Boxart Gallery - Kim Joon

September 03, 2010

artworks


Prajna 1 40 n. 22	Duet-Fowl 140x100 cm n. 19	Duet-Incanto 140x100 cm n. 18	Bird land-Swarovski 90x90 cm n. 6

Blue fish 2 100x100 cm n. 5	Blue fish 3 100x100 cm n. 4

I am interested in tattoo as a metaphor for hidden desire or a kind of compulsion engraved into human consciousness. Tattoos can reflect individual and collective reality or displaced desire. I see the skin, or in some cases the monitor, as an extension of a canvas. My earlier tattoo paintings were 3 dimensional canvases in the form of lumps of flesh or parts of a body, such as a muscular arm. Unfortunately, in Korea tattoo is regarded not as a cultural expression of oneself but as a criminal act. In order to comment on this prejudice against, and censure of tattooing, I have put on several exhibitions for three years in a row, opening a tattoo parlor in the gallery with real tattoo artists.

"We are opening this virtual Tattoo Parlor with the hope that one day you will be able to visit an actual tattoo parlor without violating the law. In this Tattoo Parlor, you will find installations and images on the subject of tattoos. Also artistic tattoo works, instruments for tattoos, words of prejudice and support will also be displayed here. Our goal is to open a tattoo parlor where no one in Korea has yet visited legally. It will be a strange and fascinating place. This tattoo parlor is within a gallery now, but it hopes in the future not to be in a gallery."

Kim Joon was originally a painter interested in exploring the dynamics and tensions that exist between the mental and physical realms. Mr. Kim first became interested in the process of tattooing in college and while serving a three year military term in Seoul, Korea. During his time in school and the military, he began to give home made tattoos to his friends. When Mr. Kim gave these home made tattoos he used needle, thread, and Chinese ink. He would dip the thread into the Chinese ink and let it drip down the needle into the skin.

In Mr. Kim's current works, which the artist likes to describe as "paintings", he uses water based markers to create the designs. His process involves taking a piece of sponge and covering it in a layer of traditional cloth that is used as fabric liner in Korean sewing. The lining is then covered with very transparent fabric, and painted two coats of a skin colored hue. He also layers on mediums and finally varnishes the surface to create a more firm appearance. Mr. Kim remains fascinated between the tensions of the mind and body. He is also intrigued by the concept of the permanence of tattoos as a vehicle for marking ones soul.

Mr. Kim says originally these works were created on a much larger scale, but the art viewers in Korea found them extremely disturbing. The artists says that now people are not as disturbed by his work.

Party
by Christopher Jones

After the seduction by colour, first things to see in Kim Joon's Party pictures at TOUCHART gallery are bodies: scores in a vibrant bacchanal. Then bits of bodies: Vishnu arms sprouting from backs legs plus an arse for an erect penis. Jungles of embryonic limbs poking from torsos stood and supine. Then tattoos, serpentine and elegant, licking at the surface of each body, adjoining patterns echoing Prada, Levi's and Dior. All this before noticing, each body has skin, pocked like a Google-Earth desert.

These are Deleuze's corps sans organs accelerated, made ultra-contemporary, echoing Benjamin's ever-present "Relevance to the present is more important than even unity or clarity." These are bodies with organs replaced by Firewire, and techno-synthetic flesh, compressing media-made pictures of Beckham, Paris Hilton, and those blasting through Manga, with heroic personifications bulking Hollywood. Each Party body is a centrifugal magnet of contemporary fashion design, billboard postures, and a la mode attitude, spinning through magazines and youtube. But amidst the excitement there is pixilation and jaundice skin. Among each conflation of pattern and tattoo, flesh appears deformed and ruined, so each body-surface becomes a multi-layered fact of nature's being written by culture and science and vice versa.

Party-mandarina duck, 2007 displays a multi-limbed body, sensuous and ill, in shades and hues of alizarin crimson. Among the patterning and zippers, it is dead-looking. Party-louis vuitton, 2007 with generous breasts, sustains the healthy decay with mutilated thighs. Instability vibrates in the relations of flesh, pattern, and tattoo throughout Party to ask, is this flesh on tattoo and pattern, or vice versa? With Party Kim Joon interrogates the balance of nature, culture, and science in human being, while offering a delicious response: in every picture, each of these three vital aspects of Being, and their personified interrogation, are characterised by blazes of contemporary colour.

Party is essentially a display of Kim Joon's talent for directing colour's evergreen capacity to render a picture's story relevant. Party-levis, 2007 is for example the story of classicism in decay made relevant through Photoshop shades of gold, to show a figure like a David (Beckham) with skin in digitized ruin. Party-mandarina duck foregrounds its patterns and tattoos with digital-bright crimson, to emphasise contemporary tales of fashion, culture and science, while the cerulean blue in Party-louis vuitton foregrounds skin, prompting nature to speak first. And against the disjointed story forms employed in mass-media, foregrounding products like Beckham away from ground, Party combines ground and figure within each picture's colour - be it light yellow, jade, or fuchsia pink - so responsive thoughts about culture, science or nature can also interplay.

Party is a pulsating range of colourful stories, with their condensed componentry skilfully composed at the picture plane. To talk therefore of skin, tattoo, or pattern disjointedly as independent is to overlook Party's central power to conflate and intensify. Talk that would miss the whole, unabbreviated tragedy: The maelstrom of pictures where Party works to compress and reinvigorate those nearby will ultimately prove its relevance, by consuming it.

Biography

Kim Joon was born in 1966 in Seoul (South Korea) where he now lives and works

Solo exibitions

2007

“Party” (Touch art, Heiri)

2006

“Duet” (Canvas International Art gallery, Amsterdam)

2005

"Tattoo You" (Walsh Gallery, Chicago)

2003

"Flesh Park" (June & TTL Zone, Seoul)
"Saunabell" (Ilju art hause, Seoul)

2000

"Make me smile!" (Gallery Wooduck, Seoul)

1999

"Fire" (Total Museum, Jangheung)

1998

"Hair show" (Gallery Sal, Seoul)

1997

"Tattoo in my mind" (Keumho Museum, Seoul)

1995

"Tattoo" (Segye Gallery)
"I love it" (Yale Gallery)

1994

"I love it!" (Insa Gallery)

Selected group exhibitions

2007

Intermediae-Minbak (Matadero Madrid, Spain)
Arco 2007 (Gallery Hyundai, Spain)

2006

PARIS PHOTO 2006 (Gallery Hyundai, Paris)
Made in Korea (Paris, Annecy)
Hybrid traend-INDIA & KOREA (Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul)
Art & science (Tsinghua University, Beijing)
Spotlight 30 women (Paper Gallery, Seoul)
2006 - Asia art now (Ssamziespace, Seoul)
Softness (Soma Museum, Seoul)
ISEA 2006 (South hall, San Jose, USA)
Art/37/Basel (Gallery Hyundai, Basel)
Contemporary Asian Art (Bonhams, London)
KunstRAI/Art Amsterdam (Amsterdam)
Endless Clone (Space Ieum, Beijing)

2005

Winter-fly (Sk t-tower)
Toronto International Art Fair (Toronto)
ART COLOGNE 2005 (Koeln)
ART FORUM BERLIN (Berlin)
ASIA:THE PLACE TO BE? (Alexander Ochs galleries, Berlin)

2004

"Inked" (Walsh Gallery, Chicago)
Reeling 15 Years (Savina Museum, Seoul)
"Out of Window" (Jip Gallery, Seoul)
Senef 2004 Online Film Festival (Seoul)
Kwangju Biennial, "Minority" (Kwangju)

2003

Resfest Digital Film Festival (Seoul)
"Korean Tattoo Shop" (Artinus, Seoul)
"Korean Video Art Today" (Walsh Gallery, Chicago)
Exhibition of the artists of Seoul in France (Artitude Galleries, Paris)
"Out of Window" (Tokyo)

2000

Kwangju Biennale, "Scar", (Kwangju)

1997

Body as Text (Keumho Museum, Seoul)

1996

Young Venture (National Museum, Kwachun)
Asia Pacific Triennale (Qeensland Art Gallery, Australia)
Seoul International Art Fair (KOEX, Seoul)

18797

boxart - Art Gallery - via dei Mutilati, 7/a - 37122 Verona ITALY
tel.(+39) 045 8000176 - fax(+39) 045 593426 - email:
p.iva 0260170 023 6

Kim Joon

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