Kim Hyun-sook? Play Completed with Aesthetic Units

Kim Hyun-sook was once seriously troubled with her identity as an artist. All artists are tortured by this problem without exception, but Kim suffered from its aftereffects in terms of time and physical strength. The traces it left, however, offered momentum to look back on herself, and to open up a new path for her work. At the time, Kim developed the concept that artistic work is a game. Since then Kim has worked with objects she feels interested in, and the first objects she chose were the tools she saw at her father's kiln, who engaged in producing roof tiles. Kim later realized this is a very creative, natural form of play. After reaching adulthood, Kim has discovered her identity and draws the possibilities of her art from the tools forming part of her memory and sensibility. The artist makes her studio a place where she attains her aesthetic sense by breathing freedom and imagination into her empirical tools as the main subject matter of her work.

Although the objects (the tools) Kim employs are in the same context with those of her previous work, and in an extension of play, her recent work shows little change in the way of expressing them. Recently, plastic models concretized in another form have become her trade mark. The reason why Kim notes the plastic models is because she thinks that an assemblage and combination of each unit may reflect her identity appropriately. She feels a plastic model reveals her anxiety about work and identity by integrating her independently existing memories into her sensibility. More recently, the artist has focused more attention on how each object reveals herself or her consciousness directly rather than on its individual meaning.