Jess 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.
Books have long been my companions, but my attention has shifted from their content to their physical presence. As I moved 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.
