In his invitation exhibition, "Social Landscape", artist Kim Nam-Jin introduces all of a sudden a very curious form of art, a wooden panel graved by electric drill and then applied paints, into the contemporary Korean art scene and turns it into a critical comment on Korea's contemporary artistic stereotypes. Kim's works of art could be experienced both as painting and sculpture in terms of their mode of production.

  After spending years investigation the possibility of the so-called post-painterly genre, trying to probe into the specific power of art to express the relation between the visible and the invisible, and looking around the art world for every different avenue to reveal the social consciousness of his own, Kim came to the conclusion that it is the best he can do to at once portray and sculpt the "Social Landscape" by means of a unique and unconventional technique, the use of electric drill.

  What is at stake in his works of art is manifold. First, it is concerned with the "Death of Painting' from the art historical perspective. Second, it demonstrates that the contemporary art has almost turned to the Thought, and hence shouldn't be viewed in the traditional manner in which works of art up to the period of Modernism used to be. Kim's works have stopped to be a visible object. Rather, they are embodying an invisible meaning which has to be read rather than viewed. Finally, it reveals that some of good works of art are caused by a sort of twisting of meaning based upon the break with the existing ideology of artist's own, which one often notices in art history. In fact, Kim's "Social Landscape" could be called an artistic result that his art has produced after reading the social mechanism against the grain of his own ideologies. Art History tells us that most of the great works of art are the man-ifestation of the uncanny dialectic of meaning, the story of its victory over the spontaneous philosophy of artists' own.  

  In this sense, viewers are invited not to see his works but to ponder over them and to explore what the title "Social Landscape means. Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin once said, "I shut my eyes in order to see." The statement is more philosophical than anything else because the state without the sense of sight spells that of thought. For those who are not unfamiliar both with the passage from Modernism to the contemporary art and the philosophical kinship between contemporary art and Thought, the exhibition itself might be a big intellectual challenge. Kim Nam-Jin, I think, is one among the artists who do not flirt with the art market or commercial success but continue to work within the art historical context in which any true criticism of each artist is embedded.