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Youngbae Kim: Upon Reflection
Andrew Bae Gallery
Light defines, as much as it illuminates; the shadows it casts and the spaces it fills imply as much as do the items it reveals directly to sight. Upon Reflection, Youngbae Kim's second solo show in the United States, features recent oil paintings by the contemporary Korean artist. In these images of reflected light both interior and exterior, Kim expresses a restraint, elegant but unforced, whose understatedness allow the impression of empty space to blossom as a full form. Devoid of movement, these are undisturbed spaces whose attention to gently shimmering light and spartan, undisturbed interiors combine elements of both Western and Eastern art. From the West, the attentiveness to light's fall, its pearlescence, its reflection upon, within, and through the items it touches. The gallery notes the influence of Vermeer, but many of the Dutch masters evoke this quiet, masterful touch of light as illuminating its own qualities by the items on which it falls. From the East comes the use of negative space, a characteristic of Asian art most easily understood in ink painting, where a single, supple stroke of black can activate the entire blank page around it. Kim's work brings both alive in these subdued scenes. His interiors focus on an empty room as bathed with light. Where there are objects, their placement is within such quantity of space as to positively emphasize and even sculpt these voids by their presence. The table and four chairs in Interior (48 x 60 in.: oil on linen: 2006) do this, standing as quiet elements within the large, gently illuminated area around them. At the same time the spaces within these works extend into a world larger than the bounds of what is visible within the painting, a larger wholeness often suggested by a window or doorway. These incorporate glass which passes light freely, and imply or actually show vistas beyond the chamber of the initial vantage point. Light shimmers across the floor or radiates through window glass and blinds, and fills the rooms to brimming. Warmly colored, in the earth-tones range, it makes the spaces amiable and inviting. We only know about this light by its qualities and the shape of its edges, or conversely, its indistinctness; and at times the light itself is the only clue. In the exquisitely understated Summer Shadow (32 x 48 in.: oil on linen: 2006) there is only space: a wall, the ground, their right angle meeting picked out and emphasized by light and the direct and indirect shadows. All is implied by the intersection of color areas tracing out the angle of the wall, and the shadows implying the presence of overarching trees. It reveals just how many cues are given by the quality of a shadow on a surface, how much it implies of the presence, position, size and quality of the object standing opaque between the light, and the surface. And yet, Summer Shadow seems luminously real and detailed; there is no feeling that anything has been glossed or abbreviated. A third theme of reflective light in these paintings involves the mirror images cast back by water. Well-handled, these stand second to the interior and exterior paintings if only because the reflective qualities of water's shimmering surface both flattens the image into a definite plane, and makes the implied image more explicit. The paintings worth a special trip here are the interior and exterior works which speak so revealingly of light and its elements. Subdued in color, there is a suggestive inwardness to these paintings in which space is superbly sculpted by the fall of light upon surfaces or the shadows it creates. This is a skilled amalgamation of aesthetics of East and West. Eighteen paintings in oil are featured. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. |
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