At SPACE MOUM, Kim Eull’s exhibition 《Bad Drawing》 presents an accumulation of thought and sensibility on art, life, and the life of making art. Looking closely at the works on view, the word ‘bad’ first appears to signal a lack—whether of the concentrated originality of technique, an ostensibly profound subject, or the labor and capital often expected to support such claims. In an era of relentless competition, even art—supposedly the freest of pursuits—comes attached to countless conditions. Yet most of these peripheral conditions do not resolve the fundamental problems art must confront on its own; they function instead as proxy mechanisms of consumption.

In this sense, Kim Eull’s practice—stripped of such bubbles—poses a direct, unsentimental proposition, even as prevailing standards in the world may differ. For over two decades, Kim Eull has devoted himself to drawing, producing approximately 30,000 works on paper. However, the time and volume of this sustained practice do not necessarily translate into unwavering belief in painting. He has worked tirelessly, and with equal intensity he remains skeptical toward painting itself.

On one side of a space filled with works and objects hangs a work uniform embroidered by the artist with the phrase ‘a joyful world that doesn’t need paintings.’ This statement, light in tone yet substantial in weight, embodies a pointed paradox. If humanity were to progress into an ideal society in which freedom and equality no longer contradict each other, art might become unnecessary: art is often regarded as the pinnacle of individual freedom, and arguably the last of the privileges to be equally enjoyed. Yet reality demonstrates how the freedom of a few can harm the freedom of many—most starkly in the opposing freedoms of capital and labor. What governs the present is a false freedom that ignores others’ unfreedom, and a false equality leveled downward. Solutions differ by worldview. From a leftist perspective, art is often seen as something to be overcome, with the claim that until a truly ideal society arrives, art should serve as an instrument of political movement.
 
In this context, the avant-garde’s assertion of the ‘death of art’—and likewise the ‘death of painting’—has repeatedly surfaced. For the left, art is not the final goal but a transitional means within the broader path of human emancipation. By contrast, right-leaning positions have tended to fetishize art as a possession of the few, akin to sacred private property. Concepts sharing a family resemblance—autonomy of art, art for art’s sake, pure art, formalism—position art against society and attempt to exclude the social from the artistic. This is an easy solution that resolves (or leaves unattended) contradiction by removing one side altogether, often rendering art hypocritical or impaired. Yet leftist solutions, too, have been shown to remain bound to classical prescriptions—an idealized unity of truth, goodness, and beauty—rather than genuine ‘realism.’ Kim Eull’s phrase ‘a joyful world that doesn’t need paintings’ may touch the horizon of a leftist ideal, but it would be difficult to imagine him endorsing a tendency to instrumentalize art as a political tool.
 
For now, the artist appears to hold a compromise—an ‘equilibrium between the living ground of reality and one’s ideals.’ What Kim Eull calls ‘bad’ in this exhibition remains intentionally ambiguous: the term could point to the rigid paintings he critiques in the world at large, or to his own works—works that some might question, asking, “Is this painting?” In any case, within 《Bad Drawing》 he makes paintings about painting. Occupying Gallery 2, the ‘Beyond the Painting’ series aims toward ‘meta-painting’: a critical painting of painting itself. Here, the artist regards the surface of painting as ‘a field of lies and pretense, adornment and distortion,’ and turns his attention to what lies behind it. According to him, the mindset that elevates painting through subject matter or form tends to produce rigid works rather than works that feel natural. The posture of ‘Do you even understand painting?’ aligns with a romanticized image of the artist that inflates the subject, and the artist’s self-consciousness can be equally constricting. In this exhibition, a face—its features erased—stands upside down on the floor, revealing the impulse to erase even the most minimal trace of self-importance.
 
Erasure may enable writing. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter observes that Zen practitioners seek to understand themselves more deeply by breaking rules and conventions and freeing themselves from what once held them. The other becomes an index of the same, because the same is composed of the other. It is certain that erasure must precede novelty—yet the previous is never completely erased; it leaves traces behind. Kim Eull remarks, ‘Painting is short, and life is short.’ For an artist who sees ‘life itself as meaningless,’ art becomes “to regard the meaningless as meaningless, as it is”—to see ‘nothing’ as it is. His works, searching for meaning in meaninglessness, hover on the boundary between art and non-art. For him, drawing is a flexible field that can move beyond formative frameworks, including painting. It is precious precisely because it retains an initial freshness, and because it contains fragments that arise from life.
 
Drawing accompanies writing, and text and image operate in a complementary relationship. The questions of art and life are profound—debated endlessly, yet never fully answerable—yet Kim Eull approaches them through a style that may appear loose or even clumsy, while remaining incisive. Exhibition-making is another matter: it requires selecting and organizing works executed over a long span within a specific time and space. Gallery 3 presents a drawing installation that weaves drawings together with objects inside and outside the exhibition. Rather than the oppressive gravity of “important work,” Kim Eull’s key vocabulary advances with a lighter step: drawings and objects. Historically, the value of drawing and objects rose to prominence through Dada and Surrealism, which sought to awaken the latent or repressed unconscious. His studio is filled with objects gathered over time. In the 2016 MMCA exhibition for the 《Korea Artist Prize》 program, he reconstructed a corner of that studio, and in his 2010 exhibition at Space Gongmyeong he released roughly 450 objects into the space.
 
His works on paper are not so different. ‘I don’t buy paper separately… I always pick it up,’ he says. By erasing or adding to something already found, unintended results can emerge—exemplified by the ‘Reviving Dead Paintings’ series (2004). Going further, objects are sometimes attached to these ‘impure’ planes, shifting attention away from ‘art’ and toward things. In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot—citing Rilke—recalls that ‘the point of departure of art is in things,’ describing them as ‘humble, silent, and serious beings.’ Unlike commodities, goods, or even artworks, things are free (or indeterminate) from utility, function, and fixed meaning. Kim Eull’s exhibition lifts the heaviness embedded in the very words ‘art’ and ‘work.’ Instead, he works without ceasing—during studio hours, in the hour or two before sleep, and even in dreams. Even when consciousness is occupied elsewhere, the unconscious fire directed toward work remains lit.
 
Art may be difficult to sustain as a profession, but a life wholly devoted to art is possible. While everyday life often becomes consumed by labor and consumption, the artist continues to think and enact art without pause. Depending on one’s political and aesthetic orientation, such enactments might be called experiments or practices. The artist is one who seeks to share the results of such enactments with others. The drawing installations in Gallery 3 seem to pursue lightness to the point of escaping gravity itself. Drawings made on paper without supports hang from strings with clips, or rest on floating desks. Leaning on thread or branches, they flutter and spin. Because they are not firmly fixed, stones are placed on them so they will not fly away; steel balls or weights are sometimes attached. A worn desk is tied to a pillar and suspended in the air, while a self-portrait lies upside down on the floor as if discarded. None of the installed drawings offers a stable view; even those placed on a desk demand physical effort—stepping up—to see them closely.
 
These precarious, barely attached presences suggest the fragility of art’s place in life. Yet the works do not simply ‘float’: what anchors each drawing’s center of gravity is text alongside the image—namely, the artist’s thought. Because many are made on small pieces of paper, words often claim their position even more decisively than images. Brief statements—only one or two lines—can appear like Zen koans, or recall the East Asian tradition of poetry, calligraphy, and painting. In one work, a stone is placed on white paper with the text: ‘A stone on white paper… creation has begun again and the world is starting to shake.’ Though small, the result is monumental. The stone on the plane reads like a massive boulder or mountain—or perhaps a metaphor for the magical moment when a drawn image becomes a physical entity.
 
A painting does not merely reflect the world; it is another world existing in parallel. The existence of such worlds may console free spirits who are easily alienated in reality. In fact, dominant systems invest enormous capital and technology to seize this last domain that remains with the human body. Spectacles produced by the ‘dream factory’ increasingly replace art. Yet Kim Eull remains endlessly skeptical of the artist and the work. The upside-down self-portrait with omitted features carries the suspicion that the self may be false. A work clipped like laundry bears the phrase ‘a scene of someone burning something in a field,’ raising doubt: could it be the artist’s own work that is being burned? He has burned drawings into ash, or molded the ash into rice-cake-like forms and stacked them. These ash-transformed drawings reveal a skepticism that asks what use art could possibly have.

At the same time, drawings stacked like rice cakes seem to carry an enduring hope shared by artists—that art might become as sustaining as food. Whether rice cake (life) or ash (death), drawing lies in the process between life and death. A Zen-like drawing continually calls time to mind: all living beings, including humans, are bound to the cycle of birth, aging, illness, and death, unfolding along the axis of time. If a work is a microcosm—and if a work is as light as a sheet of paper—might the universe be the same? Figures tied to pillars, pieces of wood, and works suspended from steel balls compress the universe, literally, into a single sheet. A stiff plastic doll, upright like a mummy, inhabits this universe with the phrase: ‘You will die and return to the center of the universe.’ The universe and life, born from dust, will return to dust; an endlessly recurring view of time can feel more affirmative than an apocalyptic belief in an end. Like dust particles glittering in sunlight, images containing the universe and life flutter at random, dismantling the illusory apparatus of painting.
 
Works without a foundation—or works that remove the foundation—transform the reality in which they stand into an abyss. The method is light and transparent, rigorous and consistent—and simple. Yet this simplicity is not merely literal; it is a higher-order simplicity. Mathematics and physics repeatedly show that the higher the knowledge, the simpler it can become. Kim Eull achieves this through the works most familiar to him, but the question extends outward: are not the elements that make up our environments—especially possessions and products—equally mutable and fluid? The installation method, in which six drawings operate separately and together, reflects a long-standing interest in treating paintings like things. In his 2006 exhibition at ARKO Art Center, he formed a spiral band of images and suspended it in midair. Installing drawings privileges not an optical distance penetrated by perspective, but a field of perceptual experience that approaches and changes moment by moment. If painting is representation, things are presentation; Kim Eull presents painting like a thing.

When modern art sought to move beyond representationalism, the object became a crucial compass—exemplified by Cubist collage, Surrealist objects, and more recently the post-minimalist shift toward experiential fields composed of things rather than discrete works. In Gallery 2, the ‘Beyond the Painting’ series plays with the classical metaphor of painting as a window. In Kim Eull’s work, window/wall/space resembles a Lego game with countless combinations. Painting once served as a transparent window onto the world, but here the artist draws another window onto the window. A window within a window could open endlessly, like successive computer screens—an act of tautology and self-reference. These are ‘transcendent’ paintings that reflect on painting by painting paintings about painting. Yet for him, transcendence is not distant or performative; it is recursive, returning to the point of departure. By painting the wall to which the window is attached, he also hints at painting’s historical shift—from window to wall—as art moved from classical realism to modernism.
 
This may also be a form of representation: the window images, similar in elements yet varied in permutations, recall mechanically cut windows in container houses or prefabricated buildings near Seoul, where his studio is located. Add a line beneath two windows, and one might imagine the anonymous modern subject living in a ‘machine for living.’ Here the window is an eye, but it does not face outward. The modern gaze that claims transparency can, in fact, be blind. If cities are filled with apartment blocks, their peripheries are filled with modular buildings—mass-produced by standardized methods. The backgrounds, often painted in flat tones of blue, blur whether we are seeing a section of wall with windows or the sky itself. Some works replace white clouds with sprayed paint marks, suggesting that wall and window are fluid. Windows or doors may be arranged in perspective; the former leans toward representation, the latter toward fantasy. In any case, painting—whether primal or meta—becomes the site where representation and fantasy meet.
 
While the independent painting emerged with modernity, the modes of thought underpinning painting trace back to ancient philosophy. In What Is Painting?, Julian Bell compares painting with two classical lines of thinking: Aristotle suggests people make images because they desire knowledge, while Plato opposed images, believing they were made to indulge vain desires. Bell notes that Plato’s “idea” concerned how things exist in the mind of the divine rather than the human; “form” is a general translation of the Greek “idea.” A Platonic sense of beauty connects to classicism and abstract art, while Aristotle’s commitment to mimesis fostered illusionistic techniques that replicate natural objects as closely as possible. Yet neither ideas nor objects can escape typification: both seek to represent something, differing only in whether they represent an idea or a thing. The effort to overcome representationalism has shaped modern philosophy and aesthetics. Kim Eull’s self-reflective paintings similarly carry an awareness of the problem of representation; the frames and systems he repeatedly interrogates relate, ultimately, to representational apparatuses.
 
In the ‘Beyond the Painting’ series, black windows positioned on blue grounds exist like monads—elements of the universe and mirrors reflecting it. In 2016, within the MMCA 《Korea Artist Prize》 exhibition, Kim Eull presented a vast universe composed of such monads. Each work becomes a fragmentary meditation on self, art, and life; together they form a kind of self-portrait. In the present exhibition, a universe made of these mental atoms is presented as a fluttering sheet of drawing. One corner of this universe-map—containing the artist’s own body, stiff like a discarded doll—is left unfastened, swaying in the airflow of a small fan installed in the gallery. It may tear, but the artist does not appear overly concerned. The work itself is made on recycled paper, and the black works are often the result of erasing earlier images with black acrylic; if damaged, it too will return to the center of the universe.
 
A sheet of paper fluttering in the wind has front and back, and it exists in three-dimensional space in shifting forms. It is not merely a simple two-dimensional surface, as painting is conventionally defined. When painting insists only on its flatness—its supposed self-identity—it collides with the wall. Modernism, often seen as a major departure since the Renaissance, may be understood as a move from window to wall. But seen through Beyond the Painting, where wall and window are drawn together, the shift appears minimal. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter analyzes Escher’s works as conflicts between plane and space, citing Escher’s remark that ‘two-dimensionality is a fiction,’ since nothing—not even a thin polished mirror—is perfectly two-dimensional; yet we cling to the convention that walls and paper are flat, and on such surfaces we build spatial illusions. Hofstadter interprets this as meaning that no matter how hard we try to simulate three dimensions in two, the essence of three-dimensionality always escapes; we respond to multidimensional aspects captured within the two-dimensional.
 
Despite the persuasive rhetoric of modern aesthetics, the plane of painting is never complete—no more than three-dimensional reality is. Yet the transitions and transformations between dimensions produce compelling points. What matters is not here or there, but the process of moving from here to there, or from there to here. Kim Eull values process over results. His emphasis on drawing—expanded in meaning—marks that commitment. A notable example is a work in which he drew circles the diameter of a paper cup on 206 memo sheets from Project Space SARUBIA. In the ‘Pi 50’ series (2004), he drew whatever came to mind within a 5-centimeter diameter during the time it took to drink a cup of instant coffee.

These sheets record—one per day over nearly a year—what he thought while eating lunch. There is no predetermined idea of what to draw, yet once gathered, they become a self-portrait. One does not begin from a clear point; one becomes the unknown. Kim Eull says, ‘All day long, every day, I do small, meticulous things that my hands can do.’ Without a specific goal, he draws what passes in the moment—ultimately, ‘everything related to oneself.’ There is a subject (or object) within the absence of a subject (or object). This memo-pad mode of working can, as in his MMCA exhibition, rise into a monumental wall-filling universe that is also a self-portrait—yet even that is only part of an ongoing, never-final process. For him, making is an enactment that holds no answers, only questions—like life itself. In that sense, his practice recalls a Zen response to the question ‘What is the true path?’: ‘The path you walk every day is the true path.’

References

• [비평] 예술, 삶, 그리고 예술 하는 삶
  [Critique] Art, Life, and the Life of Making Art