Casey Kaplan

Cindy Ji Hye Kim presents her solo exhibition, Silhouettes in Lune at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah GA. The exhibition is organized by curator Ben Tollefson and will be on view at SCAD Museum of Art through July 29, 2024.

Silhouettes in Lune is 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, they depict human figures in relation to support systems like scaffolding and artist’s easels — structures that function similarly to stretcher bars: skeletal, ghostlike, and often overlooked yet integral to the act of creation.

Above her floating works, Kim adorns a frieze at the top 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 reimagination 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.