For Korean painter Kim Young-Hun, whose practice has long been concerned with mass media, this space is the culturally-loaded gap between LP’s and MP3’s: the observable continuity and material artifacting of the analog versus the discrete bits and binary voids of the digital. Chiming with as-yet-unprovable observations in medical science that suggest that humans embody both processes simultaneously -and a cultural environment in which digital communication increasingly supplants physical presence- Kim’s work intuitively collapses the distinction between digital and analog. Using the ‘Hyeokpil’ leather-brush technique, his  finely-resolved figurative elements bleed out into unplanned lines, swirls and gradients which are repeated across the plane, resulting in an abstract landscape that speaks equally of analog waveforms and digital pixel-glitching, at once crsytalline and noisy.  

 

Kim Younghun’s artistic language speaks the nostalgia and the anxiety of civilisation from the uncertainty and discontinuity of life, fear of technology and the loss of humanity through his painterly surfaces. The complex entanglement of his personal experience of reality and virtual reality becomes personified on the surface through the reconstruction of images from both worlds. Deriving from his journalist background during the transitional period from analogue to digital, his paintings question the media and the technology and how it affected contemporary culture and lives. Organically amalgamating with exuberant colours of psychological wavelength inspired from brain and electronic waves, dissembled body parts suspended in the air and rainbow like clouds delineate current manipulative and destructive social media and the world. Spontaneous at times and constructional simultaneously, he crosses the boundary between abstraction and figuration and reality and fiction. “I depict detached and fragmented bodies to show the aging body of our evanescent mortal lives amongst existential uncertainty and obsolescence of memory.”