[비즈한국] The 'Korea Art Promotion Project', an artist support program aimed at cultivating the fertile soil of Korean art, is launching its 12th season. This project is now recognized by the art world as a meaningful event for discovering and nurturing artists. It has a solid reputation among artists as a project they aspire to participate in. The fundamental keywords the 'Korea Art Promotion Project' has pursued from the beginning are 'the acceptance of diverse currents in Korean art and the pursuit of developmental change.' As a result of these principles, it is evaluated as having established a perspective for viewing contemporary Korean art.
Movies are fiction. Even if it is a documentary that presents facts as they are, it is not reality. This is because it is a world crafted by the artist's imagination.
Nevertheless, while watching a movie, the power of fiction dominates reality. We laugh and cry, immersed in a world created by the entanglement of fictional stories and imagery. We are sometimes gripped by chilling fear or feelings of happiness. We even project our own lives onto the movie scenes as if they were our own stories.
Why do we fall into such illusions? It is because of the camera's gaze. The eye of the camera, which is not revealed within the movie scene but is clearly felt. We watch the movie by following it. However, we cannot predict what will happen in the movie.
As we watch a movie, we are drawn into it, but we cannot intervene. Those of us watching the movie cannot save the protagonist who is in danger or facing death. The protagonist ignores our wishes and lives within the movie according to the script set by the director. In this way, tension, anticipation, or even feelings of desolation intersect as we are drawn into the fiction of the film.
Claire Kim (Kim Sun-kyung) is an artist who directs everyday scenes with this kind of camera gaze. Her work is reminiscent of film stills.
The first thing that makes your eyes stop while viewing Claire Kim's paintings is the subtle tension shown on the canvas. It is because of the thickness of the gaze that observes daily life from a certain distance. It is a thickness like that of a camera gaze following the characters in a movie from a moderate distance.
However, the space the artist breathes into her paintings is full of happy feelings. In terms of film, it is a romantic comedy-like atmosphere. Although it appears to be a screen like a movie scene, the artist creates her work using a cartoonish direction. It is a unique method of composing the cuts of a comic where the story is connected into several works.
In most cases, daily episodes are connected in three or four scenes, but there are also chronological narrative paintings that follow the characters in the paintings from childhood to adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
She explains the reason for working with this compositional method by saying, "I have liked comics since I was young, I saw a happy world in them, and I wanted to give people the fun of looking at paintings just as I felt the fun in comics.”
The true charm of Claire Kim's paintings, which are attracting attention for the uniqueness of their narrative composition, lies in their painterliness. Her work possesses solid descriptive power, a neutral image of characters (a cartoonish image that is neither Asian nor Western), a fresh sense of color, and a natural direction of realistic space.