Fragile–Buddha 2010 digital print 35.4 x 35.4 inches
gallery mission Established in 2000, Sundaram Tagore Gallery is devoted to examining the exchange of ideas between Western and nonWestern cultures. We focus on developing exhibitions and hosting not-for-profit events that encourage spiritual, social and aesthetic dialogues. In a world where communication is instant and cultures are colliding and melding as never before, our goal is to provide venues for art that transcend boundaries of all sorts. With alliances across the globe, our interest in cross-cultural exchange extends beyond the visual arts into many other disciplines, including poetry, literature, performance art, film and music.
Skinning: The Art of Kim Joon By Rachel Baum
[T]he soldier has become something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed;1 — Michel Foucault You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit….you're already on it, scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic….it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them.2 — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
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kinning, skin wrap, skin morph, implicit surface, global illumination, hypersurface: These are the provocative, allusive terms that describe various techniques and situations within digital three-dimensional image making. It is as if the practices of cartography and cosmetic surgery have merged, and in a way they have. The sui generis creation that 3D animation programs propose would seem to eliminate all constraints on representation because it is beyond all the limits of nature. The paradox is that the aim of this purely virtual production is simulating and recreating the appearances and behaviors of objects in the lived reality of the material world. The pressure of this paradox is at its greatest in the rendering of the human figure. Korean artist Kim Joon finds his subject within this tension, in the working of immaterial flesh. The model is a manifold concept in figurative art and the larger culture. Traditionally, it means a sitter that poses, a studio presence that the artist depicts from life as portrait or prop. Modeling also refers to the illusion of depth and curvature in painting, the volumetric shading that simulates three dimensions on the picture plane. It can also mean
Ebony–Run 2008 digital print 82.7 x 47 inches
an archetype, a canon, as in defining beauty. Within the advertising industry, the model is a creature of display, an idealized animation of the commodity. In digital image programming, modeling means the structuring of forms, the armature of virtual spaces and objects. Kim Joon’s artwork incorporates all of these meanings of model, from muse to facsimile, construction to spectacle, body to machine. In biographical context, Kim’s navigation of various conceptual and visual surfaces makes perfect sense. He describes his creative development as shaped by the fantasy and artifice of imported American commercial culture, from rock music to Hollywood. The significance of this foreign media presence following on a wartime presence is not lost on the artist. He recalls the impact of listening to American military radio as a youth in Seoul and internalizing the new global identity of “pop”—U.S./R.O.K, capitalism as ally, consumerism as shared identity. Within this historical environment, it is fascinating that a clash between self-fashioning and the power of the state should form the primary theme of Kim’s work as an artist: the tattoo.
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Conscription in the military is required of all South Korean young men. However, there is a separate division for those deemed unsuitable or disabled. The artist was relegated to this subordinate rank and began exploring what the state defined as the disqualifying conditions that precluded one’s classification as passing standard. He found that those with tattoos were categorized as unfit for duty in the main service. While a tattoo is not a physical impairment, from the point of view of military authorities it is a symptom of social and psychological deviance that threatens the disciplined conformity of the troops. In a recent interview, Kim describes the terms of this marginalization: If you… have a large amount of tattoos on your body you cannot even be in military service. The regular duration for men to serve in the Korean military is three years—that is the official army service that men have to observe. But there is this other type of service that comprises all the rejects from the regular service. These are people who might not have good eyesight or fall into a lower category of body weight, and also people who have tattoos covering large parts of their body…. There were people with some kind of tattoo, physical dysfunctions, or some kind of lack. It is a place the secondary male citizens went.3
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The artist’s response to this identification as subnormal was to reinvest the stigma by tattooing his fellow soldiers. Using a simple needle and Chinese ink, Kim multiplied the forbidden marks, reinscribing them as signs of subversive pride. Kim sees tattooing as a manifestation of the conflicting forces of all identity formation, which is a process of both determination and agency, the effect of internal and external forces that often signify on the skin, as race, gender, normality or dissent. Kim’s interpretation of tattoo is a case study in what Michel Foucault terms the “repressive hypothesis,” that whatever enters social discourse through prohibition will in fact proliferate and expand, colonizing our consciousness and spreading across our vision of the world. This dualism of proscription and obsession is clear in Kim’s account of tattoo as, on the one hand, expression, desire and selfcreation and, on the other, “compulsion, coercion, duress and constraint”4—what Foucault describes as a “game of powers and pleasures.”5 Yet in his artwork Kim Joon does not leave real scars on skin. He declares, “It’s not body art, because technically no body is used in the image.”6 That his pictures are composed of many entangled and overlapping images of bodies does not contradict this claim because they are entirely invented, rendered out of
Bird Land–Bentley 2008 digital print 39.4 x 68.9 inches
the virtual-made-visible substance of algorithmic commands. Trained as a painter, Kim describes his process on the screen as an extension of the canvas. One can trace the collapse of the concepts of screen and canvas to the early 1960s and Andy Warhol. In complex ways, Kim’s digital surfaces are an evolution of this mediation by the silkscreen. While the screen is no longer a fabric mesh, it is a mesh of code. The medium is informational rather than physical, but the manifestation of the image is still a passage and transfer through a screen, even if it is now an electronic matrix rather than a material one. In contrast to Warhol’s deskilling of painting by relying on photography for the image, Kim’s process is closer to traditional painting in that forms must be carefully built up and finished with what can only be described as digital facture.
Warhol is also a direct source for the use of brand logos, even as tattoos. In 1955, he created a calling card for his commercial design business that featured a drawing of a Victorian-era circus performer with a plumed hat and acrobat’s costume, her limbs covered in tattoos of corporate trademarks, including those of Chanel No. 5, Dow Chemicals, and Wheaties breakfast cereal. Thereafter, the appropriation of iconic advertising designs became a defining feature of Warhol’s art. What does the fusion of marketing and tattoo imagery mean in Kim’s images? The corporate emblems are embedded in the swirling, linear forms of traditional decorative Asian graphics, from woodblock prints, textiles and ceramics. The classic motifs of clouds, dragons, waves, flowers, birds and fish flow in patterns around major corporate
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symbols such as Intel, Puma, Bentley, Starbucks and Gucci. Is this a circular commentary on fine art as a luxury product, along the lines of Takashi Murakami’s mutual branding with Louis Vuitton? On one level, the interlocking naked bodies bearing trademark emblems create the impression of an orgy in an airport Duty Free store. Even the consistent absence of heads—the cropping of each figure at the torso—gives an impression of serially manufactured commodity bodies. Initially, these hyper-designed bodies in Kim’s artwork appear to conform to the fantasy standards of advertising. The figures themselves—even “beneath” the colorful surfaces of undulating ornamentation—seem to have the Photoshopped perfection of magazine models. We’re accustomed to the airbrushed purity of digitally smoothed and sculpted bodies, a cosmetic uniformity that suggests we’ve left behind the damaged containers we inhabit irl (“in real life,” the techno shorthand for actual lived experience). Art historian Christiane Schneider explains, “The physical body in the technological information society has become interchangeable material... a negligible quantity in the face of virtual forms of existence. Identity is no longer found or even looked for in the body. The deconstruction of the body into electron-microscopic units [is] the result of mechanization.”7 However, the closer one looks at Kim’s figures, the more flaws and distortions one finds. The skin we expect to have the synthetic beauty found in advertising seems to tear open in places or include disturbing grafts. Areas of masculine body hair may be transferred to a slender, idealized female leg.
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There are areas of rough and raw skin, appearing painfully shaved or marred by rash. Female pubic hair is exposed— framed by the clean outlines of the “body paint,” it seems messy and ungroomed by the conventions of contemporary fashion/pornography. There are conflicts of scale between body parts, with overlarge hands next to seemingly undersized torsos as well as hands with the chapped, ruddy knuckles of a female laborer or working-class housewife. These uncanny discontinuities within the depicted bodies serve to make their artificiality even more vivid. Kim Joon uses a program called 3D Studio Max. The marketing for this product claims to let users “create organic objects” on which skins “can be controlled.”8 Gender theorist Judith Butler has defined erotic desire in terms evocative of Kim’s figures, describing “the... vacillation between real and imagined body parts”9 and how “bodily surfaces” become “sites of transfer” for features “that no longer belong properly to any anatomy.”10 Kim Joon uses the technique of “skinning” against perfected illusion and toward an erotic but uncanny dislocation. In doing so the artist undermines the value of conformity in both embodiment and consumption. These bodies are not sealed packages, they are uneven surfaces reflecting our conflicted self-creation—in the artist's words, “multi-layered composites of desire and will, emotion and action, pain and pleasure of self and other... a complex system of complicit activities.”11
Rachel Baum received her Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University in 2005. She is currently assistant professor and director of the art history program at C.W. Post, Long Island University. She has published recently on Andy Warhol and contemporary Asian art, including contributing an essay to the monograph Hiroshi Senju (Skira: Milan) published in 2009.
1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (Vintage: New York, 1995), p. 135. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1987), p. 150. 3 “Korean Artist Kim Joon discusses tattoos, taboos and his inspiration—interview,” Kim Joon interviewed by Erin Wooters, translated by Ms Inhee Iris Moon. Posted on wordpress blog Art Radar Asia, December 2, 2009. See http://artradarasia.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/korean-artistkim-joon-discusses-tattoos-taboos-and-his-inspirationinterview/ 4
6 The artist quoted in a fashion editorial titled “The Kim Joon Intrusion,” West East Magazine. Issue 30 (July 2010). 7 Christiane Schneider, “Inez van Lamsweerde: The Soulless New Machine.” Camera Austria. 51/52 (1995), p. 87. 8 This software has been updated and renamed “Autodesk 3ds Max.” See the manufacturer’s website: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/ index?id=13567410&siteID=123112 9 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. (Routledge: New York, 1993), p. 59. 10 Ibid., p. 64. 11 “Korean Artist Kim Joon discusses tattoos, taboos and his inspiration—interview,” Kim Joon interviewed by Erin Wooters, translated by Ms Inhee Iris Moon. Posted on wordpress blog Art Radar Asia, December 2, 2009. See http://artradarasia.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/koreanartist-kim-joon-discusses-tattoos-taboos-and-his-inspirationinterview/
Ibid.
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I. (Vintage: New York, 1990), p. 48.
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Fragile–Chunhyang on the Limoges 2010 digital print 39.4 x 55.1 inches
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Fragile–Herend 2010 digital print 47 x 66 inches
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Ebony–Pink 2008 digital print 69 x 43 inches
Ebony–Puma 2008 digital print 69 x 43 inches
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Neverland 2009 digital print 47 x 47 inches
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Fragile–Flow Blue 2010 digital print 82.7 x 47 inches
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Bird Land–Chanel 2009 digital print 47 x 47 inches
Bird Land–Breitling 2008 digital print 47 x 47 inches
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Fragile–Dresden 2010 digital print 47 x 82.7 inches
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Fragile–Easy Rider 2010 digital print 47 x 47 inches
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Bird Land–Aerosmith 2008 digital print 47 x 47 inches
Bird Land–Mini Cooper 2008 digital print 47 x 47 inches
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Fragile–Adam & Eve 2010 digital print 82.7 x 47 inches
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Fragile–Mermaid 2010 digital print 35.4 x 21.3 inches
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Blue Fish 1 2008 digital print 39.4 x 39.4 inches
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Cradle Song–Apple 2009 digital print 36 x 26 inches
Cradle Song窶的ntel 2009 digital print 36 x 26 inches
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Fragile–Skulls 2010 digital print 47 x 47 inches
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Fragile–Holy Plants 2010 digital print 47 x 66 inches
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Lee, Sang Bong 2008 digital print 39.4 x 39.4 inches
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Cradle Song–Montblanc 2008 digital print 63 x 31 inches
Cradle Song窶天ivienne Westwood 2008 digital print 63 x 31 inches
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Fragile窶天illeroy & Boch 2010 digital print 47 x 82.7 inches
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curriculum vitae 1966
Born in Seoul, Korea
EDUCATION
BA Painting, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea MA Painting, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2003 2000 1999 1998 1997 1995 1994
Fragile, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Tattoo and Taboo, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Beverly Hills, California Tattoo and Taboo, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong Kim Joon, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Bird Land, Sabina Lee Gallery, Los Angeles, California Kim Joon, Boxart Gallery, Verona, Italy Duet et Party, Galerie Bertin-Toublanc, Paris, France, and Miami, Florida Stay, Space 355, Tokyo, Japan Party, Touch Art, Heyri, Korea Duet, Canvas International Art gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tattoo You, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin, Germany Tattoo You, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Tattoo You, Savina Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea Flesh Park, June & TTL Zone, Seoul, Korea Sauna Bell, Ilju Art House, Seoul, Korea Make Me Smile!, Gallery Uduck, Seoul, Korea Fire, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea Hair Show, Gallery Sal, Seoul, Korea Tattoo in My Mind, The Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Tattoo, Gallery Segae, Seoul, Korea I Love It!, Gallery Yale, Seoul, Korea I Love It!, Gallery Insa, Seoul, Korea
GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 2009 2008
30th Anniversary of the Young Korean Artist, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea Rasa: Contemporary Asian Art, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Beverly Hills, California New Creative Constructs, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, New York Korean Eye: Moon Generation Exhibition, Phillips de Pury & Company, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK Conditions of Being—As of Now, Korean Cultural Service, Beijing, China From Younhee-dong, Yhd Projects, Seoul, Korea Korean Contemporary Photo Now, 798 Space, Beijing, China Da Vinci’s Dream, Jeju Museum of Art, Jejudo, Korea Magic of Photography, Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea Paris Photo photography fair in Paris, France, with Keumsan Gallery of Seoul, Korea Pop & Pop, Seongnam Art Center, Seongnam, Korea Scope Basel art fair in Basel, Switzerland, with Sun Contemporary gallery of Seoul, Korea Border of Virtuality—Korean and Chinese Media Art Now, Han Ji Yun Contemporary Space, Beijing, China Photo...Photo?, Sun Contemporary gallery, Seoul, Korea Being Now, Gallery Soheon & Soheon Contemporary, Daegu, Korea World-Beaters, Gallery Soheon & Soheon Contemporary, Daegu, Korea
Ebony–Cloud 2008 digital print 82.7 x 47 inches
2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996
Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum, Taiwan Ocultos, Fundación Canal, Madrid, Spain Field of Life, California State University, Sacramento, California New Asian Waves, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany Text in Body Space, The Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Giant in Illusion, Sejong Museum, Seoul, Korea Intermediae-Minbak, Matadero Madrid, Madrid, Spain ARCOmadrid art fair in Madrid, Spain, with Gallery Hyundai of Seoul, Korea Paris Photo photography fair in Paris, France, with Gallery Hyundai of Seoul, Korea Made in Korea, Paris and Annecy, France Hybrid Trend—India & Korea, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, Korea Art & Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Spotlight 30 Women, Paper Gallery, Seoul, Korea Asia Art Now, Ssamzie Space, Seoul, Korea Softness, Soma Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea ISEA 2006, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, San Jose, California Art/37/Basel art fair in Basel, Switzerland, with Gallery Hyundai of Seoul, Korea Asia: The Place to Be?, Alexander Ochs Galleries, Berlin, Germany Cosmo Cosmetic, Space C, Seoul, Korea Pop, Pop, Pop, Gana Art Gallery, Seoul, Korea Love Virus, Art Center Nabi, Cyworld, Seoul, Korea Gwngju Biennale, “Minority,” Gwangju, Korea Inked, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Realing 15 Years, Savina Museum, Seoul, Korea Relative Reality, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Resfest Digital Film Festival, Seoul, Korea Crossing 2003; Korea/Hawaii, KOA Gallery, Honolulu, Hawaii Exhibition of the Artists of Seoul in France, Les Galeries Artitude, Paris, France Gwangju Biennale, “Scar,” Gwangju Folklore Museum, Gwangju, Korea Ocean Art Festival, Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, Seoul, Korea Taboo-Brutality, Violence & Fantasy, Total Museum, Seoul Money, Money, Money, Savina Museum, Seoul Humans and the Doll, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea Underground Cartoon Festival, Kumho Museum, Seoul, Korea Body as Text, Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Young Venture 96, National Museum, Gwacheon, Korea Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2010 2009
Korean Eye: Contemporary Korean Art, Skira, Milan, Italy “The Kim Joon Intrusion,” East West Magazine, July “Kim Joon at Sundaram Tagore Gallery,” Asian Art News, January/February “Luxury Brands Embedded Upon Human Bodies,” Weekend Weekly, November
VIDEO 2009
Interview, Asia Tatler, December 19 Interview, CNN, December 2
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Installation, 2009, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Hong Kong
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sundaram Tagore Galleries New York 547 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 677 4520 Fax 212 677 4521 gallery@sundaramtagore.com
Beverly Hills 9606 South Santa Monica Blvd Beverly Hills, CA 90210 Tel 310 278 4520 Fax 310 278 4525 beverlyhills@sundaramtagore.com
Hong Kong 57-59 Hollywood Road Central, Hong Kong Tel 852 2581 9678 Fax 852 2581 9673 hongkong@sundaramtagore.com
www.sundaramtagore.com President and curator: Sundaram Tagore Director, New York: Susan McCaffrey Director, Hong Kong: Faina Goldstein Designer: Russell Whitehead Printer: Printed in Iceland by Oddi Printing
Art consultants: Diana d’Arenberg Joseph Lawrence Benjamin Rosenblatt Brad Vartan Alison Ward
First published in the United States of America in 2010 by Sundaram Tagore Gallery Text and photograph © 2010 Sundaram Tagore Gallery Art © Kim Joon All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cover: Fragile–Dresden (detail) 2010 digital print 47 x 82.7 inches