Around the gallery, a series of black frames, each containing a vignette, a moment, interspersed with cascading rock trails and a time travelling projection. There’s a rhythm to the works arranged in the gallery. Each moment a line of poetry, a whole story being told within its borders, but also a part of a larger story. Quiet moments are broken by tension, pulsing with the ups and downs of a life. A flat stick, once fitted perfectly within the frame, has snapped under the prolonged pressure, splintered in the middle. Kim has left it where it has fallen, balanced on a rock. The edges are jagged, threatening, but also mute, broken, no longer able to fulfil its purpose. As our bodies move through this place we react to the tension stored and released in the works.
This new language is an amalgamation of ideas that Kim has researched and brought into his practice; memories of growing up in Korea, studying in China and moving to Australia. Korean artist Lee Ufan’s theory of Encounter, combined with his knowledge of the Japanese sculptural movement Mono-ha, Western theories of Phenomenology and the ethos of the Italian Arte Povera movement, discovered during a residency in Rome. In this space Kim has reused elements from previous artworks and travels. Stones repurposed from an artwork created on a residency in Italy. Table legs from his most recent work, removed, upturned and arranged at the bottom of the frame resembling a landscape, the upright sweep recalling the brushstrokes that capture the peaks in Japanese scrolls. Ideas, theories and snippets, collected over a lifetime, and combined here to create a new language, made up of Jonathan Kim. A new way to interpret our world.
In this space of slippage and interpretation, Kim creates a portal between two worlds; Korea and Australia. A direct link between his first home and his current home. Standing in Australia, we can watch a live stream from a home in Korea. In one way, we are stepping into the past, Seoul is 30 minutes behind Adelaide. But what is this assigning of time? If something happens here, it is happening at the same moment as it is in Seoul. Perhaps Kim wants us to experience the way he lives, between these two lives and cultures, separate but together.
The magic of this space is that there is no one interpretation of it. While Kim may be able to to trace his travels, for me they offer a look back. Rocks, tied together with used cotton fabric, fall from the ceiling and onto the floor. I’m reminded instantly of a skeleton, tipped out in pieces on the kitchen table, and my father telling me and my siblings to reassemble it. A pre-dinner distraction while my mother cooked and my father read. A game. Elsewhere, a bundle of dried bamboo and rock. There was a creek we played at. It was across the road from my Nanna’s house. During school holidays we would go to the creek, play in the water, cut down the bamboo and, let’s be honest, probably hit each other with it under the pretence of a game. The memory feels calmer in the frame that Kim has made. It’s like he has distilled the essence of the adventure, the rocks from the creek, the bamboo growing in its banks, and left out the yelling, the laughing, though I can hear echoes of both as I stand before the work. The materials together invoke this memory, dream, thought. Separately, they would perhaps be a rock and bamboo. I have certainly seen rocks, and bamboo, and not been taken back to that park. But between them, the conversation between rock and bamboo, that is where the creek is, the memory.
Kim wants to put his audience in conversation with their bodies, and the materials in the gallery, drawing on our own experiences to interpret the work in a physical way, training ourselves to sit amongst these stories and feel them. Not to repeat what we all already know, but we are living in uncertain times. In this space, carefully constructed and installed by Kim through both research and happy accidents, perhaps we find not what he wants to tell us, but what we are ready to hear. It may be happy, sad, tense, relaxed, or any feeling in-between, but it is us as individuals who are reflected in these walls.
