Korean artist Seong Sik Kim focuses on the structural relationships between forms, moving between dimensions and exploring abstraction and figuration. Seong Sik Kim became inspired by birds by the lakeside and started depicting them in curved forms. A Motif is refined into straight and curved lines.
Artist Statement
A. In 2017, I drew a bird gazing outward. I was drawn to the image, though I could not explain why. For a long time, birds have entered the realm of human imagination—serving as mediators between earth and sky, as with the sotdae, or transforming into concrete disasters, as in Hitchcock’s films. They have been read as omens of fortune or misfortune, and imagined as symbols of greed, like the eagle looming behind a cowering child. We give skilled snipers the name “Hawkeye,” and in modern sports the device that captures the precise position of a ball is also called Hawk-Eye. Yet, despite these many associations, I still cannot tell why I was compelled by that bird.
B. I still do not know why I was drawn to the image of the bird. Yet after working on the bird triptych series in 2019, I began to reflect on the contexts created when images interact within space. My thoughts on the relationship between the bird and the painting eventually extended into the form of the curve. When I imagined the image of a snake moving along the edges and corners of objects, the impulse toward the curve grew even stronger. The exhibition thus unfolds with walls and corners, curves and straight lines, birds and snakes.
