Despite the fact that I took artist In-Sun Kim to task in the Globe
& Mail last Saturday for what seemed to me like her determination
to trivialize half of her new exhibition called A Square Foot Toronto’s
Peak Gallery, I want to use this opportunity to revisit one of the two
works in the exhibition that seemed accomplished and powerful enough
to compensate for the rest of this rather ill-advised show.
The work I’m talking about is furniture-like construction called
P.L.U., Personal Living Unit (pictured here). Kim designed the piece
to “reflect the modularization of typical metropolitan life”.
P.L.U. seemed to me to take its place as a worthy extension of the works
in Kim’s previous (and first) show at Peak Gallery called Encased
. Then, as now, she was making her pieces from what, in her gallery
statement, she called blocks of “collated newsprint”. The
process, which she has described as “growing out childhood experiences
on her parents’ farm in Korea”, is laborious and exacting:
it involves gluing together, one over the other (as in the masking of
papier mache), many sheets if newspaper (“with the same tireless
resolve required for tasks such as pulling stems from thousands of dried
red peppers”) until, when they have dried (or “solidified”,
as she puts it), they can be sanded, cut with a saw, and used, like
wood, as building material “for furniture and accessories”
(the remarkable “furniture” she made from her newspaper-generated
“wood” in this earlier show included a table and a loveseat;
it was Kim’s penchant for “accessories”, however,
that appears to have got her into trouble—about which more will,
be said in a moment—in her current exhibition, which runs at Peak
until July 29.
The “wood” Kim makes from her glued newsprint is lovely
stuff: the agglomerating of the sheets of newspaper lends the material
a soft grey cast—a greyness textured everywhere with faded and
indeed almost masticated bits of text and photographs, traces of the
original newspaper pages (if you look closely, you can almost read the
stories still). And when this vividly archival “wood” is
sanded, sawed and assembled by the artist into a piece of furniture,
the solid new objects that result seems to possess a sort of soft, murmuring
self-absorption—as if echoes of all those residual texts and images
were still coming faintly to the ear from the other life they led before
“encasement”.
For her current exhibition, A Square Foot, Kim has seen fit, unfortunately,
to use her paper-derived “wood” to construct a whole raft
of cunningly wrought but dispiritingly decorative, wall-mounted objects:
her Multi-Complex, for instance, with eight little “wooden”
drawers that can pulled out, which is like an ornate, labour-intensive
spice-rack; or other miniature cabinets with “wooden” keys
which, when wound, set some silly interior thing turning to the rinky-tink
sound of a commercial music box: upmarket jewel-cases (and not as interesting,
despite the elegance and intricacy of their construction, as those tawdry
little lidded cases you can buy in dollar stores with a toy ballerina
inside who pirouettes atop a mirror to Lara’s Theme or I Could
Have Danced All Night or something).
But her P.L.U. was in every way a worthy successor to the table and
loveseat of Kim’s earlier exhibition. Indeed it was a enriching
development from those first, satisfying pieces, in that it not only
provided a solid piece of furniture magically built from a compression
of newspapers, but used that remarkable procedure as the basis for critique
and not as an end in itself.
“While society is free to experience the vast expanse of rural
habitats, especially in Canada, the majority of the population insists
on programming themselves into the cityscapes of compartmentalized dwelling
spaces [Kim is nothing if not wordy!]. The viewer”, she continues,
in her gallery statement, “is encouraged to postulate a future
with this trend extrapolated to the extreme; a future where each individual
occupies the most minimal and efficient of space [sic.]: a personal
living space.”
Well, this is pretty prolix and semantically overloaded, but one knows
what she means: man is born free and everywhere he is shoehorned into
personal living spaces.
And so, in P.L.U., her best piece thus far, Kim uses the texture of
her homemade “wood” to add linguistic density to her model
of overcrowding; it’s almost as if the “clamour” of
the material embodies the cries and whispers of the close-packing of
society. And there is a deliciously wicked additional aspect to the
piece: the P.L.U. object (is it really a model?) is so over-integrated,
with drawers and extensions and double-duty elements, and the spaces
of the piece so elided, its functions collapsed, that it is suffocating
and ingenious in equal measure: a cautionary tale in homemade “wood”.
In-Sun Kim’s A Square Foot runs at Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave.,
Toronto, until July 29. 416-537-8108.
about the exhbition
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