[Reading Paintings: Artist] (77) Yoonah Kim ②

Yoonah Kim’s “in-between gap” is both the “between” and the “gap” separating presence from absence. The “in-between gap” described here is nothing other than a momentary death captured within a moment of life. Life and momentary death share the same grain as presence and absence: presence arrives at absence through disappearance, while absence, precisely by being absent, presupposes presence.

What allows us to distinguish presence from absence, however, depends largely on a certain inclination that confirms presence and on signs of a concluded existence that reveal absence. It is also conditioned by the fact that these concepts have already been demarcated within the domain of the speaker/painter.

The 2016 work Island reveals the artist’s “intervention” into this “in-between gap” more clearly. Later serving as a prototype for Untitled, the work constructs a structure in which temporal elements entwining balloons settled within the space and sharp razor blades closely connect divided space with painting.

For this reason, a restricted mode of observation that resists easy approach fragments each viewer’s sense of time and allows the anonymous viewer to encounter and examine presence and absence. Perhaps it is an “island-gap” that is neither presence nor absence, or that remains beside both presence and absence—neither distant nor close, unable either to extend a hand or to grasp one.

Yoonah Kim’s longstanding concern with “presence and absence” has taken many formal variations: being and nothingness, life and death, harmony and disharmony, contradiction and compromise, deficiency and rupture, the instant and eternity. There is no hierarchy or order among them.

What remains is simply this: when a ground once believed to be secure suddenly disappears, existence itself comes to read its own absence; when even the slightest desire is severed, an intensified awareness of absence emerges; and only when absence grids itself onto eternity does presence become maximized.


Yoonah Kim, Event Horizon, 2016, Installation (oil painting/rotten tongue, weeds, soil), Dimensions variable © Yoonah Kim

Yet the visibility—or form—of presence and absence can only be read while one is alive. Once something has vanished or been erased, everything becomes meaningless and its existence can no longer be apprehended.

Presence is always relative, because it exists only insofar as it is recognized by another. Accordingly, the visibility of presence and absence found in Yoonah Kim’s work is necessarily relational and dynamic. And what we encounter in the midst of this relation is, as noted earlier, the “in-between gap.”

As can be seen in the weeds used in Step Passed Me, the many paintings, installations, and texts by Yoonah Kim that we encounter can likewise be understood as things gathered from a vividly lived life, whether desired or not.

Because of the nature of art, surface reactions or their outcomes are inevitably positioned visually with greater weight placed on one side or another. Yet the space between the two terms signified and signifier merely designates the “gap” that must be written through the artist’s “life” and through the artistic language seized or discovered within that life.

Having observed her work for roughly a decade, I believe that Yoonah Kim refuses to accept anything stale or banal that has been detached from reality. At times she appears like a monk setting out in search of truth, and at others like a young person willingly entering an arduous journey in search of the self, exposing life in its raw state.

At the same time, however, her work often reveals an awareness that her own existence, or the many absences that exist yet remain unseen, may in fact be profoundly ordinary. Particularly in her tendency to resist fixed personal experiences, values, and worldviews—a shifting and active stance—her various forms of mental nomadism suggest that she still has opportunities to approach a wide range of possibilities.

Among these works, Step Passed Me and Untitled are especially effective examples of this awareness of ordinariness and of her shifting, active form of mental nomadism.


Yoonah Kim, Untitled, 2017, Installation (razor blades, string, sculpture, sound work), Dimensions variable © Yoonah Kim

Although we exchange presence and absence within the sites constructed by the artist and discover traces fluttering in the air, intervals, gaps, and islands, we continually read in them a parallel simultaneity and recognize an almost fated “impossibility of intervention.” And yet, because of something as sharp as the razor blades in Untitled, we find ourselves lingering helplessly around them.

In place of the artist, who attempts to intervene in “beings that cannot help but feel absent because they have not been granted existential value,” we maintain only a vague empathy with what is present. Yoonah Kim’s installations and paintings penetrate precisely this point: the gap-island-interval that seems piercing yet porous, sharp yet suffused with affection.

Where, then, does this in-between gap originate for Yoonah Kim? As noted earlier, it is a trace and fissure of life organized around the axis of the “self.” It is both a “between” and an “island.” At first glance, it may be described as an expression of the joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure that continually accumulate in the artist’s mind and heart.

More precisely, however, it is an indirect manifestation of intervention into what is present and absent and of the impossibility of such intervention, revealing the discontinuities of the spaces and gaps between them—at times layering and interweaving even pain and sorrow. It is, in other words, a “hospitality toward pain,” received as something both sorrowful and beautiful.

For a fuller understanding of Yoonah Kim’s work, I recommend encountering it in person. Photography has its limitations when it comes to conveying even the sublime emotions that arise upon encountering a particular object or environment.

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