"Visions that transport us to a culture"

 

In Korean artist Hyun Kyung Kim's painting exhibition we are faced with a compact series of pictorial works that literally transport us into a particular culture, the Korean culture, which knows how to immerse itself in nature, here represented by the bamboo plant understood as an icon of the past, present and future.

 

In short, an icon capable of being a figure of time, that time of which we talk too much, but which in itself does not exist; the past is no more, the future is not yet, the present is not but flows irrevocably away.

 

The icon of the bamboo here becomes coessential to any cognitive itinerary and is also meant to carry with it the contradictions of individual experience, its path between the hidden paths that belong to everyone but that each person must then alone rediscover.

 

These bamboos by Hyun Kyung Kim (an artist with a long and significant résumé) conceal and reveal, open visions and skilfully play with our imagination in a delicate yet very rigorous rite in which we are invited to play a role of welcoming duplicity, as if only in the active participation of eye, mind and heart can we finally understand, no longer as spectators as much as actors.

 

This encounter certainly does not require the guidance of traditional scholastic schemes; it is perfectly useless to refer to the history of European avant-gardes; one must have the courage to make available the whole self that contains us to walk the path of nature and the mystery of life that it holds.

 

Isera, July 2024

Mario Cossali