24 Feb - 31 Mar 2011 

 Ha Young Kim

At 43 Inverness Street Gallery

London based South Korean artist Ha Young Kim’s paintings and drawings will be shown from 24 February  till 31 March 2011.

Private View : Wed 23 February 2011 6-10pm

On the ground floor, two large paintings on canvas and a drafting   film introduce themes that dominate Kim’s work. Tropical Punch and Only a   Little Push (both 2011), are bold images active with high-keyed   colours. While the light is shallow, layers of translucent paper give an   atmospheric depth. The subject matter is violently visceral. Punches   are thrown repeatedly from all directions at once. The brute physicality   of the images penetrate the surface, suggesting an emotional and   psychological space beyond the picture plane.  Kim’s use of colour   relates to “Dan Chung”, a palette used on traditional wooden buildings   in Korea and fabrics used in Korean shamanistic rites. Smaller paintings   in the same room elaborate on similar forms, but are painted on sheer   polyester. Eat In and Out, Mop, Diagnosis and Guinea Pig center on   corporeal abstraction; these representations of the body are rollicking.   Some part of some person is constantly being crimped or curled or   digested, perhaps all three at once.

Upstairs, Lying to Myself, a grid of 49 paintings on paper expand   Kim’s subject through variation and repetition. In each painting, two   characters appear to harangue a third. What at first seems cute is   slowly revealed to be more problematic. Is the face one face, three   faces, forty-nine faces, or one hundred and forty seven faces?   Chromatically punctuated, and economical, these pictures are   individually enigmatic and engrossing in their totality. 

Ha Young Kim’s paintings and drawings conjure a hallucinatory space.   The rendering in these works is allied to a cartoon sensibility, but the   images are intractable. There are no doll-eyed characters primed for   projection and desire. Here, Kim offers food and regurgitation or facial   distortions and other manipulations of body. “Wish-fulfillment is the   meaning of each and every dream,” just as painting materialises the   desire of the artist to produce an image. Parallels to dreamwork are   evident in Kim’s conflations of uneasy body representations with   ambiguous pictorial qualities. In them, action occurs in time which   seems to go both forward and back. Simple autonomous characters of manga   have been replaced by a zone populated by an uncanny coterie of blank   test subjects and floppy globs of stringy tangles. Like peering through   the eye-holes of a mask, these works offer an inside-out view of   relentless grabbing, poking, prodding, devouring and expelling;   cartoonishness that paradoxically invites empathy.