WHAT I HAVE SEEN
CITY LANDSCAPE
CHUNKY TOTEM SERIES
FAKE SAGA
THE WEATHER FORECASTING STONE
YET TO BE FILED
DRAWINGS
LIST OF SELF-DEVELOPED WEBSITE PROJECTS
EXHIBITION VIEW
PASTRY(with HJ Keem, JY Park)
TEXT
ESSAY
CV
toomanysulkies@gmail.com
TEXT
TODAY'S SCULPTURE RECIPE: BIZARRE FOOD VS. GOURMET EDITION
CJAS
16th Residency Participants Critic Workshop
2023
While I walk through the center of Kim Sulki's exhibition, City Recipe (2022, Cheongju Art Studio Relay Solo Exhibition), I feel already halfway persuaded by the freshness of the title. Kim Sulki's sculptures do not overwhelm the viewer nor look easy and soft. Would it be because of the materiality of the acrylic that clearly transmits the seasonal landscape beyond the exhibition hall, the metallic materials that penetrate the surroundings, and the light density of the space as a whole? Lightweight objects, creating an illusion of the absence of volume, weight, and depth, are suspended like tightly sealed airbags and sometimes nove through the space like a light breeze. Would they be some teaching gadgets with which someone on the other side of the world is tinkering, a visualization of the universal laws based on their unique orders, or objets waiting to be displayed on the shelves of a general store? I got ready to be more persuaded by extending the word 'recipe' meaning in many ways, but the distance from the work is not easily closed.
The various objects in the exhibition are imitations and modifications of shapes, parts of shapes, and other points in those parts of a cityscape. The collective impression of the objects, arranged in unusual proportions, sizes, heights, and angles, seems far from urban monuments' meaningful historicity or heroic sculptural images. It is moderately decorative, sometimes clichéd, and suddenly cynical. A series of three-dimensional objects made of materials such as acrylic, fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP), processed plaster, and brass look like either the artist's studies resulting from desperate struggle or a manufacturer's production samples for hardly discernible usage. Kim Sulki's 'Garnish' contains a hint of cynicism not to put too much effort into it, but also 'coolness and loveliness' that should not be overlooked. In what context should I approach this sculptural 'recipe' she has devised?
The exhibition focuses on sculpture about sculpture. Above all, a new exhibition is the newest platform to report the artist's path of sculptural experimentation. Compared to her previous creative attempts to convey her inquiry into 'totems' or science-fiction narratives, this exhibition's direct attention to the urban visual environment apparently. marks a turning point. However, the artist consistently emphasizes her central issue of "focusing on the range of stories that can be embodied through crossing images of materials from different eras." In addition, I raise questions about the attitude of seeking to be free from the formative and sociocultural heritage of the sculptural medium while caring about it at the same time. For example, what do the creators categorized as the 'young' generation want to achieve? And from what do they wish to be liberated? Or I would formulate a more comprehensive question: for them, wouldn't the artistic work be just disinterested play or conceptual activity without any aspiration to escape or transcend a specific agenda? In other words, within the playful attitude of 'fiddling lightly with the legacy of public sculpture, there may never have been a guilty conscience regarding inheriting the characteristics of decorative art that most sculptors implicitly share or an excessive sense of responsibility to carry the new zeitgeist on their shoulders. In that case, statements like They lack something' or 'They crossed a certain line' should not. make sense. They are just unrealistic expectations from critics.
However, this generation has inherited a legacy of sculpture, a mass of extreme material that cannot be easily worn out or discarded once it is produced, and the artists were born and raised in an urban environment created by their parents. At least, they seem to be serious about a kind of liquefaction / vaporization technique that thins and lightens the body mass of the sculpture by eagerly tapping, spreading, melting, bending, and blowing it away. They reduce the historical origins and mass of archives embedded in each object into fragments, mixing and listing them without hierarchy, eventually destroying the old totality. They also erase personality by deleting the imagination about the creator's intervention in physicality. I try to positively infer that, rather than burning down the ground and tearing down the walls without any solution, the attitude of keeping a distance from them could be the point where today's artisanship and creativity begin to emerge.
Throughout this exhibition, we can track the structural aspects of the city that Kim Sulki observed with high interest, as well as the sculptural properties in everyday elements that people would hardly consider as sculpture or work of art. Within the vast subject of 'city, which people tend to examine once in a while seriously, it is still exciting to borrow someone else's gaze to rediscover its visual features, textbook sculptural techniques, and sociocultural visual languages that occasionally catch our eyes. Let us think of things that have been stylized little by little: graffiti walls that have lost their vandalism' energy, tile mosaics that we may encounter in the underpasses of an old-established new town, Western-style fountains and urban sculptures that seem to have been supplied everywhere in the country in similar shapes, classical abstract sculptures in front of insurance company buildings, the design of industrial structures that we can no longer tell whether it is for a practical function or for decoration. There will probably be no archive more abundant than that for a creator dealing with architectural tectonics and styles per period combined with the material properties of matters. Each of them is both sculptural in itself and anti-sculptural at the same time. The threedimensional structures that stand everywhere, except those with specific uses such as civil engineering purposes or public buildings, often converge into ornamentation, imitating monuments or sometimes transform into conceptual byproducts that have lost even the least purpose or into abstract masses with no identifiable context. Today's sculptures resemble yesterday's cities and tomorrow's ruins more than art history books. Perhaps it is an inevitable flow.
Facing Kim Sulki's landscape sculptures, minicry created with modern materials and production methods, I naturally think of the world of molecular gastronomy. Why do I compare the task of a chef, who constantly varies the texture and experience of tastes and strives for appealing plating while they mostly use the same ingredients, to the mechanism of a sculptor? Perhaps it is because I want to affirm the ambiguity of contemporary art (or artistic cuisine), where the true identity of the work is hard to find because of the eccentric fragmentation of senses and excessive layering on the border between bizarre food and gourmet. Bringing out Kim Sulki's simple statement that she is interested in sculptures that release narrative,' I attempt to associate contemporary art with a plate of molecular cuisine¹ that dispersed into bubbles, cooled down into a solid texture, and eventually remains as nothing but a vague mass and nuance. In this world of terrible popularization, where the taste we know is the most irresistible, I endeavor through the variability of sculpture which takes on new traits over and over and, accordingly, new narratives, the fictiveness of commentary, and the theatricality of viewing. Both the artist and the audience will get to accumulate the experience of excessive gourmet becoming bizarre food and audacious bizarre food becoming gourmet. As Kim Sulki wishes, I expect many different textural changes with the texture of the narrative amplified and then shrunk in every direction. I am unsure if we possess a good sense of taste to discern and synthesize tastes subtly, but I hope this exhibition will be rather gourmet than bizarre food. Food War we hardly weary. AE, culinary competition is a topic.
¹Molecular and Physical Gastronomy was born in 1988 when French chemist Hervé This and Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti were preparing for an international workshop on the physical and chemical aspects of cooking and were trying to come up with an appropriate name for this field. It is a cooking method that analyzes the texture and structure of food ingredients using physical and chemical approaches to create new tastes by combining seemingly incompatible ingredients, It is a style of cuisine that goes several steps further than traditional cooking methods such as simply cooking with heat or frying with oil, to change the texture or aroma of ingredients. Source:Google search