Meeyoung Kim solo exhibition ‘Wet on Wet’

Ara Jo (Curator of Seoul Museum of Art)

Paintings by Meeyoung Kim who intuitively captures moments of passing landscapes seen through the window of a train carriage, tastes and textures of foods, fresh breezes and feelings from walking trails, convivially summon the viewer’s memories and senses following the flows of free strokes and colors. Her recent works filled with traces left by her brush movements and matieres created from oil colors covered and intermixed, turn into haptic views as it is like an eye that senses the surfaces.

Entitled as Wet on Wet, Meeyoung Kim’s exhibition is composed of 20 paintings of hers that vigorously adapt wet-on-wet painting technique that covers the surface with fresh new paints before the previously administered layers are fully dried off. Whereas her early works in which she attempted the wet-on-wet technique tend to have brush strokes more distinctively, her new works in the exhibition seem to show her gestures thrust, expose, cover and scratch former shapes further fiercely. Along with the particular technique that the works have to be completed before the paints on the canvas are all dried, her intuitive decisions and coincidental effects become imperatives. It would not even be exaggerating to say that the fact the artist has majored in Korean traditional painting before studying in the UK is a foundation that enables her to skillfully improvise such technique. The swift but decisive brush strokes, the gradation of tones and the color spreading effect in the Korean traditional paintings seem to be highly related to the wet-on-wet technique used in the oil color paintings.

In this sense, Meeyoung Kim intensifies her idiosyncratic abstractness through the process of filling the entire surface of the canvas with scratching, spreading, covering, and dribbling when the paints are still wet, embracing the unexpected effects. Particularly, Pepper Lunch (2016), Raspberry and Mint (2016), Orange Breeze (2017) cause one to remind of certain sounds, textures and tastes. The characteristics of her paintings in which disparate senses are stirred up through their visual effects would recall Orphism artists’ abstract paintings in the early 20th century that accentuated the correlation between the colors and sounds.

Apart from the characteristics of her paintings that provoke diverse senses, she maintains her experiments by subverting the traditional rules of paintings. Looking into her works with sheer layers, one can recognize that the artist attempts to resolutely show the intervening process of a color into existing layers by putting darker colors first and covering lighter colors upon it. In oil color painting in general, the lighter color goes first and then darker colors with more durable brush strokes are laid upon it to elaborate shapes. However, Kim chooses the contrary order to dismantle forms as well as to accent the colors that are mixed and combined. In addition, one can discover dark colors that are supposed to be laid on the back of the surface and recognized as shadows or backgrounds becomes voluminously arisen like in The Painter’s Grove which reminds of the rainforest. The subversive effects acquired through repudiating conventional thinking logics or interfering with the previous traces on the surface would not make one consider Kim’s paintings as a mere banquet of beautiful colors. Besides, her surfaces of the all-over composition, without the order of center and the periphery or the idea of addressing the center, not only highlight the flatness of paintings as two-dimensional media but also allow imagining her rhythmical gestures to expand in all directions.

Speaking of daily moments that pass by and unfold her previously enclosed senses, the artist recalls herself that the moment of capturing trivial experiences rather than investigating social narratives emancipated her to obtain her expressing ways to be freed and resolute as well as to decidedly try to break existing forms. Thus, she highlights that the changes in her subject matters are acutely relate to the changes of her formative languages. The power of abstract painting is to concentrate on figurative elements such as colors, lines, membranes, and the rhythms amongst the elements, as well as to activate one’s imagination and experiences. The different speeds in Kim’s paintings resemble the speed of memories coming around and going. The phenomenon of sheer images and moods caused from the breezy or sunny weather, the flower and fruit scents, moreover thrilling, puzzled feelings that intricately fluctuate and then disappear is a peculiar experience that one can have by following her abstract gestures with a bare eye. In this sense, she would never become loose in maintaining the powerful skill to deliver the artist’s experience to the viewer and in doing her experiments that build her own formative languages in the frame such as the combination of colors, techniques and compositions, which could be the reasons for us to pay our close attention to her works. I hope her sheer layers of experiments and stories to tell can be abundantly conveyed through the exhibition filled with her new, exceptional pieces.