KIM DONG YOO (Born in 1965) Rose & Explosion signed and dated 'K D Y; 2003' in English (each) oil on canvas 182 x 227 cm. (71 1/2 x 89 1/4 in.) x 2 pieces Painted in 2003 (2)
Momentarily imperceptible, the modernist grid dissolves the flat exterior of the canvas into economy of imageries conducted in historical and stylish correlations. Kim Dong Yoo's prodigious endeavor in harmonizing consistency with variation is willfully exercised to produce a pictorial idiom in which the spectators are expected to decipher the binary code between miniscule images within the enlarged image.
The substandard composition of the enlarged subject matter packed into the rectangular canvas is perhaps in deliberate interest of Kim to summon a snapshot focus that immediately exhibits to an iconological recollection. The blocked intimacy reproduced iconic imagery bestow on an individual is unraveled by Kim's playful construction in inducing the audience to physically shift their body in order to shift their visual reception; in result, reticently manipulating the audience to create their own intimacy and dialogue with his painting. With this technical insinuation, the artist impersonates the digital production of modern visual culture and the society's obsession for icons and symbols.
The rapid growth of technology has spawned a vast collection of iconic images. The field of pixels merge to form a discernible picture with its electronic signals that is figuratively analogous to Kim's brushstroke, in which the fine-tuned gradient summon a singular image. Rose and Explosion (Lot 175) are executed in monotonic patches of smooth grayscale, exercising the spectator's eye to synchronize between concentration and convergence. As seeing is a process of metamorphosis rather than an automatic system of visual identification, Kim affirms that we never see only one image at a time by shrewdly applying this complex notion to his technical process of microscopic painterly pixilation. Through the lyrical permutations of pixel-images, he challenges in which people and objects can attain new definition. Training the eye to discard the mentally stored identification of an image by simultaneously inserting relevant yet different microscopic imagery, he teases the audiences' intuitive observation, fluently toying with empiricism and epistemology, a philosophical theory that all knowledge is derived from the experiences of five senses, particularly of perceptual observation. He guides the eye through stereopsis, a visual blending of two faintly different images in stereoscopic depth and solidity, providing a new metamorphic aesthetic vocabulary to the mundanely seen image.
Rather oblique in relationship with each other, Rose and Exploration is both of a finishing image of a Marilyn Monroe pixilation. The vision becomes steadily contemplative as the grid with repeating pattern and its tonal gradation act as a continuum to generate an illusion of depth. Kim's methodological translation of the pixel dots is surprisingly unaided by technology but heavily relied on his artistic labor in gradation of color intensity and multiple perspectives. The various observation angles offer a visual peripatetic, figuratively similar to the cultural peripatetic of Marilyn Monroe and the symbolic entities of rose and explosion.
The two powerful emblems adjacent to each other double the sublime allure of Monroe. Beautiful to percieve but dangerous to possess, rose with its prickly shrub and bomb with its destructive propensity mutually trigger a hypnotic sentimentality and hazardous desire that Monroe uniquely evoke. By stylishly plotting an analogy between the two icons respectively, it virtually imitates the seductive tease by tugging the viewers in for a close inspection and pushing viewers out for full perception concurrently. Notorious as a 'blonde bombshell' and an icon for beauty and sex, Monroe's charisma is described in multi layers.
Rose pertain to various sultry significance including the historical moment of her last public performance at president John F. Kennedy's fourty-fifth birthday, where she presented a self-painted rose (fig.1) as a birthday gift for the president and the film 'Niagara' where Monroe portrays a femme fatale character named Rose. She successfully digested this diabolical role of Rose (fig.2), a character of both fascination and shock, illustrating human sexuality and passion. Both with its ability to blossom exquisite beauty in color, the flower blooming emulate the movement of bomb explosion, presenting an effect that is lyrical and numbing. In this, the human sexuality and passion seen in Monroe's film role is subtly depicted in the evocative poetic performance of a flower flourishing together with the climatic blast of an explosion. Mostly acknowledged as an emblem of love and beauty, the symbolism of a rose is multifaceted. Religiously branded for Virgin Mary and also sacred to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, lust and beauty; rose in many ways draw parallels to Monroe's divine sexuality. The sultry allure that Monroe coined is knowingly asserted in Kim's decision to delicately insinuate through carefully chosen entities. The obsessively ordered composition of Monroe assemblage is also akin to the fanatical infatuation society had with her, furthermore evoking the society's over production of repetitive images of idols, reproducing them into consumable visual symbols, creating easy inclination towards objectifying Monroe as a product, hence into a sexual object. These seemingly arbitrary entities fuse with its perceptual and conceptual relevance, in many ways epitomizing on the narrative of the subject rather than pictorial depiction of the subject. The audience's interaction in decoding is crucial in Kim's philosophical probing as decoding itself acts as a form of visual metamorphosis.
Kim serves a great breadth of variation on a single motif by presenting flexibility in the spectator's vision to look for the object, look among the objects or look at an object; in chorus, managing to enlighten the audience that object multiplies and changes under our very eyes. He demonstrates that illusion of sight has its interesting values by rejecting to confine vision as something singularly related to the mechanism of the eye, uttering that there are narratives that we cannot discern physiologically and psychologically.
