New York Times review of Minjung Kim. December 16, 2020.
“People of refinement have a disinclination to colors,” Goethe argued in an 1810 treatise on chromatic perception. That’s as good a justification as any for the three shows, all excellent, quite unalike, staged so far at this private foundation. Last year we saw the paintings and photography of Christopher Wool (black, white, gray) and the sculptures of Charles Ray (silver, aluminum); now the Hill turns to Minjung Kim, a South Korean artist whose painstaking, profoundly beautiful ink paintings deploy, in the main, a muffled palette of grays and blacks.
On large sheets of pulpy hanji paper, Ms. Kim obtains delicate tonal shifts through variable saturations of ink and water, as in her “Mountain” series, whose careful gradations of blacks suggest receding hills or waves. Yet many of her “paintings” could be termed collages: She layers strips of the hanji paper (made from mulberry bark) in parallel lines or circular cutouts, then paints over the ridged and roughened surfaces. Frequently the paper shapes are several sheets deep. Usually the edges have been singed with a flame. The layering and burning give the rippling blacks a suggestion of three dimensions, and make these denuded paintings/collages feel almost like bas-reliefs.
There’s actually a little color in this show: Ms. Kim paints some mountainscapes in monochrome red or blue, and also one strange, earlier work of multicolored circles stands out like Skittles in a pile of coal. But her most powerful paintings, sedulous and silent, arise from the plain tools of black ink, water, paper and fire. You could map a lineage for these works stretching from Chinese literati painting, through modernist Western abstraction, to the nonobjective Korean painting movement called Dansaekhwa (Ms. Kim studied with Park Seo-bo, a Dansaekhwa superstar). But influences take a back seat here to the slow, deliberate act of painting, and the paradox of creation in nihility.
New York Times review of Minjung Kim. December 16, 2020.
“People of refinement have a disinclination to colors,” Goethe argued in an 1810 treatise on chromatic perception. That’s as good a justification as any for the three shows, all excellent, quite unalike, staged so far at this private foundation. Last year we saw the paintings and photography of Christopher Wool (black, white, gray) and the sculptures of Charles Ray (silver, aluminum); now the Hill turns to Minjung Kim, a South Korean artist whose painstaking, profoundly beautiful ink paintings deploy, in the main, a muffled palette of grays and blacks.
On large sheets of pulpy hanji paper, Ms. Kim obtains delicate tonal shifts through variable saturations of ink and water, as in her “Mountain” series, whose careful gradations of blacks suggest receding hills or waves. Yet many of her “paintings” could be termed collages: She layers strips of the hanji paper (made from mulberry bark) in parallel lines or circular cutouts, then paints over the ridged and roughened surfaces. Frequently the paper shapes are several sheets deep. Usually the edges have been singed with a flame. The layering and burning give the rippling blacks a suggestion of three dimensions, and make these denuded paintings/collages feel almost like bas-reliefs.
There’s actually a little color in this show: Ms. Kim paints some mountainscapes in monochrome red or blue, and also one strange, earlier work of multicolored circles stands out like Skittles in a pile of coal. But her most powerful paintings, sedulous and silent, arise from the plain tools of black ink, water, paper and fire. You could map a lineage for these works stretching from Chinese literati painting, through modernist Western abstraction, to the nonobjective Korean painting movement called Dansaekhwa (Ms. Kim studied with Park Seo-bo, a Dansaekhwa superstar). But influences take a back seat here to the slow, deliberate act of painting, and the paradox of creation in nihility.
Read full review here.