GALLERY 2

16 Jul 2009 — 8 Aug 2009

Eunhye Kim's page

Eunhye Kim
Present

Gallery 2 presents Eunhye Kim’s first solo show. Kim painted various images of children for the last three years since 2005 to 2009. She depicts the children as another herself and as ourselves living in the modern world. As if it is too harsh for them to be alone, the children in the pictures are holding a doll in their arms, or being held in the doll’s arms, sometimes even being in the guise of a doll or other characters. When they are playing with a ball or going on the rides, the kids seem to know how to spend the time alone-by inventing a substitute for someone to be with them. They look at us, as if craving for a response, or a glance at least. In short, the children expose the indifference prevalent in society. Though the children look lonesome and the theme behind them is somehow serious, Kim fills her works with warm suggestion of humanity. The dull faces of the children express their discontent with the presents given to them, for they need not the dead things but a friendly hand stretched to them. Kim felt a deep loneliness as becoming a grown-up and began to draw a picture of immature ‘children’ to deal with the feeling. In her works, the children and the presents given to them are reborn with a new meaning?the ‘present’ prepared by Kim is not the material things offered to the children but an immaterial and wishful message to us.

Eunhye Kim(b.1984) is a young artist who will introduce herself to the audience for the first time on this show in Gallery 2. While Kim’s works apparently describe the innocent world of children with fanciful imagination, we still can find ourselves reflected on her canvas. She offers us a realistic view of her imaginary beings, whose delicate faces invite us to immerse ourselves in the memory of the past, the dream of the present, and the vision of the future.

“Everyone has his or her own reminiscence and memory. The old days could appear sweet or bitter according to the perspective from which we look back upon the past. Memory is, I think, a repetition of transforming, erasing, and attaching over the traces of the time we had, so as to please ourselves.

I repeatedly write something, and erase it.

The words drawn from my mind suddenly look unsatisfying and sound strange, so I erase it with a rubber.

I write down again all the words in my mind and the things choking my heart.
And I begin to erase the scribbling that I want to do away with, one by one, with a wishful thinking that I could empty my mind as well as the note in front of me.

Like the traces of pencil, a memory remains in my mind, a reminiscence in my heart.
The words that I press down on the note leave a trace even after being erased.

The note… might be remembered with the traces left behind.”

_ Excerpt from the artist’s note