Text: Dorothee Robrecht – Korean artist Jinran Kim is presenting her latest works at the Berlin project space KIMGO – gloomy sea panoramas made of gauze and ash. The exhibition at the Berlin project space KIMGO runs from August 16 to September 1, 2024 and is curated by Baruch Gottlieb.
Image above: Meer © Jinran Kim
Jinran Kim, born in Seoul, is an internationally renowned artist with exhibitions in Paris and Tokyo, among other places. She has lived in Berlin since the early 1990s, but regularly travels to Korea to work on art projects, most recently on the dazzling media façade of the Lotte World Tower.
Her work in Berlin is not so colorful and digital. Quite the opposite: her works on display are dominated by shades of gray. “Nature Morte” is the title of the exhibition, and on display are large-format ocean panoramas, alongside smaller works with waterfalls and forest landscapes. There is no trace of animals or people – Jinran Kim’s landscapes radiate stillness, a total, almost eerie silence. Seen from afar, the seascapes look like black and white photographs, the waves foam so realistically. Up close, it becomes clear that they are not pictures, but textile sculptures, composed of thousands and thousands of small threads of fabric.
The artistry is striking – how did these works come about? “I tore gauze,” says Kim, ”which is used to bandage wounds. I dyed the threads with ash and then sewed them onto paper.”
Working with extravagant materials such as gauze, ash or soap is a trademark of the artist Jinran Kim. Gauze is the material that characterizes her most recent period of work. She discovered gauze for herself when her mother died. Her mother had been ill for a long time and her house in Seoul was always full of bandages, even after her death in 2015.
Kim was born and raised in Seoul. She studied sculpture there and came to Berlin in 1994 for postgraduate studies at the University of the Arts. She has lived here ever since and has also made a name for herself here, not least thanks to two major solo exhibitions at the Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz.
Even then, she was already painting with ash, on themes such as death and trauma. For example, there were large scenes of bombed-out cities, including the ruins of Berlin in 1945, and she assembled coffins from pieces of soap. Why this preference for the gloomy?
“That has to do with my history, certainly also with my mother’s illness, from which I suffered a lot. Of course, my background also plays a role. In Korea, war is always present as a possibility. The apocalyptic is simply in my head, no matter what I do.”
And this also applies to the works currently on display. Kim’s landscape panoramas restage a nature that she perceives as highly threatened – by people who disregard, exploit and destroy it. Kim is convinced that if things go on like this, life on this planet will not have much time left.
Their landscapes have something ghostly about them, but you can’t see the impending doom. They are simply too beautiful, too perfect for that. Doesn’t that also harbour the danger of aestheticizing a catastrophe?
“This is a very European question that no one in Asia would ask,” says Jinran Kim. “Beauty of representation is a basic principle, regardless of the content. I don’t aestheticize disasters, I show them. And I chose the material gauze because it has a metaphorical quality. It’s about healing.”
Text: Dorothee Robrecht
WHEN?
Exhibition dates: Friday, August 16 – Sunday, September 1, 2024
Opening hours: Friday – Saturday, 4 – 7 pm
WHERE?
Project space KIMGO
John-Schehr-Str. 1
10407 Berlin
