Installation view of 《Phantom Footsteps》 © Kukje Gallery

Outstanding visual expressiveness, mercurial sensitivity, a desire for success coupled with a self-destructive temperament. In novels and films, when the protagonist is an artist, these traits are often emphasized. It is understandable—an eternally scandal-ridden “enfant terrible,” obsessively devoted to producing work while constantly entangled in controversy, is the public stereotype of the famous artist.
 
Yet there is a professional reality of artists rarely depicted in fiction: diligence. It may sound unexciting, but it is true. Artists work within invisible dynamics where immeasurable time, complex production processes, deep reservoirs of energy and expression, conviction and wandering move back and forth. The great artists we know became who they are through precisely such creative dynamics. And it is through that unseen artistic devotion that they continue to realize their own works.
 
This is precisely why Kyungah Ham, a leading mid-career figure in Korean contemporary art, must be named an icon of the art world in 2024. Her devotion to art—her invisible, incalculable effort and diligence—has borne powerful new fruit in her solo exhibition 《Phantom and A Map》(Kukje Gallery, 2024.8.30–11.3). From a broader perspective, these results will serve not only as a significant marker within today’s art world, but also as a reference point for understanding contemporary perceptual structures and Korea’s political, social, and cultural history in the future.
 
This exhibition marks Ham’s first solo show in nine years since 《Phantom Footsteps》(Kukje Gallery, 2015). It was held across Kukje Gallery’s K1, Hanok, and K3 spaces. The scale of the space and the works was substantial, and the exhibition demonstrated remarkable depth of thematic inquiry and diversity of formal language. At K1, works from the ‘Embroidery Project’ series(2008–) were presented—works that have been recognized domestically and internationally as representative of her practice.
 
“An Artist Unites North and South Korea, Stitch by Stitch.” This was the headline of a full-page article in The New York Times Arts & Design section on July 26, 2018. As the title suggests, the Embroidery Project(2008) is a painting series in which Ham critically engages with the past and present of a divided Korea and pursues genuine communication between North and South by linking her artistic process with North Korean embroidery artisans.
 
In essence, the artist creates draft paintings informed by Korea’s modern political history and sends them to North Korean embroidery workers through intermediaries in third countries. The artisans secretly translate the drafts into embroidery on fabric and send the completed works back to the artist.
 
The production costs are impossible to calculate or settle. The artist can become embroiled in controversy at any time without legitimate cause or wrongdoing, and she has even faced real danger. Whether during moments of diplomatic optimism—when the leaders of North and South Korea met at Panmunjom, and former U.S. President Trump declared of Kim Jong-un, “We fell in love”—or during periods of extreme tension among South Korea, North Korea, and the United States, Embroidery Project has remained ghost-like, perpetually precarious art. Ham has endured all of these difficulties for more than a decade without relinquishing the project.
 
For this reason, the performance held at the opening of the recent exhibition may be read as a lighter side narrative to the weighty devotion and persistence she has maintained. A contemporary composer created music based on Embroidery Project (the score-drawing was displayed at the entrance of the exhibition), and performers whistled the composition before the embroidered paintings in K1. The melody and gestures evoked the sound of birds heard at the Panmunjom footbridge, recalling the fragile peace that once briefly passed over the Korean peninsula. In this sense, I consider Embroidery Project to be an utterly unique body of work, difficult to find comparable examples to in modern or contemporary art history.
 
Meanwhile, 《Phantom and A Map》 also presented new abstract works reflecting Ham’s contemplation over the past several years of the pandemic—meditations on our fragile and precarious presence, as well as on the contemporary digital environment and its analog residues. These works offered viewers another way of experiencing the artist’s hidden effort and devotion in a different artistic form.
 
The tapestry works shown in the Hanok space were produced in collaboration with Magnolia Editions in Belgium. The original drawings depicted the sorrow of humanity under the pandemic—an emotional state akin to lamentation—rendered through the bleeding and diffusion of printed images.
 
In K3, a powerful new painting series dominated the four walls: ‘Phantom and A Map / “Did You Come by Photograph or by Train?”’(2024) series. These works were woven from countless ribbon tapes, cords, and paint-soaked canvas fragments.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic and the deterioration of inter-Korean relations dealt a severe blow to Embroidery Project. During the physical shutdown, the artist could rely only on digital networks for communication with her collaborators—and even those conversations were often fragmented or incomplete. Through that experience, Ham seems to have confronted the chaos of a world constructed through dazzling technology and the fractures of reality that digital systems cannot fill. In ‘Phantom and A Map / “Did You Come by Photograph or by Train?”’, the rigid background grids formed by achromatic ribbon tape cannot suppress the indeterminate shapes created by vivid, fragmented, organic lines.
 
Over the two-month exhibition period, 《Phantom and A Map》 was viewed by many general audiences. Prestigious overseas museums—including the Philadelphia Museum of Art—and art world figures also visited the show. What did they see and value in Ham’s art? Perhaps they were drawn to how her excellence in visual expression and the complexity of her social consciousness are realized within a ghostly gap between what is visible and what is invisible.
 
Here lies the dimension in which Ham’s devotion exceeds the mere diligent production of art objects. Her working processes and the resulting works are mediated through reality. Yet they are also distinct from reality. Her art contains within itself the procedures through which reality acquires and exercises influence under the conditions of art.


 
1. I have previously written critically about Ham’s art and Embroidery Project in the following texts: Kang Sumi, Difficult Object: Korean Contemporary Art Since 2000, Paju: Geulhangari, 2017, pp. 30–43, 230–248. Su-Mi Kang, “An Aesthetics of Some and Such: Kyungah Ham’s Unfixed Art,” Kyungah Ham: Phantom Footsteps Exhibition Catalog, Kukje Gallery, 2016, pp. 9–21.
2. David Segal, “An Artist Unites North and South Korea, Stitch by Stitch,” The New York Times, July 26, 2018.
3. KBS News Plaza, “Trump: ‘We fell in love’ with Kim Jong-un,” broadcast October 1, 2018.

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