Space Construction

source: blouinartinfo

Kim Ku-lim, an active pioneer in the genre, highlights the artist’s seminal work from the 1960s and ’70s. Installations previously unrealized due to challenging specifications were recreated, and groundbreaking pieces lost over the decades have been restored in a comprehensive introduction to Kim’s oeuvre.orn in 1936 in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province, Kim became part of the art world unexpectedly. After dropping out of college he decided to move to the U.S., where he ended up at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he participated in group exhibitions alongside contemporaries that included Bruce Nauman.

On returning to his native Korea, he expanded his sights from painting to include performance and video art, and became a major player in collectives like the AG Group and the associative Fourth Group. His “The Meaning of 1/24 Second” (1969 ) was the country’s first experimental video that strung together seemingly unrelated, yet arguably critical, images at 24 frames per second.

The result is this recreation, decades after its inception in 1969, the massive cube is certainly the most eye-catching work of the collection with its confrontational size and prominent placement at the gallery entrance. But beyond its blood-red silhouette is a subtle, tempered entrancement. While the gallery thermostat has been turned down in order to slow the inevitable melting process of the ice, the cool waves of breeze emanating outwards from the masked form, pull visitors into its field of gravity and eventual disappearance.

The demonstration of these natural elements paired with light-fingered integration of Korean tradition evokes a sense of critical observation. The majority of the work was created during a turbulent time of modern Korean history, the era of martial law, dictatorships, governmental coups, and assassinations — the era of Park Chung-hee (father of President Park Geun-hye).

This is most keenly felt in the subdued painting and smaller installation work: the deconstructed series of common farming equipment comprised of a shovel broken into shards and a broom splintered into pieces; or the “Nucleus” (1964 ), which utilizes the teeth of traditional keys to comprise its protons, the shapes of which are echoed in the textured painting “Death of Sun 1.”

While Kim’s body of work is punctuated by pioneering steps — the first experimental video, the first video containing nudity (“Civilization, Woman, Money” 1969), the first body painting performance — his lasting appeal is rooted in the timeless quest to disrupt social procedures and invert our gazes onto authoritarian relationships.

Overseeing this exploration of his work are the two recreated “Space Construction” pieces, mere geometric forms rendered through points of colored light at first glance. On closer inspection, however, each bulb appears to be a form of all-seeing eye, a pupil that never dilates but concentrates its clouded red, green, yellow stares.
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source: engtheartrokr

Kim Ku-lim first started producing experimental work in the mid-1960s, but it was with his emergence as president of Group 4 (formed in 1970) — staging a funeral for the strongholds and prestige of Korea’s establishment art — that he became an indomitable artistic force, someone who would spend a lifetime being uncompromising with the world. This is not to say that he never made concessions, never acceded to the world. Anyone who met him for even a moment would know how innately uncompromising he was, but being uncompromising and refusing to compromise are two different things. Kim’s uncompromising nature as an artist owed to his spirit of refusing to compromise with the kind of establishment strongholds and prestige described above; now, perhaps ironically, is uncompromising spirit has itself become a symbol for the avant garde. He was a stranger from a strange land who perfected his uncompromising aesthetic through the “estrangement effects” of the worlds he “created” — which explains why the word “first” so often appears in describing his work.