María Fragoso
Rituals of Desire
Kim’s family had moved to the UK from Seoul for his father’s work when he was young. He didn’t look much like his classmates, something that he was acutely aware of. Rendering his face at such a scale felt like it meant something. Though he couldn’t articulate quite what at the time, it was enough to make him want to go to art school. He has lived a number of lives and followed various artistic threads since. Now, he’s back to painting self-portraits. “What was I trying to say back then?” he wonders, “Is it very different from what I’m trying to say now?”
As Kim tells me this, we sit surrounded by more of his self-portraits. Closely-cropped and small in scale, the paintings vary in style and focus. Together, they form a near-forensic examination of the artist’s physical form from the shoulders up, cataloguing his ears, lips, skull shape, and hairline from a variety of angles. Each image culminates in one or both of Kim’s eyes, which come to rest impassively on my own. “It’s not just a glance,” he explains, “There’s an intent in the look that I’m giving.” I feel this look, which multiplies with each canvas in the room, bearing down on me. Kim’s most recent exhibition, at Herald St in London, was titled “The Seer, The Seen.” As I sit surrounded by his paintings, I wonder which one I am.
On the table between us is a book of paintings by Giorgio Morandi, the 20th century painter whose life’s work was to imbue the still life, a familiar subject within the history of painting, with new resonances. Tireless in his repeated rendering of the same bowls, bottles, and jugs, Morandi gave them teeth. “Even though it’s so calm and serene, there’s a tension,” Kim says. Something similar can be said of his own work. A single self-portrait is one thing, a full oeuvre of them is quite another.
Also like Morandi – whose early work involved brief entanglements with Futurism and Cubism – it took time for Kim to settle on his leitmotif. During and following his studies, he turned his hand to a number of experiments in overtly conceptual art, culminating in 2019’s “Public Toilet,” an exhibition for which he filled a Venice gallery with sculptural works that told the story of contemporary art by way of plumbing fixtures. (Though his work is very different today, Kim’s early influences remain pertinent to him: “I still think Duchamp’s urinal is the most influential artwork of the 20th century,” he tells me.)
Even at that point, though, the self-portrait figured largely in Kim’s imagination. It was, he says, “the elephant in the room.” A small number of his drawings from this period feature the same hunched figure, its face barely legible, crouching atop a cuboid shape. A phrase in their titles – The artist is on a plinth – reveals them to be proto self-portraits. An earlier work, still, A shard of my face (2012), is a plaster cast that resembles a death mask. Almost a decade and a half, and a fulsome return to self-portraiture later, the poignancy of this work is dialled up. “I had to go through ten years of experiencing life,” Kim says, “rolling my head around, going crazy about my art practice and making public toilets – just to look in the mirror again.”
Kim’s return to portraiture was also marked by a number of years spent working as a model. The work brought him great success – he credits it with giving him the financial freedom to become a full-time artist – but it also brought a difficult reckoning with his identity. Viewing himself through the lens of the Western fashion world, he felt, as he had done at school, chronically aware that he was different. He found that his face, and therein his identity as Korean, were being fetishised, and his autonomy over his image was waning.
<Read the full profile from Issue Ten>
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