Byoungho KIM explores in detail the relationship between humans and the industrialized contemporary civilization through his metal sculptures. His works are the results of his critical observation of material environments and institutionalized systems; as the fruits of the marriage of cutting-edge technology and traditional labor, Kim’s works may be understood as a part of his effort to find an equilibrium between civilization and nature. In particular, Kim both expands and compresses space and time by using metals as his artistic media to examine the boundary between order and chaos.
I wish to draw attention to the concept of “garden” that Kim highlighted in this exhibition. Generally speaking, gardens refer to what result from the human act of creating ideal spaces by means of controlling nature and arranging natural elements in a certain layout. However, Kim takes the definition of a garden beyond this common understanding, expanding it to denote space that not only reflects our interaction with nature but also symbolizes the manmade, artificial, and structured world. This alludes to “artificial nature” or structural environments we live in, such as social norms, regulations, institutions, or industrialized systems. Kim’s garden stretches beyond our common understanding and exists as “a space of desire and pleasure” in artistic experiences or as a personal space where poetic experience and images linger, stimulating aesthetic imagination. Of course, such interpretation is valid from the perspective of the audience in reinterpreting and layering various narratives found in Lost in Garden. We can also presume what it is that the artist ultimately wishes to pursue artistically through the sculptural qualities unique to his art that are shiny, sharp, round-tipped, reflective, and propagative.
Sights of Inevitable Generation
Byoungho KIM explores the stable geometric structure of the artificial world through what he calls “lumps of the glamorous material civilization.” To him, lattice-like structures composed of horizontal and vertical elements, straight lines and planes are the foundation and silent order already promised by the contemporary civilization. Yet, he digs up structural instability that can cause anxiety and fear within it, disrupting stability and ultimately drawing near its true face or essence. In some works, he borrows the form of “lumps” that represent the propagation of relatively foreign forms compared to lines, while in others, he focuses on the “thickness” of cross-sections, symbolically revealing the essence of objects and the artificial world.
Lumps are like viruses—they are deviants that disrupt the stable artificial world. They are mutants in planned and artificial environments defined by straight lines and planes, so Kim calls them “lumps of civilization.” His sculptural lumps resemble nodules or buds, representing intense yet hollow desires prevalent among us or our communities in today’s capitalist society. The dazzling brilliance created as they reflect off each other allures and entices us. It completes the central narrative of “desire,” where we passively sink into the by-products of capitalism such as material, authority and institution.
Meanwhile, the interpretation of Kim’s works begins to expand from here. If these lumps of civilization, generated as hybrid mutants among firm structures and modular worlds, are considered subjects and representations of desire, his modular yet connected aesthetic sculptures that reflect the structures of our society strongly urge us to examine the process of reinterpretation by a third party through which we are invited to contemplate the principles of the world that are artificial and inevitable. One might also say that they found room to regard the lumps—both a part of the modular world and its byproduct—as potential forms of various entities that are generated and assigned value and perhaps discovered “intrinsic factors” that are bound to be manifested and revealed in the inevitable world of solid, set structures.
In Horizontal Garden (2018), the lumps are irregular protrusions from the reasonable structure that our civilization constructed, which Kim interprets as the fruits of desire born from contemporary society. These nodular or lump-like elements are most salient in Horizontal Garden and Vertical Garden. They imply that divisions and irregularities exist even in straightforward and standardized order while also providing clues about the organic structure and composition of this world as forms that continue to propagate and create their own order. Strong glints of gold between Kim’s lump-like modules simultaneously bounce and reflect off of each other, and the energy they emit go beyond simply conveying a sense of indulgence, extending our aesthetic senses and actively leading the audience to consider new interpretations. Worlds are created and built even amidst fixed rules, and the moment we sense those forms, we come to encounter another internal cause or another internal world of various subjects of desire, adding to the narrative.
Two Collisions (2024) is a recent work through which Kim clearly demonstrates how he handles and interprets material surfaces. A shiny silver sculpture and another of identical shape and size but in matte black rotate in opposite directions, each on its own axis. The two continue to rotate at the same speed, with their axes fixed, never actually meeting (crossing or colliding). The movement of the two bodies makes us recall inevitability. Objects of desire symbolized by Kim’s shiny silver sculpture and another in black that absorbs all colors and conveys a sense of distance in and of itself collectively represent the traits and essence of the world, visualizing the limitation of human perceptions that exist in the same space but one we rarely reach. The gleaming brilliance of the silver surface never meets the matte black sculpture.
Among the exhibited works is another installation titled, A Section of the Garden, which consists of a set of sculptural plates that rest and lean on each other at an angle rather than sit stably on horizontally and vertically connected planes. Each aluminum plate finished with matte black paint is bent so the artificially flattened plane creates a curved surface. The sculpture emphasizes the “thickness” of the bent aluminum plates, symbolizing the substance or essence that constitutes the world. The original color of the aluminum plates stands out in this cross-section like element of the work, highlighting the effect of their thickness.
Here, I noticed Kim’s firm sense of geometric order in observing and understanding artificial structures and worlds. As already mentioned, Kim has been exploring order based on right angles, verticality and horizontality that constitutes the foundation of the artificial world, but he also works by disrupting that very order. In other words, awkward angles or instability we find in his works are expressions of anxiety and tension we experience in stable, manmade structures as well as collisions and harmony of straight lines, curved lines, planes, and lump-like protrusions. Moreover, they may be his way of visually conveying the possibility that while the social space we constructed is based on norms and order, by-products that are bound to be created may emerge at all times.
Byoungho KIM’s art is cynical and brilliant, yet also resembles totemic elements, offering strong aesthetic stimulations. There are orders and principles that arise between individuals and societies as well as nature and civilization. Though Kim’s sculptures consist of modular parts that have been assembled according to strictly set standards, disparate elements such as lump-like or tentacle-like forms also arise as his abstract visualization of their dynamics—the process where individuals intersect and clash with one another in the social system. Naturally, I come to imagine interesting narratives that point to the possibility of another inevitable “generation” that we might see emerge from structural limitations and frameworks.