Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted with surfaces of skin that dominate the visual field. Enlarged fragments of the body, rendered across canvases of varying scale, are at times sharply articulated, and at others blurred, twisted, and deformed—resembling amorphous masses of flesh stripped of clear anatomical boundaries. What fills the exhibition space is the tactile sensation and warmth of these fragmented bodily surfaces.

Titled ‘Vein and Fever’, Chansong Kim's solo exhibition centers on the dynamics between interior flows and their surface manifestations. The vein functions as a conduit for invisible energies and emotions coursing beneath the skin, while fever signals their emergence—an embodied trace of circulation and affect made perceptible through heat. The exhibition unfolds as a corporeal landscape, a spatial embodiment of subtle circulatory rhythms and bodily warmth, as if the gallery itself were transformed into a living organism pulsing just beneath its surface.
 
Chansong Kim has long engaged in a sustained inquiry into the body as both subject and site of perception. Since beginning her practice in earnest after graduating in 2011, she has repeatedly depicted anonymous, faceless bodies and unfamiliar bodily masses—forms that resist identification and often appear alien or materialized. she was particularly drawn to the moment when the familiar sensation of one's own body shifts into an estranged, object-like experience.

This sense of estrangement became central to her painterly exploration, as she sought to capture the threshold between embodiment and perception. A significant turning point in this inquiry occurred with his 2021 solo exhibition 《At a Moment's Touch》, presented at the TEMI Artist Residency, Daejeon. Moving beyond the depiction of anonymous forms, Kim began to focus on skin as a tactile surface—an interface where the inner and outer converge. A decisive moment arose during the installation process, when she unexpectedly noticed a bead of sweat forming on her forearm.¹ 

This involuntary physiological response—sweat, breath, and other phenomena beyond conscious control—revealed to her the skin not merely as an exterior boundary, but as a living, responsive surface that continuously negotiates with the external world. This encounter provoked a profound existential awareness and has since become foundational to her practice. In Kim's more recent work, skin emerges not as the outer contour of a figure, but as a sensate threshold—a site of permeability and exchange, mediating between the interior and exterior, self and world.
 
《Vein and Fever》, Kim Chansong's latest exhibition, continues her longstanding inquiry into the body, with a particular emphasis on the material and sensate surface of the skin. For the artist, skin is not merely the outer boundary of the human body, but a dynamic interface—an expandable surface where sensation converges and experience is inscribed. In this exhibition, skin is explored as the most responsive and mutable site of contact between self and world.

This approach is further developed in the installation The Skin of Water (2025), in which skin is reimagined through the medium of water, expanding the notion of the body's surface into a broader register of circulation and fluidity. Scattered among the paintings of flesh are scenes of winter landscapes that capture water in states of transformation—ice, vapor, liquid—forming a visual metaphor for the permeability and mutability of skin. Here, water becomes a medium through which the artist contemplates the skin's capacity to respond, absorb, and relate. Another key motif in the exhibition is the lily, featured in Faded, Yet Still (2025), a work that delicately traces the blooming, withering, and falling of lily petals.

The process bears a striking resemblance to the skin's shifting states. Tense petals before blooming echo the flush of heat in living flesh, while the wilting, twisting motions recall the subtle tremors of skin at the threshold of sensation. Across the exhibition, disparate entities—bodies, water, and plants—resonate with one another, ultimately forming a unified landscape articulated through the language of skin. Kim reminds us that skin is not a static boundary enclosing the self, but a vibrant and relational threshold—a surface through which the body meets, responds to, and is transformed by the world.

What draws attention in this exhibition is not only the subjects of Kim Chansong's work, but also the deliberate spatial arrangement of the installation. The second-floor gallery, distinguished by its unusually large number of windows, presented a significant spatial condition for the artist. Several works are positioned either to face or turn away from the windows, intentionally reinforcing physical and visual connections to the exterior landscape. In these moments, the viewer experiences a perceptual exchange between the act of looking at the body and encountering the outside world.

For instance, Held (2025), a close-up of an eye, is installed near a window so that it appears to gaze outward, aligning the image's point of view with that of the natural scenery. Tails (2025), which depicts a partially hidden body behind blades of grass, visually overlaps with the trees visible through the window, emphasizing a sensory continuity between the environment and the body. Such spatial considerations are by no means incidental. Kim explains that 〈〉i〉before beginning a work, I first imagine the space in which it will eventually be placed. 

Her paintings originate from this scenographic imagination—one that includes not only the scale and dimensions of the canvas, but also the surrounding field of vision and the spatial conditions that might frame the work. Accordingly, the exhibition is not merely a site for displaying paintings, but an active staging ground—an environment in which paintings inhabit space and activate sensation.
 
What makes this spatial composition significant is its function as a space of ‘subtext’ in the interpretation of the work. It closely aligns with the artist's approach to titling. Rather than grouping similar paintings under a series title, Kim Chansong assigns each work a distinct name. This reflects her intention for viewers to imagine different narrative cues depending on the context in which the painting is encountered. For instance, a work depicting the same eyes may be titled ‘Object’ in one exhibition, but ‘Held’ in another.

As the exhibition space shifts, so too does the emotional and contextual register of the painting, opening it to new scenes of sensibility. The artist resists conveying a singular meaning or emotion, instead offering openings for multiple interpretations. While each work may originate from an intensely personal moment for the artist, it transforms into a scene—or a space of resonance—that expands through the viewer's own experiential encounter within a specific spatial setting.
 
Thus, Kim Chansong's paintings move beyond mere representation of the body or depiction of skin, instead exploring how fleeting sensory cues—sweat collecting on the skin, fragments of unfamiliar poses, faceless torsos—are translated into visual traces. For the artist, skin is not simply a boundary but a site where internal affect seeps outward; a sensory surface inscribed with emotion, memory, and energy. As the exhibition title ‘Vein and Fever’ suggests, the veins running beneath the skin and the heat that rises above it function as dual signs—evidence of inner events manifesting at the surface. 

《Vein and Fever》 offers viewers a moment to re-attune their senses before surfaces that are at once unfamiliar and intimate, inviting a renewed awareness of the body as a threshold of resonance. In the moment opened by the artist's gaze and gesture, we briefly inhabit the vibrating edge of skin—where boundary becomes connection.


1. Interview with the artist, June 10, 2025. All subsequent quotations from the artist are drawn from this interview.

References

• [비평] 진동하는 껍질 앞에서
  [Critique] Before a Trembling Skin