A blossom of imagination generated by memories

Ha Kye Hoon(art critic)

All humans have memories. Although there are differences between people, they remember things they have experienced for a certain period of time. If numbers of meeting repeat, then recollection can be reinforced by that amount. Even if people close their eyes, they can remember as if they are looking at it directly. On the contrary, some are able to remember selective parts about a subject seen long time ago, or in generally ambiguous memories, impressions of the subject are connected with certain circumstances or things often in an edited state of imagination in reality.

The flower painted by Kim Yang Hee comes from memories of her childhood. The scent of flowers that she repeatedly smelled in her youth has been stamped in her mind and recalled from memories decades later. The flower is reincarnated as an image in her paintings. The flowers are remembered not only by their sense of sight, but also by their sense of smell and touch. However, the recollections of the flowers in her childhood lose definition as time goes by, so that the artist’s imagination fills the vacancy. Therefore, her flowers are generated by memories, completed by imagination and reveals the artist’s sensuous experience and consciousness.

Kim Yang Hee feels animistic emotions along with reminiscence from flowers of her canvas. Therefore, the flowers visualized in her work are representative of people’s emotion. However, at the same time, it represents life and energy beyond the imagery. The reddish-orange poppies filling the picture on a cobalt blue background release a feeling of vitality of living creatures like humans and animals. It also embodies a spiritual presence rather than a focus on realistic recreation. On the other hand, it reveals a unique charm that infiltrates the mind of viewers and transcends into dreamlike world of imagination.

When taking a look at Kim Yang Hee’s painting, it is hard to verbalize the beauty, scent, softness and splendor of flowers. However, one can find a figure in illusion that makes it difficult to escape from it. The flowers, submerged in a certain invisible liquid and floating in air, shows petals that have dissolved into void as an existence of self, and as it shifts to something new. Her flowers are presented as petals filling the canvas like an impulse of radiating energy from some bottomless place.

According to Kim Yang Hee, an artist overcomes the inherent limitation of objects including humans, and cannot suppress the desire for moving forwards to transcend into a higher state of reality. It can be viewed as the visualization of active self-fulfillment desire in modern society and a longing for revolution of species rather than looking at wants or wishes with negative eyes of desire.

In one form, the shape of a flower in her painting gradually falls apart to become increasingly abstract. Red petals are dissolved at the edges showing a dissolutive process of living things like the unraveling of threads. The stamen and pistil are also detached into plies of threads emerging from the deep center of the flower to the surface as if it is floating. Eventually the dismantling process of figures indicates the destruction of shapes leading to the next phase and simplified colors.

When it enters the violet color phase on the canvas, Kim Yang Hee’s work depicts an abstract level beyond a reproductive phase with colors becoming monotone, unrealistic and symbolic. When observing her work, this change can be accepted as a shift of natural context and justifies a change of painting that is consistent with formal elements such as color, line and texture. Comparing the monotones in paintings, the expression of emphasis of light and shade and vitality of stroke stimulate the viewer’s eyes gradually leading to an abyss of mysterious fantasy. 

Installation art works presented with two-dimensional paintings are a series of the theme “obsession” scrutinized before. Rather than desire and obsession captivating man, it can be interpreted as visualized installation of three-dimensional works to overcome the inherent limitation of existence and to transcend one’s will beyond impulse. In these works, she also maintains the imagery of flowers keeping consistency in the subject using Korean paper, Hanji. However, it can be assumed that she is seeking an extension of formation and diverging from two-dimensional works for expression.

Kim Yang Hee has devoted her energy to her works to visualize the lives of flowers to reflect fate in existence, and to represent a continuous transcending of this fate. Though every step of changes is expressed by various forms, a subject matter throughout her works is consistent with a blossom of imagination generated by her memories. Thus she has scrutinized existence and questions of life through her depiction of the flower. 

Desire of Flowers

  Yang-Hee, Kim has been drawing flowers. Her flowers expressed by the thick brush strokes are very familiar images and we can feel the plumpness from the volume of leaves as like a feeling dropped from heavy pulp of tropical flora. 

The pollen is scattered in the wind. The lines like sticky liquid are drawn around the outskirts of the flowers. 

The gauzelike thin lines as a cobweb are tempting us to the secret room just like a spider's temptation while it builds its nest. 

Like sweet melody, these lines disperse and again soak into between around the running liquid, as if it is attracted by some powerful magnetism.

  

She has constantly sought for the variation of living things such as mutated flowers. So that the flowers in her works metastasize an insectivorous plant. 

The power being emitted from the deep of thick leaves is to feel very heavy for our eyes. It brings different feelings from the splendor, beauty, and tenderness associated with the subject matter of 'flower'. 

Her flower itself looks very light visually but it has hidden another inside.

  The title of her works, 'Obsession', is 'a something to fascinate her'. 

These desire and impulse from her obsession permeate her body therefore she is drawing the flowers in the core of her works. 

'Obsession' is not a ideology which reproduces the desire and impulse. But it is something deep to convey something visible, that is the destiny of living things to constantly transform to something invisible.

  The body is a main part of thought in our everyday life. But the body could not always have succeed to express its desire by itself with language. 

Although the body with self observation constantly spreads out a lot of story with normal language, there is the insufficiency of the disagreement between the body and the language. 

Language merely can expressed just a part of body forever.

  

 To use the expression of Merlean-Ponty, people have related with not only the surrounding of their body from living but also the body of having good command of language. The body is the subject of experience as well as thinking. Therefore, the body can not help thinking another dimension from the vibrations between pure consciousness and pure nature, activity and passivity, autonomy and heteronomy, reflective and positive thought. 

It is the limits of body that could not be decided as a specific  appearance. 

If the body has significance and the significance is produced from the body, it will appear through the system of representation.

  Yang-Hee, Kim in her flowers is approaching to a part of desire to  cling to something. This is the attachment to overcome anxiety from her inside. She intentionally exposes her inside by means of breaking down her anxiety. 

With the inspection of its hidden desire she breaks down herself again through her works. Desire and impulse permeate into her body and then stand in the core of her drawings. 

Flowers are described as the core of a active and passive body system. As if flowers always are not themselves, the body turns to be mixed with, imagined as and created as another.

  Flowers colored by pink, yellow, and primary colors are their wish  already exposed. The wish has hidden itself under the limits of unavoidable destiny. 

The structure of a plant which consists of root, stem, and leaf has the destiny that it sticks to the ground without any movement. It is a destiny of plant that should be accepted as the laws of nature for a long time from. 

And it is the heavy truth on our shoulders.  The truth is a shadow of silence behind a lot of colorful praise as like success. 

In order to overcome that flowers have a figure of temptation  by fragrance, brilliant colors, and sweet honey. They look forward to liberty through a body of an insect. 

They let tiny cells of pollen scatered to all directions in order to show off their existence to us that are not bound by their destiny.

  The flowers of Yang-Hee, Kim spread out their alter egoes to all directions as like pollen. 

The sticky white emission from the flowers is not only the eternally opened world of desire and emotion but also an incomplete world(différence). 

It is her passion which emits onto another incomplete world(l'autre différence) far from the realm where could be difficult to be explained with esthetic inference based on rationality such as comparision and harmony.

 The artist comes apart the fatal anguish of flowers into the sticky liquid and its cobwebbed traces in her works which soften decorative brilliance.  

Energies from her inside is let to spread to all directions. Human time restraint and historical yoke is cumbersomely felt as like a deeply stuck root. 

The fate that they can not move turns to be seeds, which get scattered around. The seeds are her wish that she would send far away  the life time hidden in the inside of fruits untouched. 

  Flowers already have a ability to conceive life with beautiful figures of temptation. Due to it flowers can be identified with the femininity of an animal world. 

Flowers are not only a reflected image of artist's thought, but also another body which is reflected through artist's body. 

Yang-Hee, Kim recreats something that it is difficult to undefine as flowers with keeping a original figure of plants which is not againt any other creature.

Kwang-Suk, Jo (Art Critic)