Escape from Substance

KIM Chang Kyum overlaps video – capturing reality – onto a plaster mold (of an object of reality). This is a subject matter the artist pursues in his recent works, in conjunction with introducing consistent, appropriate amount of narrative.

In this project, the KIM Chang Kyum sets the theme as the artist of the present writing a kind of a reflective letter to his past self. This is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ writing, where a pseudomorphic setting assumes a different self of a parallel reality or universe. Meanwhile, the artist questions whether he (his past self) ever existed, and whether he (himself of the present) existed. His questions are set in the past tense because of less than perfect recognition that awareness of self is inextricably incorporated into the past.

 
Indeed, the reconstruction of the artist’s past is unclear. Rather than a crystal clear reproduction, it is more akin to an ambiguous understanding, remark, or even surplus. It is as if the video, allusive of reality, disappears – only to leave behind the white skeletons of the plaster mold. Likewise, the past self is an absent presence which cannot be united with the present self. Recognition of self is merely a crippled recognition dependent on such absent presence. I do not exist, but only the notion of self.

This artist’s artwork deals with the incommunicative nature of human existence rooted in an incomplete sense by blurring any inducible meaning through the overlapping of terse kerplunk!s on the audio of pebbles being thrown into a still surface of a pond. The surface of the pond symbolizes the reflective medium of a mirror. Once the ripples on the pond seem alive, they suddenly become obscure. This symbolizes the inability to perfectly reconfigurate memory, and deteriorative nature of time on memory. In either case, to amplify the human existence by making static the video medium is unique and characteristic of the artist.