When I have visited Kim Soyeon's studio, there was one small painting in particular caught my eye. the painting had a dear facing the front with writing 'Penn's Cave" written on it. What looked like an infomation board seen in a zoo at a glance, as it is in her other works of paintings,this small painting had no explanatory factors. The work simpley analogise something isolated from a reality through arrangements of images and meanings. To Kim Soyeon 'Penn's Cave" is an origin of a fear. This work about the panic she had experienced as entering into a huse darkness of Pennsilvania's cave is a symbol of hidden horror originating from a reality.
What is interesting in Kim Soyeon's work is that the potential world, uncertain and risky situations yet been exploded into an delivered through infomation guidance and signboards like objects. The light-hearted sensibility and visual symbols, informative signs and advertisements like use of short words and sentences found through out the works enhance such instructional characteristics. But what it indicate is not as clear as a physical place or situation indicated on signboards often seen in everyday reality. The infomation eeen in the work suggested in an ambiguos way. It mysteriously leads us to a certain situation and leaves us lost in an ambiguity in the end. By adopting light- hearted and rightness of the method used in general visual communication Kim Soyeon manages to speak in a secretive and paradoxical language of ambiguous world.
The world,Kim Soyeon's images unfold is illogical and wondrous, as it is experienced in a world of dream. Unsubstantial spritialsubjects and a feeling of being grabbed by passing shadows are core subject matters of Kim Soyeon's work. The exhibition title "the third eye"suggests artist's look an such subjects exisiting somewhere beyond its physicaland sistematical dimension. Through the process of intutively accepting unexpected everyday clues, she fumble for difficult truths caught on "the third eye". Such clues apper through exteamly subjecttive system of symbols as it is seen in a world of dream.Repetitively appear birds,stange looking animals, eyes listening ears, sleeping person, potinting fingers and unpluggedelecttrical cords seem somewhat eccentric and mysterios like spritual and mythical symbols likely to the Book of the Apocalypse.
These symbols,like it is in our dreams, are illogical and perceived whithin a complicated and layered narrative structure. Her previous exihibition titles such as "Sequence" or "Series painting" suggest such concept of non-linear and illogical narratives strctures that she has been exploring Fragments of images tthrown in front of spectators without any explanations relate themselves like a set of film stills, multiplaying meanings , forming indenfinite stories. There is no begining , the middle or the end. Idenfinite and fragile threads between images encourage spectator's own intutions and imagenation. Such story remains mysterious and unresolved, continuesto resructure itself by fomed relations of images.
Kim Soyeon's work reveals a world hidden behind a reality intervening and interrupting our daily lives like an uninvited guest. It is not a world where everything is clear and approved, but a world of point, doubts, uncertainly, fear and hysteria. Not a world of light ,made up of optimism and clearness, but a shadowed world as it is in a nature. The strength of Kim Soyeon's work lies in the fact that a fear does not appear as an ultimate darkness , but oscillates where the darkness and light co-exist. And this is the reason why as it is in classical horror or crime films psychological tension is experienced from her works. Such conditions come to us as a lyrical beauty, and this is because her work dose not provide a huge answer about known truths, but the tells a story of fragile and unstable state of a human existence. The belief of a certain exstence, but the fact that subject is still unknown, she tells a stoty about such condition in a language of doubts and uncertainty.
By Eunju Lee / Independent Curator
