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Cindy Ji Hye Kim

Excavating the Unconscious

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

Skeletons grin without identity, fetuses held in the air, and wooden guardians preside from above. Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s latest exhibition, Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish, at Casey Kaplan, takes shape as excavation, pulling memory, myth, and unconscious forces from layers of black pigment. She takes materials often dismissed as secondary, such as charcoal, graphite, and shades of gray, and makes them the foundation of an entire cosmology. Grayscale is her chosen terrain, a way to strip images to their raw mechanics and forge a visual language that is both archaic and contemporary. “For the last ten years, I’ve been working in what people often call black and white, though I prefer to describe it as a grayscale palette,” said Kim. “It began as a way to become better at drawing and to blur the traditional hierarchy that places painting above drawing.”

Kim’s command of grisaille links her practice to the underpinnings of art history. Having studied the Renaissance technique of gray tonal underpaintings that once governed entire compositions but were later obscured beneath glazes of color, she adapts that tradition into her own work. Within her practice, it becomes a metaphor for the unconscious, for forces that shape human life while remaining hidden from view. “That underlayer, though invisible in the final image, governs the whole composition,” she explained. “It became a metaphor for the unconscious realm I often explore, forces beneath the surface that shape human behavior.” The effect in her work is startling: images that seem carved out of shadow, as if painted memory itself were a substance. Her paintings brood, smolder, and press with an intensity that refuses to dissipate.

In Kim’s paintings, skeletons carry the drama. Bones appear again and again, anonymous yet universal. “Skeletons are both anonymous and universal,” she said. “They strip away markers of race, ethnicity, or individuality, leaving a shared human language.” There is an odd intimacy in these forms: ribs bending like reeds, vertebrae stacked in precarious towers. At times, they look archeological, as though she were unearthing rather than constructing them, a painter acting as her own paleontologist. This skeletal language allows Kim to sidestep identity as spectacle, carving out a space where mortality, vulnerability, and memory speak across divisions.

The exhibition also introduces a set of figurines that expands her vocabulary. Elevated above the viewer, they resemble guardians, their placement echoing a mural Kim produced at the SCAD Museum of Art. They draw on kokdu, brightly painted wooden effigies placed on funeral biers in Korea, intended to accompany the dead to the afterlife. “Returning to Korea for the first time in twenty years, I began reflecting on what had been lost in my own identity,” she recalled. “Making the kokdu became a ritual of both mourning and release, a way to honor that passage.” Their presence at Casey Kaplan is uncanny: they stand as silent witnesses, compressing the gallery into a ceremonial space.

Alongside these guardians, Kim’s paintings address cycles that tether human bodies to the cosmos. Medieval calendars depicting agricultural labor fascinated her: images of sowing, harvesting, and lowing, paired with the months. “These cycles tie human life to celestial rhythms and seasonal change, something we all intuitively recognize,” she said. Several works reference the autumnal equinox, when light wanes and the ground begins its period of rest. Fetal forms based on sonograms appear across canvases, alien, pulsing, suspended. She calls them “a kind of rain,” a startling metaphor for renewal, suggesting that decline and death might be indistinguishable from the seedbed of life.

The show’s title fuses psychology and sabotage. “The term ‘prehistoric wish’ comes from Freud—it refers to primal desires formed before we become rational adults,” Kim explained. As infants, these wishes are elemental—contact, embrace, survival. For Kim, painting taps that primal need: “Even when I fail, the act of making can bring an undeniable feeling of being alive.” But the title also carries self-destruction: “The word ‘saboteur’ reflects an impulse toward self-sabotage or self-erasure,” she said. This paradox, art as both primal fulfillment and potential erasure, animates the exhibition. Her paintings feel as though they come from nowhere and everywhere at once, “anonymous yet utterly singular,” as she put it.

Kim’s relationship to language further complicates her figures. In earlier works, like her 2019 Foxy Production show, she staged “character series” that paired schoolgirls in uniform with scaffolds derived from consonants and vowels. Over time, she pared this down, letting letters dissolve into skeletal architectures. Korean vowels persist in her process, transformed into scaffolds that structure images rather than convey words. “Though I can still read them, my relationship to the language has grown distant, and that detachment lets me treat them as visual elements rather than legible text,” she said. It’s a striking inversion: what should be most personal, her mother tongue, becomes estranged enough to function as an abstract form, a universal system of marks.

By the end of Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish, Kim creates structures where primal questions reverberate and refuses the comfort of answers. What does it mean to be a body? How do we live inside cycles of loss and renewal? What shapes us when our identities dissolve to bones? The exhibition resists resolution and presses insistently at these edges. In the end, Kim’s work reminds us that painting, when reduced to shadow and stripped of ornament, still carries its oldest charge: to bring the unseen to light and to return us, however briefly, to the feeling of being alive.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s “Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish” at Casey Kaplan, 121 West 27th, New York, from September 4 to October 25, 2025.