Bidding Farewell to You

The production of KIM Yongik’s Bidding Farewell to You took a long period of time of seventeen years since it started with a single blue polka dot made in 1995. In 2005 Kim drew his own body on the canvas, placed it on the eaves outside of his studio for the whole year of 2009, and decorated some part of the canvas by means of golden paint in 2010. Finally in 2012 when it was damaged by a viewer’s scribbling on it during its display at Seoul Museum of Art, Kim saw the incident as the mark of its conclusion and sealed it by putting the canvas in a glass box. It is on the basis of his critical consciousness toward progressive modernism’s lack of intention to communicate that Kim has sought the generation of raptures and tensions through the pendulations between form and concept and between modernism and postmodernism. After all, his art is a constant process of asking questions through which he attempts to narrow the gap between art and life and thereby to formulate a new relationship for them.