About Suhyeon Kim’s ‘Hollow’

Lee Sangyoon (Art historian)

1. Suddenly made hollow hole

Suhyeon Kim holds her solo exhibition 《Hollow》 in LA’s Koreatown, 2 years after the exhibition 《Denial before, indeterminate still》 in 2018. She seemed to vanish then and suddenly shows up to bring word of her exhibition.

The most distinctive change on her new works is not only remarkably brightened and gentle colors but also adjustment of holes’ shape that felt even painful. Exotic colors inspired from desert also embodied ponderosity and honesty with oil painting, instead of existing acrylic coloring. Though the work of ‘digging’ to make holes on canvas using a knife and make people recognize the canvas not as a stage for reproduction but as a substance itself still is the most representative characteristic of Suhyeon Kim’s painting, the overall atmosphere of her works this time is totally different from before. Holes that are now relatively even in size and arranged in an organized way are so away from logic and argument that it recalls Vladimir’s lines that read “But habit is a great deadener.” in Waiting for Godot which never left her hand. The digging work started from 2006 and she is finally skilled after 15 years, which cannot be seen as horrible pain or impulse of destruction any more, or practice of cool-headed reason against tradition either. Suhyeon Kim’s digging holes seems to be hypnotized – it is repetitive, unconscious, drowsy and aesthetic at the same time.

2. Daily life paused due to possibility of death

The change described above appears to begin at a crack and break in dailiness. Her trip to US in 2018 formed spacetime like in a vacuum, which Suhyeon Kim likened to ‘hollow.’ In addition, the pandemic that started in February 2020 actualized unexpected hollow and dished discontinuity, in other words, a pause of life attributed to death. The artist note that says “street without any cars and people, empty gallery, hollow exhibition with no hope for viewers” shows her observation of surreal circumstances in LA’s empty streets without cars or any human traces, closed shops and exhibition with no viewers. It is like a record on life premised on death. She said daily life on pause triggered by the pandemic reminded of deeply sunken, empty space as if a number of people were sucked in all together. Suhyeon Kim stated that this sudden pause may be a state where life and death coexist or perhaps, a moment when death is more vivid than life.

As in lines of Waiting for Godot that read “They give birth astride of a grave,” huge hollow caused by life destined to death and possibility of death made the artist focus on the most essential and original question. It is supposed that the question about the origin has actually lingered around her since a pilgrimage to a desert (Joshua Tree National Park) started in 2019, not because of the pandemic.

A desert in American West where Suhyeon Kim stayed was a ‘off-grid’ place out of GPS tracking, which was like cracked dailiness or a huge sunken pit and at the same time, undefined or undetermined dimension that walked a fine line between reality and surreality. Landscape of the desert stuffed as a pristine form itself also was a place where paused time lasted forever and as in the pandemic, it showed nature that did not belong to either death or life. These two, death and life, could coexist as equivalent values in the dimension of vacuum. What the artist faced here was an existential question. In a desert and an empty city where “nobody comes or leaves and nothing ever happens” and in the pandemic as well, the artists seems to have faced greatness of death, beauty of melancholy or finiteness of her existence.

3. Hollow that is open to anyone but cannot be faced by everyone

Through cracks and hollow space made due to death, the artist approached fundamental issues such as cosmic nature, transcendence, limitations of existence and perpetuity that are open to anyone but cannot be faced by everyone. Questions that had never been experienced in daily life, or, had never been necessary for daily life, shook firmness of existence, which increasingly hazed assertive ‘me’ and overlapped objects that ‘I’ looked at with ‘myself.’ While the existence scattered this way, objects that were easily perceived and recognized also became faint. For example, the speed of time we perceived and experienced in the desert was totally different from that of daily life and notions that we had conventionally recognized were also redefined. A video work <An Ordinary Sunrise> at this exhibition shows how the passage of time is diversely experienced in a desert and how everyday and ordinary landscape is differently recognized. She found in the desert that death was not an end and life was not always brilliant. Considering the changes above, Suhyeon Kim’s works definitely did come closer to nihilism that before but had difference from common melancholy. The distinctive difference here is that her works do not define death as the finality or present death as something charming but humbly accept both life and death on a border where the two are overlapped. This difference is supposedly an outcome that Suhyeon Kim’s consistency to put off making definitions and determination was reflected to expanded sight beyond personal dimension.

3. Simple and great proposition

The ‘Spectre’ series appeared in the process that dilutes the border between everything that cannot be defined or determined any more and has been otherized from me. Given the aforementioned background and process, Suhyeon Kim’s ‘Spectre’ series could be understood as an indicator which belongs to either of existence and non-existence, death and life or on which the two notions are overlapped. I suppose that it would be human existence exposed through the huge hollow hole which is not only the artist’s personal symbol but that of mankind. In the presence of this existential question, the artist chose acceptance over an answer. As the value judgment of whether her work was of canvas or cut pieces or order of rank became one of consuming debate upon the ‘Spectre’ series on which the holes returned to similar forms and meaningless repetition, the proposition faced at the hollow pit inhaled all the disputes at once. Life and death, the simple but great proposition, shows itself through Suhyeon Kim’s painting but does not give us any answer.

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett