Expressionism Turned Inside Out
In June 2020, shortly after New York Metropolis was ordered to go beneath lockdown in response to the quickly spreading pandemic, I despatched an e mail to artist Kyung-Me asking if she knew how I’d acquire a replica of her graphic novel Dangerous Korean (2016). I advised her that I already had Copy Kitty (2020) and wished to search out her earlier, out-of-print guide. Along with being beguiled by Copy Kitty, the story of a cat who retains altering its identification within the pursuit of affection and affection, I used to be interested in her artwork as a result of the work I had seen on her web site revealed that she had undergone at the very least three main shifts inside lower than a five-year span. I have no idea of many graphic artists who consciously resist the trimmings of favor.
Within the ensuing sporadic correspondence, I discovered that Kyung-Me was engaged on a collection of ink drawings. A yr later, she associated that she was sad with the collection and had began one other one. By then, I used to be greater than casually fascinated about what she was engaged on.
Everybody is aware of that when you might have excessive expectations, you stand a robust likelihood of being disenchanted. I had none of those worries after I went to see Kyung-Me: Sister at Bureau (October 29–December 22, 2022), her first solo exhibition at this gallery, and I used to be not let down. All the pieces I had gleaned from seeing her exact ink drawings on my pc display screen was multiplied tenfold in particular person. It was not simply that the exhibition’s eight drawings measuring 32 by 47 1/2 inches had been spellbinding due to the intricacy of minute element, culminating in a exact, elaborately constructed inside area. It was that Kyung-Me’s disciplined concentrate on these particulars appeared inseparable from an enormous grotto of emotions that the artist channeled and saved in examine. This was expressionism turned inside out.
Sol LeWitt, who decisively eliminated his hand and private emotions from drawing, famously mentioned: “Conceptual artists are mystics reasonably than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic can’t attain.” LeWitt may virtually be describing the work of Kyung-Me; she leaps willingly right into a world that he consciously eschewed — the self — and all that the phrase implies, together with the physique, reminiscences, phobias, legacies, needs, and creativeness. The outcomes are massive ink and charcoal drawings which might be each bit as embellished and mysterious as Albrecht Dürer’s etchings. I can’t consider one other artist who may be favorably in comparison with LeWitt and Dürer and might (miraculously) nonetheless stand on their very own.
The primary work the viewer encounters within the exhibition is “The Fall” (all works 2022). At 10 by 14 inches it’s the smallest of the 9 drawings. The lone work on a wall within the entrance gallery, which is separated by an extended corridor from the principle gallery, it depicts a barefoot girl in a long-sleeved robe, seen from behind. The girl is getting ready to coming into a tree-lined tunnel that seamlessly opens up from the wall of a contemporary home impressed by a conventional post-and-beam Asian residence. The girl’s lengthy, raised arms resemble baguettes that reach from her shoulders like wings and terminate in stumps. The tunnel’s spherical partitions and flooring recommend a vortex. Just a few leaves float within the room she is about to depart. Her toes appear to drift above the ground; we would surprise if she is selecting to enter the tunnel or is being transported by unknown forces.
The trope of a younger girl falling into or coming into one other world is acquainted, however Kyung-Me’s evocation of it feels genuine, and units the stage for the viewer’s entrance into an alternate actuality. The evenly spaced strains in “The Fall” each endow the partitions with texture and underscore the meticulous consideration the artist pays to each inch of the topic’s floor, regardless of how incidental it might sound. Kyung-Me’s concentrated imagery pulls us right into a state of heightened consciousness by her personal immersion in surfaces, particulars, gentle, and shading. It’s as if we’re seeing all the pieces by a magnifying glass. With every drawing, I acquired nearer, slowed down additional, and have become more and more misplaced within the plethora of particulars. I used to be reminded of the hours I spent staring on the weave of a carpet after I had taken mescaline.
Kyung-Me’s nested rooms, a motif all through the present, are levels occupied by a single particular person whose face is hidden from view. The areas evoke what Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of House, known as a “dream home” that “should possess each advantage. How ever spacious, it should even be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy wants the center of a nest.” Within the artist’s dream home, I’d add that intimacy, looking for its reverse, wants a labyrinth, hermitage, personal theater, boundaries, and mirrors. She makes use of hatch line work, in addition to perspectival gadgets, reminiscent of foreshortening, and choreographed mixtures of repetition and sudden disruption, to attract an area that’s concurrently huge and claustrophobic, open and sequestered. It’s as if she drew every line with a razor blade that cuts deep however attracts no blood. The impact is mesmerizing and unsettling.
I considered the provocatively named, unpopulated architectonic drawing “The Organ” because the second portal to the opposite seven drawings, all populated. The artist depicts what may very well be the entrance or again of a church, dividing the area horizontally into two equal areas. Within the higher space, on the mezzanine, are three clusters of the organ’s phallic tubes. Immediately under them, we see a receding, columned passageway culminating in a white-lit elliptical area. The underside fringe of this opening touches the drawing’s backside edge, compressing the area.
The mix of phallic tubes and elliptical openings invitations comparisons to the female and male physique. Piranesi’s prisons and Martin Ramirez’s drawings briefly come to thoughts as reference factors that assist find the psychic territory wherein Kyung-Me’s drawings exist. The longer I regarded, the extra I felt I used to be initially of a bottomless inquiry that will lead into every kind of psychologically charged niches and recesses. The remainder of the drawings confirmed this thought.
In “The Career,” a room nests inside a room. On this washitsu (Japanese room), a girl in an embroidered kimono is seated within the seiza place (on her knees) on a platform, which is about in a windowless alcove lined in tatami mats. A curved sword lies on a desk positioned halfway between the girl and the room’s framed entrance. {A partially} lowered bamboo curtain obscures the higher half of the girl’s face, however doesn’t cowl her full, sensuous lips. Eroticism and repression, the hidden and the revealed, have merged right into a ceremonial area, all of which the artist has decisively outlined in skinny, unwavering hatch strains, repeated patterns, darkish and light-weight.
Within the foreground, two zaisu (chairs with backs however no legs) are positioned close to the drawing’s outer edges, reverse one another. Between them, in an oblong, framed field set into the ground, we see a teapot sitting on a spherical disc set right into a clean mattress of raked sand. For whom are the chairs meant? What’s going to occur subsequent?
The undulating grooves and patterns left by the rake intensify the strict order discovered all over the place within the room, from the tight association of the tatami mats to the position of the geisha’s lengthy, tapered fingers. Probability and chaos might have been expunged this world, however I get the sensation that beneath this intricately detailed floor flows a river of managed rage. The rigidity and repetition of the construction, with its suggestion of a straining want held in examine, is riveting and intimidating.
Though most of the drawings share these qualities, I believe essentially the most entrancing, unsettling, vertiginous, and sinister one is “The Confession,” a receding, rectangular room wherein mirrors and spiky metallic railings separate one half from one other. Positioned precisely within the middle of the drawing, as if pinned there, is the again of a girl kneeling earlier than an arched opening. The facet partitions extending diagonally into the drawing mirror one another, multiplying the spiky fences. The impact is chilling.
Whereas the drawings share many compositional gadgets, what Kyung-Me does with every room is radically totally different. Dividing the floor into discrete trapezoids and rectangles, she establishes a receding area wherein she depicts a variety of objects and surfaces drawn from the Victorian period and Asian cultures, together with porcelain vases and different chinoiserie. Beginning within the seventeenth century, no royal residence in Europe was with out its Chinese language room; these had been typically the place the mistress was saved. As a lot as these works may evoke the previous, I used to be reminded of the groundbreaking writings of Anne Anlin Cheng, who has theorized that in Western cultures Asian femininity is considered decorative, a floor to be embellished and inscribed, an unique object. Kyung-Me is among the few artists I do know of to deal with the Western objectifying stare upon Asian girls and its lengthy, sordid historical past.
Kyung-Me: Sister continues at Bureau gallery (178 Norfolk Road, Decrease East Facet, Manhattan) by December 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.