In The place I found, artist Hyosuk Kim's latest urban series invites viewers into a world of vivid visual pleasure combined with profound reflection and boundless imagination. Her powerful compositions and rich painterly vision are the result of years of experience and keen observation, reimagining the landscape of Seoul in an entirely new way.
Kim's dynamic portrayal of entangled threads offers a powerful visual experience. The organic yet structured lines create a rhythmic energy through shifts in thickness and direction, conveying a sense of movement. These threads merge with the architecture, blending reality with fantasy, spreading a vast energy across each canvas and building a palpable tension.
Beyond this, the exhibition is more than a depiction of Seoul’s physical landscape; it symbolizes the complex social relationships and forces at play within the city. The Seoul on Kim’s canvases is not a static skyline. Her work reflects the tug-of-war of profit in new development zones, the collapse of buildings due to shoddy construction, and the broken connections that result from these upheavals. She reveals the underlying essence of the city as a network of relationships bound by capital and desire, represented by the strong cords supporting redevelopment areas and the tangled bundles drifting through the city center.
These tightly bound threads in development zones give birth to a new city, as if nurturing an egg, while the loose knots in the urban core hint at a bird soaring toward the next generation. As these intricate urban connections lift and take flight alongside the wings of the bird, our perception and interpretation of Seoul elevate toward new realms of transcendence and vision.
