Mysdreams: Painting, process, matter

With his recent series, Mysdreams, Heung Mo Kim continues an investigation of the mysteries of transmutation and transubstantiation through the painting medium. Mysdreams works with painting’s qualities and processes, and yet these paintings operate within a narrow spectrum, so that the painter has allowed himself, and the viewer, to explore the implications of limiting tonalities and materials. This limit is experienced rather like a freedom than a harsh constriction. The painter has avoided the medium’s excesses, for example, of color, gesture, diligent spatial or figural representation, or an expressionistic stylized formalism.

These works represent an aesthetic departure from the Soulscapes. In this earlier series, a mostly black background was engaged as a field of which the gesture of brighter, more saturated drips of color implied an energetic movement of the body in relation to the painting field. Although this movement occurred on paper, its original quality was given over to the paint and the collage. These elements created a new surface tension. The Soulscapes conveyed a sense of space on a grand scale. Their energy and dark surfaces stand in contrast to the modulated whiteness and delicate surface qualities of the Mysdreams, which seem to function on the scale of the microcosm, even as the diptychs here distinguish the edge of one space greeting another.

The paintings in the Mydreams series are painted on rice paper, mounted on panel. With this group, the painter has moved to amplify the paper’s inherent, essential qualities, those that represent its true nature and therefore, its truth or soul. The rice paper is strong, light, translucent and flexible. While the panel eliminates this flexibility, the paint itself is plastic. It soaks into or sits on top of the paper. The meta-whiteness of the paint layer reveals the paper in its purity. Together paint and paper have a discussion at the edges, of a grid-like pattern and the paper, at the seams of the diptych, through a gesture. Together these two materials form a skin for the panel. On this skin, the painter has inscribed mysterious markings, part of a body, of language. The lightness of these paintings suggest evanescence, a world of floating, charged bits of matter; these rhythmic, dappled surfaces reflect and diffuse a room’s ambient light, so that the works are no longer discrete entities in themselves or even as a group, but become integrated with the environment in which they are hung. This effect draws the viewer in to a separate reality, to participate in a free-fall – – an illusion of great space, the contents of which are generous and nonspecific. The Mysdreams liberate the viewer from literal constraints of space (graphic, ornamental, gestural), so that we, like the artist himself, can delve into a meditation within and upon these “mysterious dream” fields.

The paintings in the Mysdreams series offer a respite from an all-too-literal sensate world. In these and in his earlier works, Heung Mo Kim has effectively changed a body’s energy to a vibration of the soul, through a meditation upon light, space and matter.

— Debra Steckler, New York