2022. 4. 15 – 5. 8
Kim Hyun Soo

Born and raised in Jeju Island, a blessed environment where nature and people coexist in peace, Kim Hyunsoo captures the dense green of nature in her works, which is reconstructed based on her childhood memories. Her works represent the ‘forest of calm’, which is densely filled with trees stretching vertically, the lush green forest and the path through it, the ‘forest of waiting’ with a secluded house at the end of the road, the winding ‘country road’ running along with the symbolic shapes such as circles and triangles, ‘eternity in a moment’ in which plants captured at both sharp and round moments are crystallized in the shape of eternity. The world that the painter depicts is ‘landscape painting’, but not in a conventional sense. Kim Hyunsoo’s landscapes are far from perceiving and objectifying nature to reproduce it realistically. She describes her work as “a process of bringing out the images from deep inside”. The images usually appear as green lumps, and she explains that they are “representations of the dense green that I encountered and absorbed with my whole being in nature when I was growing up in Jeju”. She only transfers the images left in her memory and the scenes that her gaze recombines onto the canvas. It is not important whether the landscape transferred to the canvas is a real place or what it actually represents. She merely reconstructs her inner images and memories.

Born in 1992, Kim Hyunsoo majored in oriental painting in the undergraduate and graduate school of Sungshin Women’s University. Unlike in Western painting, in Oriental painting, the colors underneath are visible on the surface, shapes are drawn not by stacking colors from the background but by individually finishing them. Trees, background, and grass – each of these are colored individually and the depth of color is achieved by applying dozens of layers of paint. Kim Hyunsoo’s colors and shapes are quite implicative. She uses very restrained palette, such as green colors representing forests, leaves, and grasses, and brown colors representing branches and pillars of trees, earth and roads. The shapes are also clear, and her canvas is composed of intensive forms based on the abbreviated symbols, such as circles, triangles, and squares.

Kim Hyunsoo says in her notes for this exhibition titled < My Universe >:

“My work is a process of bringing out the images from deep inside”. I usually feel surrounded by something vague and heavy. Its size is as big as the universe, but in it I am so small and empty. To get out of it, I capture the calm and shimmering things inside of me and transfer them to the work of art.”

As can be seen from the artist’s notes, the things transferred to the canvas are those ‘things’ that have been filtered many times in the inner world of the artist, that is, they have been abbreviated and abstracted. She catches, confronts, and ponders on things inside her that are constantly floating. The filtered and crystallized figures are soon transferred to the canvas and speak to us. Kim Hyunsoo’s work is that which resonates deep in our heart, condensed in one very simple and connotative word rather than trying to convey words full of flowery eloquence and rhetoric.

Kim Jeong Won ( Curator, Gallery Mac )

Gallery MAC
2F, 162 Dalmaji-gil117beonna-gil, Haeundae-gu, Busan, Korea
+82-51-722-2201

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