김인영 | The show must go on

Artist: Inyoung Kim

Curator: Melanie Pocock (UK)

Inyoung Kim pays attention to the state of the image in the conversion process, causing material transformation across media such as painting and printing, sculpture, and installation, as well as online and offline. Recently, She explored the properties of images shown in digital environments and observed aspects of them being converted into real-world materials. As the way digital mediates images becomes more sophisticated, we get easily immersed in it, the artist studies the methodologies that enable awareness of “difference” causing heterogeneity or dissonance, in order to break the immersion in the media. The series of work, entitled “Re-aliasing” is an attempt to produce the difference again, as appose to eliminating the difference that exist in the natural world in the digitalization process.

Inyoung Kim received a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the department of Painting at Seoul national university. Starting with her first individual exhibition entitled <Space-building>(ArtforumNewgate, 2010), she has held 6 solo exhibitions, including <Overlapping Layers>(Gallery Dos, 2017), <Re-aliasing>(Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea, 2019), <Transition Spot>(Incheon Art Platform Window Gallery, 2020). She has also participated in a number of group exhibitions, including <Questions For Now>(Incheon Art Platform, 2020), <Prints, Printmaking, Graphic Art>(National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2020), <Translation of the Difference>(Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong, 2019).

Melanie Pocock is the Curator of Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, where she is responsible for exhibitions, commissions, and publications. Prior to joining Ikon, Pocock was Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (2014 – 19), where she organised more than sixty exhibitions with local and international artists. Her essays and reviews have been published ArtAsiaPacific, Art Monthly, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, LEAP, Ocula, The Financial Times, divan | Journal of Accounts, Journal of Curatorial Studies and Third Text. In 2014, she edited the first monograph on the work of Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman, published by Kerber Verlag. Pocock is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and holds an MA (Distinction) in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art.

6 March 2021

Dear Kim In Young,

Many thanks for your suitcase. A burst of colour on a grey and rainy winter day!

I almost couldn’t open it, because the paint around the opening clasps had dried and stuck to the case …

Having looked through its contents, I realise that such a reminder of the material quality of paint was appropriate.

Reading the materials that you provided taught me many new things about the effects of digital images on our perception of physical as well as digital matter. Though I already knew that digital images were composed of a finite amout of square pixels, I didn’t know what aliasing and re-aliasing was. Through your work, I see how countering the reductive effects of digitization – a process which you uniquely describe as “anti-aliasing” – can be a form of artistic activism. Your intrinsic – yet still discernible – interventions feel all the more powerful for their subtlety.

The many layers in your suitcase (printed images of your works in plastic sleeves; paint on acetate that reflects your scanning method) aptly reflects the process of your works. I enjoyed unravelling these layers and feeling your critical approach expressed in them.

I’m so pleased to see that the global pandemic has not curbed your motivation or enthusiasm for your work!

Best wishes from Birmingham,

Melanie Pocock

Curator, Ikon Gallery