In a career spanning four decades, Yong-Ik Kim’s work has reflected and challenged the social and political climate of his native Korea. Early on, while a student of Park Seo-bo, Kim gained attention for his Plane Object series – raw, unstretched fabric panels hung on the wall with folds and wrinkles emphasized by airbrushed paint. In the early 1990s, he began painting a grid of dots, a formal/conceptual approach that carries through to the present day. Early on, the dots represented perfection, authority, and rigidness, and he depicted them in contrast to more imperfect forms of mark-making like scribbles, stains, or even mold. In The Lingering Shadow…#16-5 exhibits Kim’s continued exploration of these ideas, seen in the play between the regular, authoritarian pattern of dots and the beauty of the stained, runny marks at lower right. Kim’s work has been widely shown and collected, and he was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, in 2016.
photo credit: keith park