Jeongyun Kim
Mixed-media on linen book cloth
Diptych 594mm x 840mm
Title Spine to Spine
Ultimately, my art practice is a conversation with myself, navigating the tension between resistance and persistence.
As a translator and former librarian, books have long been my companions, my attention shifted from their content to their physical presence. moving between countries and languages, gradually losing my mother tongue and a sense of "Korean-ness" with it, language became unstable; the book as a physical object, with its weight, texture, and structure, remained reliable. Influenced by Giorgio Morandi’s meditative observation of everyday objects, I began deconstructing the book and drawing its component parts in detail, placing them in dialogue with life drawings. Post-war German artists, Dieter Krieg and Anselm Kiefer’s book paintings validate my approach of treating the book as a monumental object, loaded with the symbolic weight of history and knowledge. There are structural similarities between the book and the human form. I see the body as a living cover that protects and contains the stories within. Historically, there is evidence of human skin being used to bind books, where, in a very literal sense, the body became a protective book cover
My next step is to reintroduce language into my work, not as fixed text, but through asemic writing, exploring mark-making as an expressive form, much in the spirit of Cy Twombly. I believe this form of writing allows language to exist as a visual texture rather than explicit meaning, echoing my own journey with its instability. I will continue challenging myself, finding new ways to deconstruct and reimagine the objects that anchor my world.
