Sculpture has recently been making a comeback in Korean art, following painting. A growing number of artists are calling themselves sculptors, researching new sculpture techniques and working hard to produce powerful sculpture works. Several special exhibitions have highlighted their work, either individually or collectively. But the term “comeback” implies that sculpture had disappeared, and this claim is too easily refuted. How many sculptures have appeared in our urban landscape since the Building Artwork Policy was introduced, in 1995? It can safely be said that the production of sculpture has never decreased in quantitative terms. But when it became a legal requirement to insert sculptures into the urban scenery in affiliation with buildings, the genre’s fate headed toward a sort of upside-down ready-made. Things that should have been works of art were apathetically produced and then neglected in non-artistic contexts where no one expected to see an artwork, evoking a sense of skepticism about the very nature of art among the few people who actually looked at them.

While the concept of creating a particular object known as an artwork, based on traditional aesthetic media such as painting or sculpture, cannot itself be wholly denied, it long ago started to be seen as somewhat obsolete. In Korea, video and digital media emerged as new areas of interest in the exploration of media at least as early as the 1990s, while there has been a growth in works produced using various conceptual approaches that go beyond medium-centric thought to reconsider the divisions of art itself. At the same time, art galleries have changed from specialized and exclusive abodes of artworks—as distinct from everyday objects—to open stages, allowing the symbolic, architectural and performative arrangement of various heterogeneous items. This is a well-known story. Relatively less discussed is the fact that, within this changed artistic environment, creating sculpture has suddenly become an enigma. Many artists who majored in the genre have avoided describing their works as sculpture, even when these works are indeed three-dimensional; even more frequently, they have expanded their work into media installation or changed direction altogether and moved into video work.

It was in this climate that Minae Kim majored in sculpture, in the mid-2000s. Over the past 10 years or so, while sculpture as an artistic topic sank below the surface and then came back up, she has constantly explored sculptural questions. But her approach is far from being one of dominating spaces with monumental masses that redefine the concept of sculpture. On the contrary, she recognizes a specific space for exhibition as a mold and pedestal of sculpture, from which an eccentric object is drawn to subtly disturb the order embodied in the space. In her works, sculptural elements have the capacity to open and reveal the gaps between objects and space. They redefine sculpture as a new issue, unconstrained by its traditional media—the totality of materials and convention to create an artistic volume.

Minae Kim is known for work that cleverly latches onto the architectural order which is physically constructed to program the types and ranges of events in the space, then throws it into confusion, altering spatial perception in unexpected ways. A typical example is Relatively Related Relationship (2013), a work in which Kim borrowed railings as a form and installed unidentified railing-type structures in various places throughout the exhibition hall at MMCA Gwacheon as part of the New Visions 《New Voices exhibition》 (2013). Railings are normally devices used to limit movement and prevent injury at points where changes in level occur, such as flights of steps. But Kim’s railing-shaped structures posed as safety barriers, preventing access to works to protect them from damage by viewers, or confusingly blocked lines of flow, or guided the eye along imaginary lines of movement, as if a path led up beyond the ceiling, in the absence of an actual staircase. Such works reminds of the tradition of the institutional critique, such as shutting exhibition rooms completely or smashing up the floor, and of the phenomenological approaches that cause viewers to newly perceive the exhibition venue as a purely physical space. Yet they do not yield easily to such reductive classifications.

Just as Kim’s objects belong in no specific category and constantly evade our grasp, so do her spaces. At first, the artist seems to have recognized the space as a physical and systematic institution, both an external environment and a framework already internalized inside her, then attempted to explore this confining space through sculpture. As an MA student, she attempted several works made from boxes featuring cutouts exactly the right shape for holding specific sculptures. In some (030516, 2005), the sculptures are inserted into the cutouts; in others (040111, 2004-7), they have come out of the boxes and are staring blankly at the empty holes from which they have emerged. Finally, the sculptures disappear completely, leaving several hundred empty boxes with cutout profiles of figures waving hello or goodbye (Hi-Bye, 2006-7). The link between objects and space is not one of ping-pongesque reciprocity in a single place, but one that advances constantly to new places and changes constantly into different forms.

There is more than one way to move from here. Kim could have gone beyond sculpture, or left art altogether for the world outside. She didn’t, but that does not mean we should jump to the conclusion that she failed, ultimately, to escape the yoke of the system. Rather, Kim has driven her own vehicle of space and objects, a strange contraption with a wheel on one side and a brace on the other, tottering around wherever she wanted to go. Though she herself does not claim to have been exploring sculpture until now, she has maintained a constant awareness of the rules that define the sculptural, at once reflecting them and working to find oblique angles of escape from them. Because each of her works began with different, externally-determined conditions, it is hard to sum up her entire trajectory in a single chronicle. But Kim has developed types of technique in response to the contexts of their work, and it is possible to trace the paths of these types as they evolve through constant repetition, or undergo unpredictable transformations.

First are works that send contradictory signals between movement and stasis; works that, put simply, represent situations of stalemate. By adding to an existing space a minimal number of objects imitating the architectural elements around them, Kim creates situations where all directions are open but we do not know where to go (Blind Alley, 2010), or where we are given a clear direction in which to go, but no way of doing so (Distant Stairway, 2011). The objects she has introduced are thus similar in outer appearance to functional objects but useless. This effect finds its most extreme expression in Rooftoe (2011), an imitation column, added below a truss where no column is needed, with a wheel at its base. At first glance, the work looks like a column that must stay in place, without moving, but it does not actually need to be there. It stands there, neither a proper object nor a meaningful architectural element, while the red wheel at its base serenely bears the burden of twofold redundancy.

This approach, mainly formed at Kim’s college while studying in the UK, was both a response to spatial programs for producing work and training artists, and an exploration of the impossible position for sculptures as neither everyday items nor architecture. Moving further towards works for exhibition halls, the self-denying qualities of objects grow stronger. Here, we find structures that fit perfectly into the square corners of the room when stood up, but have only one leg, with a wheel at its base, so cannot stand up by themselves (A Set of Structures for White Cube, 2012), works made from three connected wooden crutches that can stand up by themselves but have lost their original function of movement (Free-standing Sculpture, 2012) and works that invalidate their own specificity by accepting all the functions and meanings of objects that are legally allowed into the exhibition venue (Golden Pillars – Table, Plinth and Object, 2012).

The artist did not stay for long in this blind alley in which objects had to assert and prove themselves. By this time there were already plenty of venues that, unlike classical White Cube with its principles of pure space exclusively for exhibiting artworks, upheld the historical character of their locations and the architectural qualities of their buildings, opening themselves to extra-artistic contexts. This provided Kim with room for new experimentation. She focused on making objects abandon the will to move or its opposing lethargy, physically or virtually reflect and multiply the spaces in which they were placed. To this end, she introduced walls and curtains, windows and mirror frames, or simply flat objects of various sizes, transparencies and reflectances. The forms of fake windows recur with particular frequency. Kim installs framed canvas and lighting in the shape of windows on the inside and outside of an external venue wall (Behind the Scene, 2012), or hangs a mirror on the front and back of a partitioning wall between two identical police cells (La Reproduction Interdite, 2012), creating the illusion of a window. Such devices, as intended by the artist, not only deceive the eyes of viewers but function as a type of public screen, inducing viewers to imagine what lies beyond them—spaces that do not actually exist and therefore cannot be confirmed.

Strictly speaking, these were not completely new experiments but repeat attempts at the approach taken by Kim in 2008 at her first Seoul solo exhibition, 《Anonymous Scenes》. But while in 2008 she focused on materially presenting the spatial illusions she had experienced around her, and the fantasies they triggered, within the exhibition space, her works this time adopted a structure that was comparatively open to the unknowable memories and imaginings of those passing through the space at that moment, including the artist herself, or those who had occupied it in the past. This approach was further solidified in 2013’s Richard Smith, a one-day project in collaboration with curator Kwon Hyukgue. For this work, based in a project space at a shopping arcade in a residential area due for redevelopment, Kim posited an imaginary figure who had lived in the neighborhood and created ambiguous situations that allowed viewers to imagine meeting him. Here, the artist and viewers were placed in the same predicament of having to conjure an image of an unknown being based on only a small handful material remains. Ingeniously, the entrance to this space, with its shutter half pulled down, bore a strong similarity to Continuous Reflection, a work displayed at Kim’s 2008 first solo exhibition, in which the artist installed mirrors on the exhibition space wall and pulled shutters partially down over them, reflecting an earlier experience in which she had mistaken the corrugated pattern on a wall for a shuttered door. To those who remembered the 2008 work, this produced the fantastical feeling that the space beyond the mirrors back then had transcended space- time and opened out in London.

Creating such virtual leaps and jumps has been a key driving force in Kim’s subsequent works. The huge pink and black rubber balls that appeared at her at her second solo exhibition, 《Thoughts on Habit》 (2013), implied a new kind of motility, able to roll or bounce off anywhere. These elements appeared repeatedly in subsequent works, changing form into guises such as immaterial light-based images (Black, Pink Balls, 2014), graphic surfaces stuck to exhibition space walls (Conditional Drawings, 2015) or small, hard snooker balls (Black, Pink Balls, 2018). Just as divining the future in scattered rice grains is closer to resolving compulsive anxiety about a specific future possibility than to actually reading the future, these balls deliberately introduce randomness, rather than being mechanically subordinated to the given conditions and responding routines of the artist’s work.

Recently, Minae Kim has focused not on physically occupying space but on emptying it as far as possible while evoking strange thoughts, impressions or instructions that swell like phantoms within it. In her 2018 exhibition 《GIROGI》, she used unexpected methods to transform the exhibition space into a kind of moving image. Generally, white outlines of birds that appear fat in comparison to the size of their wings are expanded to fill the walls, irrespective of their original sizes. Moving light and sound give the impression that the birds move momentarily though, of course, this is not actually the case. While, in several senses, the question of how sculptural things could move is one that ran through Kim’s previous works, 《GIROGI》 offers the most recent answer. Sculpture remains in a liminal space between agoraphobia and claustrophobia, leaving us uncertain how to feel. But within this space, it moves endlessly. Whether we must call the results of these movements sculpture or see them as the invention of another medium, has yet to be decided. It seems, perhaps, that the artist wants to leave it undecided for as long as possible.

References

• 올해의 작가상 (Korea Artist Prize)