Installation view of 《Accidental Order》 (Artplug Yeonsu, 2024) © Bokyung Kim

On the Existence of Multiple Gazes within One Surface: Upon the Common Denominator of the Image

Konno Yuki

A single space can have many sides within that one space. Each time the things placed within it, each individual arrangement, or the direction of the gaze changes slightly, it creates a different impression. Even when the same things are placed there. Does the act of moving things around and changing their positions only pursue a better, most ideal single view?

Looking at similar photographs piled up on a smartphone, some might think so. Whenever storage space runs out, we are advised to delete similar images. Nevertheless, the images remain arranged and stored. There is also the method of choosing just one and discarding the rest.

That, too, is one method—a choice to delete without leaving anything behind is a concise decision, and it produces a more concise result than the experience of possessing multiple images. If we want to possess several similar images, the reason cannot be only one. Each image has its own moment, and each moment has aspects that belong only to it.

These are images for which it is difficult to establish differences in value or determine superiority. Rather than pursuing a single ideal in images, we keep each variation one by one, even as we worry over the choice to erase or the difficulty of erasing.

Looking at the paintings presented by Bokyung Kim in her solo exhibition 《Accidental Order》(Artplug Yeonsu, 2024), there are series with similar compositions as well as works that show single scenes. Her painting begins at the stage of collecting images: the artist gathers images from magazines or SNS posts, brings them into editing tools, and creates multiple versions of a scene.

She then selects some of them and paints them, sometimes changing the colors or forms when transferring them onto canvas or paper, and during that process new changes or additions occur. Within the single space of painting, the things placed inside it—the similar compositions and materials that become images, as well as the original image and the process of editing it—each carry different impressions.

Looking closely, two stages of “collection” overlap in Bokyung Kim’s painting. These are the stages before the image enters the painting plane and the moment it enters it. Like clipping newspaper articles, the artist collects images and then collects them again within the surface—that is, transfers them into the stage of storage. Even two stages of “editing” overlap here.

The artist connects an “edit/collection-like” attitude of becoming immersed to the point of selecting, or finding it difficult to select, images with an attitude of “editing” them into the images she imagines.

Installation view of 《Accidental Order》 (Artplug Yeonsu, 2024) © Bokyung Kim

In this sense, a single scene shown in Bokyung Kim’s painting is both one among many scenes and a scene that contains many scenes. In the space of her painting, images of objects and scenes move beyond the simple repetition of “copying,” “cutting,” and “pasting,” producing a result in which objects and scenes, existing images and my own images, come together.

Her work does not simply bring in the reality outside or inside the self as it is by “copying,” “cutting,” and “pasting,” but creates a space through the mediation of her own gaze. There are multiple spaces within one painterly space, and multiple sides appear within a single plane. This is not an arrangement of images, but ultimately another space made through Bokyung Kim’s gaze.

The space of variation is where subjectivity is placed. Perhaps what is important in Bokyung Kim’s work is that she acquires subjectivity between space and the self through the process of working. In an age when images are everywhere, we easily decide what to record, or leave behind, and what not to record, or not leave behind—just as easily as “copying,” “cutting,” and “pasting.”

Before moving toward a single choice, multiple spaces exist in multiple images, and in fact multiple sides are contained even within a single space, in each image. Bokyung Kim’s painting looks at each of these one by one, selects them through her own gaze, and contains them again.

Bokyung Kim’s “collection” and “editing” may be understood as contemporary concerns related to the technical production of images. Yet the key may lie in the construction of the self-image-space produced within that process. Even if the surface of the work is one, the images and gazes contained within that one place are not singular.

Conversely, this non-singularity is condensed within the surface of the work only through the artist’s gaze and hand. The “many” gazes of “one” person who was drawn to a certain image can coexist. As the artist describes her own work with the phrase “as if collapsing, yet not collapsing” (from Bokyung Kim’s artist’s note), her painting has a flow in which background and subject interpenetrate too much to be called simply “construction,” while some images are concrete and the pictorial space is spatial like a stage, making it difficult to see it simply as “abstraction.”

Gazes and impressions that seem to be “collapsing” as they are captivated by images, yet do “not collapse,” remain in and as painting. The space created under—perhaps, upon—the common denominator of the image is built together as and through self-image-space, passing through “collection” and “editing.”

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