A Garden of Architectural Ornament Page

VERY SMALL SCULPTURES

Byoungho KIM’s sculptural works emerge like an indigenous species of the artificial environment that has become our second nature. His practice, which leverages industrial materials and technologies, reflects reality in a manner distinct from mere mimesis; it does not simply copy the world’s appearance but applies the very principles by which it is constructed and maintained. These geometric assemblages―built from factory-commissioned tubes and club-shaped components―thus diverge from pure abstraction. While rigorously geometric, their forms are deliberately referential: polished surfaces and stamen-like shapes evoke magnified botanical jewelry. They feel entirely at home in the urban landscape, as if a mineral fungus had sprouted in an ecosystem of metal and glass. Yet this organic appearance is a meticulously planned and fabricated illusion―a kind of visual special effect. The artist likens his process to gardening. A garden, after all, is a construct―an artifact reconfigured to conform to humanity’s idealized image of nature. Though often relegated to the status of ancillary architectural decoration, the garden embodies a peculiar translational process: nature becomes ornament, and ornament in turn becomes place. In some sense, our entire urban matrix now exists as one vast, all-encompassing garden. If everything about life and art is already a part of this constructed garden, then what possibly can an artist do within it? Kim’s response is a recursive one: to act as a secondary creator, seeding this ground with his own gardens.

Garden in the Garden
Kim’s initial Garden series focused on certain autonomous principles of formation, administered artificially, ostensibly behind the facade of nature. Garden (2013) is a forest of slanted, parallel aluminum pipes, identically sized, but with varied colors. The bright colors and polished surfaces running from ceiling to the floor might feel related to public park amenities or playground equipment. To others, its dense arrangement might evoke architectural bird spikes scaled to human size. Each rod is secured flat against the ceiling but tapers to a fine conical point on the floor. The resulting installation occupies a curious affective space: it forms a self- contained whole with a cheerfully indifferent attitude, neither explicitly hostile―nor hospitable―to the viewer. Neither does it assert its presence with the transcendental aloofness typical of an artwork, precisely because its standardized components can be reconfigured at whim. In this, Garden functions as a metonym for the contemporary world: a modular system, easily expanded and transformed. It is a pleasant and convenient order in which objects, spaces, and even human beings become flexibly protean.

Here, the garden is presented as a microcosm―both a constituent element of our urban environment and a compressed illustration of its internal logic. It is not a stage for human action, nor a place for dwelling, but merely an aestheticized landscape that gestures toward nature. As such, it fails to provide a stable ground upon which human existence can be anchored. The exhibition intimates the presence of some individual who dreams, doubts, remembers, and weeps, but in this gardened world, their place is entirely absent. And Kim does not resort to the age-old critique of how modern civilization, built for humanity, paradoxically alienates it.

The Latent Potential of Ornament
For everything to become a garden ultimately means for an aestheticized world to become naturalized. Rather than delineating and defending a distinct territory for art, Kim accepts this fantastical, artificial nature as the initial condition for his creative practice. Consequently, his works exhibit a compelling duality: inside the controlled environment of the white cube, they appear as discrete objects of inquiry, like the results of a scientific experiment; outside the gallery, they dissolve back into the urban matrix, becoming yet another appended aesthetic object or architectural ornament.