Review

A review of Kim Jongku's Mobile Landscape

A close-up view of Kim Jongku's painting process with steel powder, which is an industrial byproduct and lends itself to unique manipulation. Image: photography by Chris Bronson, Shannon Ryan, and Ryan Waggoner, courtesy of the Spencer Museum of Art

Spencer Museum of Art
University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
February 25 — June 25, 2010

After winding through the Spencer Museum of Art’s central court and a gallery filled with historic and contemporary Asian art (as well as works by Aaron Siskind and Kiki Smith that have an Asian feel), you encounter the Electronic Media Gallery that brims with work made by Korean, Seoul-based artist Kim Jongku earlier this year. Kim came to Kansas via the museum’s international artist-in-residency program, and he is among the first three artists to visit the University of Kansas’s museum under this program, initiated last year. All participants to date have been Asians, it happens.

Three strains in Kim’s oeuvre combine in this version of Mobile Landscape, the exhibition’s central piece that lends its own title to his entire exhibit here; Kim showed a comparable installation-performance with the same title elsewhere in 2006. In both versions of Mobile Landscape his curious medium, a steel powder industrial byproduct, appears both as calligraphy in relief and filmed landscape. The third aspect is live feed video. With spare economy, the Lawrence incarnation of Mobile Landscape utilizes a single sheet of wide, white drawing paper as stage, substrate, and screen. The roll is suspended high on the wall just like any retractable projection screen; the page that was unfurled from it hangs vertically down the wall and then spreads over the floor. On that page, near the wall, sits a small video camera pointed out toward the viewer. Mounds of black steel powder on the paper in front of it appear as a series of hills fading into the distance in the live-feed image that shines onto the paper screen from a ceiling-mounted LCD projector.

A graphic line of black calligraphy perpendicular to the screen captivates the viewer looking down at the page spread over the floor. Kim composed the page before an audience on the occasion of his artist’s talk at the February 25th opening. He uses a dustpan with an extended corner, modified simply with cardboard and tape, to draw linear script characters in relief with the granular black powder. One broad area of value resulted from a handful of black dust the artist threw onto the page, and similar works look as though the powder could have been spread over areas with a broom. Some qualities compare to applying tone to a drawing page with vine charcoal dust or to child’s play in a sandbox. What fascinates is that the relief of the calligraphy also forms the hills of the fabricated landscape seen in the projection… and beyond what appears to be a rendition of a vast landscape are the moving feet of gallery goers currently standing in the Electronic Media Gallery — in the same projected image. The seemingly incorrect scale relationship is at first puzzling; recognition of part of oneself there in the presentation further fixes engagement.

An extreme close-up of Kim Jongku's "Mobile Landscape" medium. Image: photography by Chris Bronson, Shannon Ryan, and Ryan Waggoner, courtesy of the Spencer Museum of Art

The fragility of the drawing makes you want to move around it with caution. How is this temporal work a mobile

Other contemporary Korean examples in the adjacent gallery are available for consideration and comparison. A tall, stoneware Square Vase (2005) by Choi Sung-jae shows use of calligraphic mark-making where slick, wet white slip is deftly wiped away from a grey clay surface to create a two-tone image of ducks swimming among reeds. Koo Kyung-sook’s two large inkjet prints, Markings No. 7-1 and Markings No. 7-3 (both 2007), picture the vague, textured imprint of her own faux-fur-wrapped body, a print created through dowsing the fur coat with photo chemicals and then laying in it on photosensitive paper. landscape? Answer: the live feed is broadcast to other locations on the University of Kansas campus and beyond.

Kim Jongku works on "Mobile Landscape." Image: photography by Chris Bronson, Shannon Ryan, and Ryan Waggoner, courtesy of the Spencer Museum of Art

In his canvases, Kim Jongku employs the same charcoal-like powder he uses for drawing on a paper page. The canvases, being two dimensional, resemble the look of Mobile Landscape’s calligraphic floor composition; like it, the canvases are at first composed on the floor. Kim completed three large canvases during his two-week stay in Kansas; ostensibly these form a triptych, though all three do not share the same wall in this exhibition. For these and similar pieces, Kim draws a line of calligraphy in the canvases' upper region. Then, a canvas may be gently raised to cause a portion of the powder to cascade downward as if the writing casts a shadow. To have paint, both a pigment and binder are needed. Kim’s steel powder “pigment” is bound to the canvas through flooding the areas thick with powder drawing with diluted polymer glue while the canvas is laid flat. Later, the tableau is propped vertically against a wall. Through use of watery glue applied with a spray bottle and/or addition of more powder, the “shadow” of the text is extended downward with gravity’s help. Like rust stains on outdoor walls created through time and weather, this method evokes the sadness of great weeping or the washing away of spilled blood long since bright red. With wetting, thick once-black dust turns rich and varied in color, and a crust coagulates the masses, exaggerating texture.

Artnet lists a similar 2007 triptych, Steel Powder Painting, by Kim as valued between $30,000-$50,000 (US currency). Another of his works, a photo titled Poongkyung (2007, edition 5), is listed as valued at $5,000-$10,000. This latter work is representative of a body of Kim’s work wherein steel powder simulates landscape in trompe l’oeil fashion through photos taken at a worm’s-eye view along the lines of what is seen in Mobile Landscape’s projection. Through the Mobile Landscape installation, Kim neatly conveys how these two other bodies of his work that appear so different are in fact different ways of looking at the same material.

-re-

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