“Personal Gestures” Installation view ©PIBI GalleryPIBI Gallery presents “Personal Gestures”, a show featuring works of Hanna Kim, Mina Ham, and Minsu Kim, through March 30. The exhibition looks at how three thriving young artists of today, producing work inspired by their daily lives and experiences, build their creative realms and respond to reality using their own distinct methods and perspectives.
Hanna Kim (b. 1984) uses various materials to visually embody fragments of peripheral feelings that undeniably exist but are unnamed, lying between emotions that emerge on the surface of society. The artist sets a rectangular panel as the base axis of the visualization process and follows her emotions to bring previously nonexistent unfamiliar images to reality through acts of subtraction, such as cutting, scraping, flipping, etc., and addition, such as painting, gluing, and other steps of fusing. Her efforts to give form to emotions we try to keep hidden within accentuate that state of mind even more and explain how visible and invisible things mesh in an organic relationship that testifies to each other’s meaning.
Mina Ham (b. 1987) captures a series of events in her childhood and the remnants of emotions she experienced from the occurrences to the present. Most characters in Ham’s work appear to be children who are not yet fully grown. Rather than aiming to symbolize immaturity, the move is the artist’s self-healing wish to strengthen herself in the past, along with reminiscing a time of passionately immersing oneself in a subject. The intentionally obscure figures reveal no information about their gender, nationality, or ethnic background but make obvious gestures of emotions and actions driven internally, allowing room for interpretation so that stories can be created. Ham’s distinctive use of contrasting colors and smudged, flowing, and winding brushwork mixed in with her personal memories and feelings come to us like a thick, moisture-laden landscape.
Minsu Kim (b. 1990) catches and observes glimpses of memories of her daily life and expresses them on canvas with a sense of improvisation. Kim overlaps and blends multiple times and spaces from her experiences on one canvas, recreated into time and space or perhaps forms that once existed and never existed. But rather than representing a strange space of an alternate dimension, the recreated screen appears like an ordinary scene that anyone may recall as their own, stirring a sense of reminiscence in the viewer. The artist clips, cuts, and pastes various materials, such as stickers, pieces of fabric, thread, etc., and uses them with paint while, at times, working on a canvas after flipping it inside out, all of which a projection of her playful attitude in actively setting up big and small changes in a repetitive everyday life.
