Critic's Note: (…)I feel the strength of the artist maximizing the effects of traditional ink and brush to capture the expressiveness of the face, while simultaneously fine-tuning it to fit her original paintings aesthetic. This strength rouses in me the taste for a new school of traditional ink painting. The spectrum of gray is expansive and the texture of the brush strokes is firm. She distances herself from the trite, conventional use of traditional ink and takes control of the medium, and depicts the realization of her vision. Here, the traditional ink medium is reborn into the artist’s vision of another world. A world that stemmed from a contemporary sensibility of life and the faces she has seen and read. This aspect is in touch with what our ancestors have expressed in portraits: the inner world of subjects.
Jungwook Kim's portraits have the traces of the drawing. Her instinctive and fun forms are recreations from her childhood, with maybe a hint of self-sufficient autism when it comes to communicating and sharing feelings with her own creations but isolating from the rest of the world. On top are some fallen ashes of regression, untamed imagination, homegrown perceptive humor, and some cynical and even aggressive power. Through the characters she creates, Kim paints some interpretations about the world and life that she observed from a distance. She expresses what she felt in a secretive, but sometimes blunt, masochistic, humorous, aggressive, desolate, forlorn and grim way. These portraits are documents of phrenological, psychic and divined traces in the shape of people. (…)
Park, Young Taek. (Art Critic) *This is an excerpt from a text, ‘Faces reflecting the world’, found on the Jungwook Kim’s solo exhibition catalogue (2008)."
Artist's Education: Ducksung University. Seoul, Korea. B.F.A., Oriental Painting.
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