is her first solo show in South Korea in four years.
For more than 40 years, the artist has looked at nature as her subject, and here she casts her relationship with that remembered world in a new light — literally, through the lens of light itself. About 30 works fill the gallery, including pieces from her "The Days" and "Towards" series depicting her Jeju garden and the sea, flowers and fruit, and her dog Leo.
For Kim, light is not merely a physical element that illuminates a landscape. It is an active presence that reveals the colors of nature and makes the passage of time perceptible. She spent years observing nature on Jeju and transferring those scenes to canvas. The gardens and seas, plants and fruit on her canvases are at once the scenery before her eyes and images carrying the layered sensibility she has developed over long years of looking at nature.
Gallery Hyundai said the artist "has built her own painterly language, flexibly grafting the materials and formal sensibility of East Asian painting onto the color fields and expanded scale of contemporary painting."
Kim graduated from the Department of Oriental Painting at Ewha Womans University's College of Art and Design. She taught at Ewha as a professor until 2017 and is now a professor emerita. She is also the older sister of Kim Sung-hee, director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
In another space at Gallery Hyundai, "Moon Mind," a solo exhibition by Korean American artist Christine Sun Kim, 46, is running concurrently. If Kim Bo-hee fixes her gaze on the light-soaked nature of Jeju, Christine Sun Kim captures a mind projected onto the distant moon.
"Moon Mind" comprises about 30 works, including shaped canvas paintings — canvases cut into specific forms — and drawings. For the artist, the moon is both a satellite of the earth and the name of her daughter, Dal. She places the moon and the mind within a single frame, looking back on time and the past, on family, and on her roots as a Korean American.
The mind is not a fixed single state but a three-dimensional presence that shifts its shape as it moves. The works began from the fact that in American Sign Language, pointing at or tapping the temple signifies "mind."
"Moon Mind," the work that shares the exhibition's title, consists of two black shaped canvases separated one above the other. The bottom edge of the upper canvas curves downward in a concave line, while the top edge of the lower canvas swells upward in a convex one. There is something aching in the yearning that races toward the moon floating above. "Mind Strong" holds the many faces and the firmness of the mind within an enormous black sphere.
Based in Germany, Christine Sun Kim has drawn on Deaf culture and her own experience to address sound and language, power and accessibility. Both exhibitions run through Oct. 18.
