Farewell Kipling
KIM JIHEE SOLO EXHIBITION
2023. 04. 19 - 29
8 Rue Chapon, 75003 Paris, France
Artist Statement
<Farewell Kipling> is the title of the exhibition after Nam June Paik's monumental performance (1986), which was aired through satellite broadcasts to Asia and Europe due to his rebuttal to the poem(“The Ballad of East and West”) of poet Rudyard Kipling that the East and the West twain never meet. While NamJune Paik previously juxtaposed the East and the West through broadcasting, this exhibition presents a series of works that juxtapose major scenes in 500 years of French art history and paintings from the Korean Joseon Dynasty as of the current year, 2023. Guests from worldwide can look into the artworks through smartphones in real-time with a connection point in traditional paintings containing daily life and play, struggles, and eroticism of both ordinary Koreans and French people.
Jean-François Millet's shows the nobles watching the farmers, and Kim Hong-do's features the Joseon era aristocrats watching the workers. The flower language of Magnolia, which fills the surroundings of the two paintings containing the sublime of labor and critical consciousness of class, is ‘sublime.’
The background of , completed and drawn by Ingres in his later years, contains a fascinating traditional craft, the mother-of-pearl pattern.
The background is Shin Yun-bok's (early 19th century; Dano is the most prosperous day of the year, a holiday held on May 5 of the lunar calendar. It is before the hot summer season and a ritual to pray for a good harvest after finishing rice planting. This was a day of spiritual rites and enjoyment with song, dance, and wine.). It contains women wearing new clothes, bathing, and swinging on Dano Day and boys peeping at them. The glasses feature Rococo painter Fragonard's custom work (1767) depicting the swinging mistress. The two results reveal scandalous elements along with the play of people.
Delacroix's (1830) is a work on the theme of the July Revolution of the citizens of Paris who overthrew the House of Bourbon. The background contains by Jeong Seon. is based on the theme of Bai Juyi(白居易; 772–846), a Tang dynasty poet who lived in Mount Lu, Jiangxi Province, China, and captures the revolution of citizens and the peace and utopia they want as Jingyeong Sansu(; A landscape painting style based on the Korean mountain stream that was popular in the late Joseon Dynasty) during the Joseon Dynasty.
Behind the beautiful and elegant feature of Edgar Degar's (1878) is a figure of a supporter of a ballerina who were lower-class working girls at the time, who often relied on income from wealthy sponsors. Shin Yun-bok's (late 18th century), which mainly painted aristocrats and kisaengs(; women from outcast or enslaved person families who were trained to be courtesans, providing artistic entertainment and conversation to men of the upper class during the Joseon periods), is also presumed to have been observed on kisaengs with low status at the time. From the smile of a blindfolded woman, it is discernible of the era’s beauty, and the other aspect of the appearance.
I sincerely hope you will meet a unique world that explores the past, present, desire, and existence through the exhibition, which contains homage elements and contemporary cultural reinterpretation of Baek Nam-joon's work, which showed the catharsis of harmony between East and West cultures.
Ou bien...
(lunettes)
Forcément les lunettes, les lunettes, partout les lunettes, et l’on a envie de réagir avec brillance en allant rechercher une citation de Søren Kierkegaard : Les lunettes cachent beaucoup de choses - même une larme dans l'oeil. C’est sûrement vrai, entre autres dans le cas des tableaux de Kim Jihee. Mais un peu facile toutefois. Un peu de l’ordre de la critique d’art interprétative.
Kierkegaard a également dit : Ma façon d'envisager la vie est complètement absurde : un esprit méchant, je suppose, a mis sur mon nez une paire de lunettes dont un verre grossit démesurément et dont l'autre rapetisse dans les mêmes proportions.
Les lunettes de la figure picturale de Kim Jihee sont elles aussi munies de deux verres différents, mais pour son bonheur. Un verre s’attache à des motifs et des éléments décoratifs, signes historiques de statut distinctif, et dont se réclament aujourd’hui les marques du luxe mondialisé ; une position terre-à-terre. L’autre verre s’attache à un ailleurs, temporel mais souvent aussi culturel et exotique (Européen), par le biais d’éléments picturaux ; une position en hauteur. Deux distances de vision simultanées, ayant en commun la revendication d’une liberté de prendre, de se réapproprier, de faire sien le monde.
Ou bien… ou bien est le titre d’un ouvrage bien connu de Kierkegaard. Avec les tableaux de Kim Jihee il n’est pas question comme chez le philosophe danois de dualité éthique/esthétique, la question semble tranchée dès le départ : l’ennui est ennemi de la vie, le désir conduit notre existence. Mais pourtant rien n’est simple, rien n’est stable – et nous en revenons ici à la question des variations picturales – tant ces objets de désir sont interchangeables, instables, mutants, volatils. L’alternative se joue à l’intérieur du choix résolu de l’hédonisme. Ou bien ceci, ou bien cela, mais quoi qu’il en soit il y aura quelque chose. De plus, comme nous l’avons noté, nous avons deux yeux, donc démultiplions la liberté de ne pas focaliser puisque nous sommes confortablement installés sur un terrain peuplé d’une multitude d’objets désirables.
Extrait de <Ou bien… > écrit par Eric Maillet
(professeur de l'École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy)