Casey Kaplan
Cindy Ji Hye Kim is reviewed in Plus Magazine.
“Excavating the Unconscious”
Words: Plus Magazine | Photography: Jae Kim | October 2, 2025
“Skeletons grin without identity, fetuses held in the air, and wooden guardians preside from above. Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s latest exhibition, Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish, at Casey Kaplan, takes shape as excavation, pulling memory, myth, and unconscious forces from layers of black pigment. She takes materials often dismissed as secondary, such as charcoal, graphite, and shades of gray, and makes them the foundation of an entire cosmology. Grayscale is her chosen terrain, a way to strip images to their raw mechanics and forge a visual language that is both archaic and contemporary. ‘For the last ten years, I’ve been working in what people often call black and white, though I prefer to describe it as a grayscale palette,’ said Kim. ‘It began as a way to become better at drawing and to blur the traditional hierarchy that places painting above drawing.’
Kim’s command of grisaille links her practice to the underpinnings of art history. Having studied the Renaissance technique of gray tonal underpaintings that once governed entire compositions but were later obscured beneath glazes of color, she adapts that tradition into her own work. Within her practice, it becomes a metaphor for the unconscious, for forces that shape human life while remaining hidden from view. “That underlayer, though invisible in the final image, governs the whole composition,” she explained. “It became a metaphor for the unconscious realm I often explore, forces beneath the surface that shape human behavior.” The effect in her work is startling: images that seem carved out of shadow, as if painted memory itself were a substance. Her paintings brood, smolder, and press with an intensity that refuses to dissipate.”