Joeun Kim Aatchim at Make Room Los Angeles
Joeun Kim Aatchim’s solo present right here, titled “사자굴 [Sajagul] — Then, out of the Den,” relies on the artist’s mythicized reminiscences of the condo by which she grew up in Seoul through the Nineties. Her haunting work, made on semitransparent silk, fill a void left by the truth that she and her household have just about no pictures from that point, which was grievous for all of them, paralleling wider unrest in South Korea. Amongst their tribulations was her father’s chapter, a state of affairs immortalized in Doubt the Fingers (The Debt Collector Seeks the Father Via a Milk Supply Gap), 2022, by which the artist and her sister cower in concern because the titular functionary kneels at their door, reaching menacingly via a gap usually used to ship milk.
Her approach references Korean traditions of portray on silk, putting her household’s experiences inside a historic cultural continuum. The depicted interiors appear to waver with staggered outlines and overlapping transparencies, suggesting the elusive nature of reminiscence and notion in addition to the artist’s stereo blindness—a lifelong situation rendering her unable to understand depth. Aatchim’s translucent surfaces glimmer with hand-mixed mineral pigments, enhancing the imagery’s ghostliness. A way of preciousness is heightened by black bows dangling from a number of stretchers, suggesting the work as objects of mourning.
Aatchim describes her course of as a reminiscence sport by which phrase associations set off recollections alloyed with fantasy. Speaking remotely with relations again in Korea, the New York–based mostly artist structured her surreal scenes round key particulars of shared reminiscences. Recurring motifs of pianos, televisions, and lions relate to facets of the household’s milieu: They lived above a piano retailer; her sister performed the instrument; and the youngsters watched the 1995 film Jumanji time and again, presumably discovering solace within the notion that their very own troubles might even have unreal origins.
The protagonists of her beloved movie play a magical sport permitting them to return in time and transmute the previous. Equally, Aatchim’s mission reads as a quest to reclaim management over her unfavourable experiences by concretizing and mythologizing them, affirming the transformative powers of reminiscence and creativeness.
— Annabel Osberg
