A Winsome Conversation with Mikyung Kim

Mikyung Kim from the solo exhibition at Artprojectco Gallery in Seoul  Photo by Junho Yum

Mikyung Kim was born and grew up in Seoul and moved to New York to study at Parsons School of Design in 1997. She began her art practice in New York, before moving back to Seoul in 2009. Since then, she has been living and working in Seoul. Her works have been shown in solo and two-person and group exhibitions in New York, Seoul, Bath in the UK, and LA. Her works are included in the permanent collection at the Datz Museum of Art in Gwangju, Korea. She will have a solo exhibition at A-lounge Gallery in Seoul next year.

I had the pleasure of asking Mikyung about how her work incorporates mathematical concepts such as geometry,  how she layers and shades colors in her artwork, and so much more.

UZOMAH: You use metaphors in your paintings that draw on daily life experiences; what is your favorite experience to tap into when creating?

MIKYUNG: My work is born amidst a continuous thinking about one subject and filtering process.  I connotatively express on the picture-plane my thoughts and feelings about things that are meaningful to me.

One of my special experiences took place at the Yoon Dongju Literary Museum, which I happened to visit many years ago. Yoon Dongju was a poet loved and admired by Koreans. By chance, I visited the Literary Museum founded in his honor. It was a sunny, beautiful day. As I entered the exhibition space, I could see the poet’s fine, elegant hand-written manuscripts, his photographs, and the beautiful covers of his published poetry books. From his handwriting, I could get an idea about his character, and as I read and savored his verses, I felt as if my mind was becoming pure and tidy.

Outside the exhibition hall, there was a sort of garden, and a path leading to another room. I followed the path and entered a deep, rectangular metal space with a high ceiling and a low floor. In the dimly lit space, a large screen was showing a documentary about the poet. The space particularly reminded me of the jail cell where Yoon had been held prisoner. The dark, desolate interior of rusted iron, without a single window and with only a few chairs, strengthened the symbolic significance of the Yoon Dongju Literary Museum.

Later I learned that the building was an abandoned water pressurizing and storage facility at Inwang Mountainside and transformed by an architect into the meaningful space celebrating Yoon Dongju.

I watched the approximately 12-minute-long documentary film on the poet’s life. Under the Japanese occupation of Korea, Yoon was arrested by the Japanese police, and he later died in prison. At the time he was only 28. It made me sad to think that such a young man had to die in vain that way.­­­ As he had been a significant figure in my mind since childhood, I guess I subconsciously pictured him as an older, mature poet. But watching the documentary, my heart ached to realize that he was not only a great poet, but a very young one. To learn that the cause of his death is still unknown, and that a young poet who left such beautiful poems had to die that way, put me in a daze for a while. Afterwards, I came outside and looked up at the sky. The charming garden, surrounded by rusted iron, also reminded me of the poet’s prison cell, though it was open to the sky, which was painfully beautiful. I could imagine how much he must have longed for the sky while in prison. In fact, reading his poems, we come to know how often he gazed up at the sky. His poems vividly convey his love for the sky and its stars. My heart ached with sadness as I could feel his heart as well.

Standing there, I thought about the work titled “Yoon Dongju’s Sky.” I thought it was a title that could communicate my ardent wish to show Yoon the beautiful sky, as well as the sky that I am always looking at. Since then, I often look up at the sky, trying to sense the beauty, differences and delicate changes in the color and light of the sky every day, just as Yoon did. Through this work, I wanted to let the many people who have suffered like the poet, see and feel the beautiful sky. Imagining a color that combined the hues of the sky and the jade-like color of Goryeo Celadon, in 2016 I began to create this series, consisting of small rectangular canvases, as if I were connecting pieces of the sky one by one.

Yoon Dongju's sky series Mixed media on linen size variables 2022 Photo by Junho Yum

U: Your work incorporates fine-tuned geometry with subtle rectangular forms in mutual contrast, and breaking differences in tone. Where does your inspiration come from?

M: When I was little, my mother kept various household items wrapped in bojagi—Korean wrapping cloths—stacked up in many layers. I remember hating this, because it was a sign of our unstable life.  Never knowing when we might have to leave for another place again, I always suffered from a sort of vague fear and state of instability.

During the time I was studying and working in New York, I visited Korea. I remember being very surprised and moved by the beauty of Korean traditional jogakbo (patchwork wrapping cloth), which I encountered by chance in Insadong, Seoul. At that moment, I rediscovered the beauty of Korea, which I had not fully realized before. Jogakbo are made by patching together many different colors of cloth and have been used for various purposes in Koreans’ daily life. At that time, I tried to imagine the minds of those who had made this patchwork and came to think that it represented a connection between heart and heart. That was when I began to use the rectangular shapes of my mother’s wrapping cloths and jogakbo symbolically in my works.

For me, the rectangle shapes became units of action to carefully flatten out, connect and stack people’s wrinkled, scarred and aching hearts; at the same time, they symbolized the basic foundation on which I sustain my life. In other words, they became a ground for maintenance of my life, and basic units to metaphorically express all the moments I encounter and feel in daily living. They are bones of thought, and bones of memory. It is as if I am constantly creating a world-leading to infinity with a single-cell unit.

Installation view at Francis Gallery in Bath, UK in 2022

 U: Can you describe how you shade and layer your colors in each piece?

M: When I work, I begin with darker colors, and add on various colors in many layers. As I stack the colors, I make the surfaces smooth by sanding. I stack the colors of the earth and the colors of the world. The image that comes to mind when I am stacking the layers of colors is the piles of stones that we often see at the entrances of Buddhist temples or along mountain trails. I have thought many times that the act of stacking overlaps with my method of work. The stone towers made by countless passersby placing stones one by one, appear to me as beautiful artworks in which layers of people’s hearts have piled up along with time.

After stacking numerous colors, I apply many layers of the color I want to reveal on the final surface, finalizing the shapes as I form the desired feeling. The color I choose for the surface is one that complements the underlying colors, which permeate into the covering layers. This can vary depending on the hues or tones I intend to use, some of my favorites being colors of Joseon white porcelain, blue celadon, or the sky. Various shades of white, showing delicate differences, are frequently used in my recent works.  The works that I have finished in gray are cases in which I imagined the colors of ceramics right before the glaze is applied. For me, this is like the color of something before anything is added.

Installation view at Helen J. Gallery in LA in 2023

U: Your ‘Tree Thought’ was published in 2018 by Datz Press. What was the inspiration behind your focus on trees? How did you select which pictures to include in the book?

M:  When I was very young, there was a time when I was captivated by a mysterious feeling that came to me as I gazed up at the tall trees stretching their branches into the sky in my neighborhood. With this feeling in my heart, I became someone who likes trees. The towering, yet calm and bold appearance of a tree became a kind of symbolic milestone for my life. Once, in the middle of New York City, I suddenly thought I wanted to become a tree. As I looked at winter trees standing in a row, I imagined “internal organs of life” standing in a line. This thought is also related to my painting works.

The tree photographs, taken around the year 2000, were kept in storage until I met Director Joo of Datz Press in 2015. Thanks to the support of Director Joo, I developed them in the darkroom from 2017 to the first half of 2018, and the fruits of my work culminated in the book Tree Thought in 2018.  I have beautiful memories of the time I spent watching the photographic images emerge in the darkness. I felt a mixture of joy, happiness, and despair, as I continued to learn new knowledge required for the darkroom development and printing process. I remember my moment of bliss when I looked at the photographs completed through the process that I so ardently desired. Publishing the book involved a process of selecting and arranging the pictures, while deciding on the direction and flow of the book through meetings with Director Joo and the designers.  It was a long journey, lasting almost 20 years from the time I took the pictures to the day the book was finally published.

U: How long does it take to complete a piece of work?

M:  It is difficult to state it simply, as each work has its own long process and different time of completion. As I mentioned earlier, because the colors used in the initial stage of the works need to be included in all the works, I begin working on multiple pieces at once, and complete them one by one. Therefore, even a small piece cannot be done quickly. I also need sufficient time to contemplate on the works, so considering this process, it feels like a difficult question to answer. I cannot generalize. Some of the larger works took months to complete.

Skin of the time (2022-5 triptych) Mixed media on linen 97.3x291.9x4.1cm 2022

U: What is the hardest thing you have found about being a visual artist?

M: I am happy that I can work as an artist. All my difficulties and pain are absorbed by this happiness as an artist.  But I suppose the hardest thing could be summarized as the conflict between me as a living being, and me as an artist. I agonize a lot over the relationship between the works I make and society. I continuously question how to coordinate the relations between these two selves, and why I do what I do. I am an artist, but also live in an era where that has become my job. I am always thinking about what art is, and what is its role.

So ultimately, I am endlessly agonizing between the work of art as a “gift,” as pointed out by Lewis Hyde, and art as a “commodity” of the current times, where everything is becoming thoroughly commodified. Though trading my works into commodities is necessary to support my life, this is a very difficult process for me. And even when this transposition takes place, my troubles would not be over. Certainly the way the value of a work is decided, as well as the method of transaction, would be outside the boundary of my control. It is very difficult to walk through the circuitry of such contradictions.

In 2020, I carried out a project called Kimimela’s Art-Gift-Cycle. It was the realization of an idea I had thought of many years before. In the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, there is a story about the “gift customs” of the natives living in the South Pacific, and native North Americans. The project involved applying the ideas I got from these stories to my work.

In this project, I chose six pieces from my works, framed them and packed them in boxes. I selected six people, to whom I gave these works as gifts. There were to keep them for 50 days, then pass them on to someone else. The novel idea that my actual art would be given as a gift to someone I did not know, and that the works would not be dominated by a single person but continuously circulated to others, created great expectation in many people when it was launched. It was carried out together with the stories of numerous people, and continued for a while, until the five works that were being circulated in Seoul came back to me last year; one remains stopped in Barcelona, Spain. This work had initially been sent to Strasbourg, France, and then travelled to Brussels and Spain. As the person holding it now has not notified me on the next step, there is no way for me to know where it is exactly. Nor am I trying to find out. After all, the works that departed for the project were no longer in my possession. The other works were returned to me for various reasons.

The objective of the project was to question how art is owned, and “ownership” itself. The project was also about the feeling of regret for the extinction of shiny things, as they are buried and tarnished in the process of commodification.

However, I don’t think that such objectives were sufficiently communicated. I blame my own shortcomings, my inability to fully communicate the purpose of the project. I did discover many immaturities and mistakes after the project was over, but it was an opportunity to learn and realize many things. Nevertheless, at that time it was my honest thought that I would have my works sent out to the world in that way, rather than just leaving them in my studio.

Installation view at Francis Gallery in Bath, UK in 2022

 U: When someone is viewing your art in person or is viewing your book, what do you hope they take away artistically from your work?

M: I hope that people will look at my works carefully, from up close and for a long time, so that they may sufficiently empathize with them in the process and take away with them various emotions and thoughts. And in the process, I hope for the formation of something that we can share. Through the experience of absorbing beauty into their bodies, I hope that they can quietly meet with their own inner selves.  That is because I believe that the true completion of a work is only achieved when it is seen and shared by those who appreciate it.

For more information about Mikyung's work, please visit her site. You can also find and follow her work on Instagram.