Casey Kaplan
Cindy Ji Hye Kim: Silhouettes in Lune
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
February 2 – July 29, 2024
Cindy Ji Hye Kim presents Silhouettes in Lune, a site-responsive installation of paintings, sculptures, and a hand-drawn mural that spans the upper portion of the gallery. The exhibition reflects the artist’s preoccupation with the psychological space of the unconscious; its secrets and symbols, and its narrative potential within the anatomy of an image.
Kim’s spectral paintings are created on translucent silk, revealing the silhouettes of their intricately shaped stretchers on the opposite side. These paintings are suspended from the ceiling alongside carved wooden archways, creating paths to be navigated by viewers, while simultaneously presenting enigmatic images that slip between tangible and obscure. Executed predominately in softly-rendered shades of gray, with subtle touches of color, Kim depicts human figures in relation to support systems like scaffolding and artist’s easels. These structures function similarly to stretcher bars: skeletal, ghost-like, and often overlooked, yet integral to the act of creation.
Above her floating works, Kim adorns a frieze at the upper portion of the gallery walls. Only viewable from afar, the frieze depicts a procession of swirling clocks and numbers, as well as the artist’s signature characters in a re-imagined format of a phenakistoscope, an animation device from the early 19th century. The mural is further adorned with images of Kokdu, a carved funerary figure that is placed on biers to guide the dead to the afterlife in Korean tradition. Presented on a continuous horizontal strip, the imagery collapses notions of time, depicting both the physical world and spaces beyond.
Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, Korea) explores the anatomy of images. The artist often works in the monochromatic Grisaille palette, a preliminary underpainting scheme designed to disappear when painted over with color. Kim likens the grayscale painting process as a metaphor in her work; her subjects are rendered as fading away into the unconscious, in fleeting scenes of memories, dreams, and myths. Using figurative representation as a visual instrument for depicting both truth and fiction, Kim creates a poetic tension between what is remembered and forgotten.
Artist talk: February 26, 2pm
Opening reception: February 27