Myeongsoo Kim: Mother-Land. Curated by Michelle Yun.

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MYEONGSOO KIM

137­ West 25th Street New York, NY 10001

cuear tfoundation.org

MYEONGSOO KIM Mother-Land

Curated by

MICHELLE YUN

October 7 - November 3, 2020 1

Mt St. Helens 1980, 2020 (work in progress) Clear varnished archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, Valchromat 20 x 43 x 20 inches

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MOTHER-LAND

Myeongsoo Kim

The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980 remains one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in the history of the U.S. I was born shortly before the disaster, on March 22, in a small town called Shinpoong, Chungnam Province in Korea. My mother used to tell me that my birth brought a cool breezy summer for her and my family. Ash clouds from volcanic eruptions like that of Mount St. Helens do have the capacity to produce cooling effects on the climate, but my mother didn't know anything about Mount St. Helens. Nor did my father or my grandmother. It was just a nice summer with the first newborn baby boy of my generation.

In Korean society, having a baby boy used to carry a significant weight , a mentality that has since shifted. The boy would carry on the family name. The boy would bring wealth and protection to the rest of the family. The boy would go to college and 4

become a doctor or judge. And finally, the boy would produce the next generation. This sense of responsibility was strongly rooted in Korean society through Confucianism and reinforced in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation and the devastation of the Korean War. Throughout the 1980s in Korea, this sense of duty to both family and state took precedence; the military government actively persecuted political dissidents who did not align with their authoritarian rule.

My uncle was a college student during this time and participated in anti-government movements to promote democracy. He was a huge collector of Soviet era memorabilia, such as pins and paraphernalia, which I inherited a couple of years ago.

In the run up to the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, a highly anticipated event during my childhood, I collected almost every promotional stamp relating to the games that was released

by the South Korean government.

Upon revisiting my collection in 2016, I began to see the Olympics, and these souvenirs, as a vehicle for government propaganda.

The Olympic stamp designs portray scenes of fictionalized sports competitions against other countries that subliminally boost South Korea as a recognized member of the global power structure and important mediator of international relations.

My practice identifies connections between personal narratives and geopolitical events as a study of the phenomenon of synchronicity.

The relationship between stamps, postcards, and landscapes is one of metaphysical encounters—it is the divide between the real and the imaginary, the image and the corresponding place. Through the presented body of work, I contextualize my experiences as a child growing up in South Korea during the 1980s within a broader social, political, and geologic sphere.

Myeongsoo Kim studied architecture in his native Korea prior to coming to the United States in 2002 to pursue visual art. In 2009, he received a BFA with a concentration on sculpture, followed by an MFA from Yale University in 2011. At Yale, Kim deepened his investigation into the connection between a desire to revive and relive memories and the constantly changing nature of the materials which act as conduits for transference and recollection.

Since 2011, he has been actively producing and showing work in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently, Kim participated in the 2019 BRIC Biennial at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY, and the Brave New World Photo Festival at the Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea.

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MICHELLE YUN Curator-Mentor

A photograph commemorates a precise moment in time. However, its function and meaning are subject to the variable predilections and associations projected onto an image by the viewer. Myeongsoo Kim’s photo-based reliefs are meticulously crafted constructions that artfully question our reliance on photographs as indisputable, factual records. They serve as visual time capsules that cross-reference disparate cultures, geographies, and experiences as a means to underscore the power of images to create both personal and socio-political mythologies.

Kim’s youthful fascination with sports, and in particular the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, was manifest through his collection of commemorative stamps issued by the South Korean government.

These seemingly innocuous souvenirs depicting Korean athletes competing against other nations across various sporting 6

events were in fact conceived as propagandistic vehicles constructed by the government to subtly promote nationalistic pride. Kim’s strategic selection, documentation, cropping, and fragmentation of these grainy images as collage elements in his work emphasize the phenomena of cultural dislocation he experienced by revisiting this childhood fascination through the lens of his present identity as a diasporic artist. Memory has a tendency to compress time and space; the holes that punctuate the surface of these reliefs echo the gaps, distortion, and selective recall that occur over time. The physical layering of their surfaces likewise alludes to the strata of experience and time that influence one’s perception of the past.

References to time—geological, celestial, and personal—is a unifying undercurrent found across this series of works.

Another touchstone for Kim is

the synchronicity of the artist’s birth in Seoul, Korea to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. These seemingly disparate events become intertwined within the artist’s personal history through his mother, who believed the reverberations of the eruption impacted the weather patterns in Seoul concurrent to Kim’s birth. Her fascination with this phenomenon was crystalized through a picture postcard of Mount St. Helens she gifted to the artist that has become both a personal talisman and illustration to his origin story.

The interrelationship between macro and micro histories in this instance is consummated through the powerful symbology of the photographic image. At a time when facts are in danger of becoming obsolete, Kim’s surreal compositions underscores the transformative power of an image to unite and with this the potential hazards of relying too heavily on the subjectivity of photographic “truth.”

Michelle Yun is Senior Curator of Asian Contemporary Art and Associate Director of the Asia Society Triennial at Asia Society Museum. She is responsible for overseeing the modern and contemporary exhibition program and the Museum’s permanent collection of contemporary art. Formerly, she has served as the Project Director of Cai Guo-Qiang’s studio and as a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in addition to organizing numerous independently curated exhibitions. Yun is a frequent lecturer on modern and contemporary Asian art and her writings have been included in many publications including No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki; Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot; and Treasures of Asian Art: The Asia Society Museum Collection, all of which she also co-edited.

Yun earned her MA in Modern Art and Critical Studies from Columbia University and her BA from Mount Holyoke College.

She is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute’s Executive Education Program for Museum Leaders and sits on the advisory board of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

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When we were shooting for the stars, 2020 Clear varnished archival pigment print, Dibond, satin poly-finished MDF 60 x 25 x 5 inches

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PREVIOUS SPREAD Landscape in the water, 2020 Pigment print, paint, Valchromat 28 x 17 inches LEFT Olympic Swimmer, 2018 Clear varnished archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, satin poly-finished UDF, brass, stainless steel glove 44 x 25 x 2 inches

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PREVIOUS SPREAD Landscape with two bears, 2018 Archvial pigment print mounted on Dibond, polished solid graphite panel, laminated graphite, poly-finished fiberboard, found objects 20 x 30 x 4 inches RIGHT Landscape in the night sky, 2020 Wood, brass, aluminum, stainless steel, copper 45 x 20 x 10 inches

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Untitled_Landscapes High and Dry, 2020 Clear varnished pigment print mounted on Dibond 45 x 30 inches

Almost full moon at Salton Sea, 2020 Archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, satin poly-finished MDF, graphite, brass, wood, postcard, gold liquid 20 x 30 x 15 inches

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Olympia 1988, 2017 Clear varnished archival print mounted on CNC-cut Dibond, polished brass discs 45 x 35 inches

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POWER / PLAY Re'al Christian

Myeongsoo Kim’s collection of Olympic-themed stamps are equal parts works of art and utilitarian objects. There is a particular timelessness to the stamps that could be described as retro-futuristic. Such an aesthetic reminds the artist of the sports movies he grew up on as a child in Seoul. While he may have been too young to understand the symbolic implications of movies like Miracle on Ice (1981) and Rocky IV (1985) in the context of Cold War–era politics, he recalls how these films and others like them fetishized the West. Kim thinks of his collection of Olympic stamps and memorabilia as an extension of this fetishization.

Keeping hundreds of them in a box—some laminated, some grouped together thematically— they have become uniquely personal fetish objects.

Each stamp is perfect and precise in its depiction of athletic bodies. One of Kim’s favorites features a male gymnast 24

performing on the high bar.

His circular motion around the bar is captured frame by frame, resembling Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs of galloping horses.

Others depict images of fencers, boxers, sharpshooters, and wrestlers. One portrays a javelin thrower mid-stride, while another captures a shot-putter taking the penultimate step before his throw, his cheeks puffed up with air. More often than not, the athletes appear to be white men. Their race and gender are presented as the normative ideal, a tell-tale sign of Western influence. Kim reproduces blown-up versions of his stamps, fragmenting the images into digital collages, a method that breaks down the legibility of the subject itself. In this process, the fragile power of the fetish object is ruptured. For his exhibition at CUE, Kim reconstructs sites, both physical and metaphorical, where the soft power of cultural exchange and the hard power of

Extreme Competition-Poids, 2020 Clear varnished pigment print mounted on Dibond, poly-finished MDF 40 x 35 x 5 inches

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military dominance have become intertwined. In focusing on the propagandistic power of images, he considers the effect of visual culture on spaces that bear remnants of colonial influence.

work meditates on how these moments of unrest never truly disappear from cultural memory.

Throughout his work, Kim considers structures that collapse the boundary between natural Kim studied architecture in and man-made environments.

South Korea before moving to A vintage-style postcard from the U.S. in 2002. His architectural the Salton Sea used to hang on background readily translates the wall in his studio, and is now into his visual art practice, part of one of his sculptures. It which combines elements of shows a family—a mother and her photography, sculpture, and children—sitting on the beach digital fabrication. Much of his with their backs turned. The inspiration and photographic Salton Sea is a now infamous work has been drawn from saltwater lake located on the landscapes in the American San Andreas Fault in California.

Southwest. He often transforms The name of the site itself is photographs of land into misleading—the “sea” is a shallow, sculptural reliefs by elevating man-made, massive expanse of segments of the images and water constructed in 1905 as an building out detailed layers, a irrigation canal for California’s technique that transposes the Imperial Valley. The canal was textural makeup of landscape eventually flooded, and the onto a flat photographic plane. preexisting Salton Basin became Each sculptural layer (which the Salton Sea. Water cannot he fabricates in his Brooklyn escape the sea; over many studio) recalls a topographic decades the lack of drainage has map and complicates the destabilized its salinity, making distinction between two- and it a threat to its own ecosystem. three-dimensional space. Images Kim’s sculpture juxtaposes his of rock quarries, sand dunes, postcard with a photograph he foothills, and lakes represent took of the sea at night; a full spaces nearly devoid of human moon hovers against the pitchlife, spaces that are now virtually black sky, and its glow reflects extinct in societies where the off the water. Small metal and visual traces of colonization have wooden objects are placed on a remained intact. The political ledge jutting out from the center divisions and disorder produced of the sculpture, subtly echoing by occupation have marked land the position of the family on the and cityscapes, a disruption that postcard. His sculpture recreates we are now reckoning with on an the site, with a somewhat unprecedented global scale as uncanny tone; the small objects national monuments are being act as totems in an isolated slated for removal. The intangible landscape. Kim is fascinated traces of colonial history are of with the history of the Salton Sea particular interest to Kim—his as both a testament to human 26

innovation and a symbol of failed modernity. There is a disconnect between the propagated image of the postcard and the reality of the environmental disaster the sea has become. This contrast between object and image is a primary concern for Kim, who reconsiders how images may be used to perpetuate idealized histories and cultural legacies.

initially invested. In essence, with half the events held in Pyongyang and the other half in Seoul, the two nations could symbolically overcome their fraught past and the colonial vestiges of their division. Whatever reconciliation the games might have brought was lost by 1987, when talks between the two nations broke down. Among other reasons, North Korea’s allies, China and the Soviet Union, were not willing to boycott the games and risk alienating South Korea, which had seen an unprecedented economic boom in the 1980s, as well as a swift turn toward authoritarian politics. Such a move might have also provoked the U.S. amid the geopolitical tension of the Cold War. In the end, North Korea would not host a single event, but would retaliate through military intervention and escalation.

For this exhibition, Kim combines his interest in the colonial histories of landscape with the political underpinnings of the Olympic games. The 1988 Olympics in Seoul were perhaps a missed opportunity for reconciliation between North and South Korea. In the summer of 1986, the governments of North and South Korea in Pyongyang and Seoul, respectively, were in talks to share the games between the divided nations.1 Following the first World War, the United Growing up in South Korea in States and the Soviet Union had the 1980s, Kim remembers being claimed sovereignty over the instilled with the idea of virtuous Korean peninsula. With the U.S. self-sacrifice. He grapples with supporting the South and the this concept equally in his work Soviet Union supporting the and his life. He describes this North, the neighboring regions ethos as a consequence of were arbitrarily pitted against Japanese imperialist attitudes each other. This lasted from adopted by Korea during their 1945 until 1950, culminating in occupation in the early twentieth the outbreak of the Korean War century. The idea of overcoming when the North invaded the physical limits at great personal South, the aftermath of which directly correlates to the political cost transferred into practices of post-war conscription and labor tensions on the peninsula today.

In 1981, the International Olympic that emphasize a devotional work ethic. Over time, Kim has found Committee selected Seoul to new meaning and magnitude host the games. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung communicated in this kind of bodily sacrifice and the physical fragility we all his desire to share the events grapple with at one point or with South Korea, a compromise another in our lives. In one of in which both countries were

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his sculptures, he uses plaster molds of his own body parts, implicating himself in his work.

What Kim saw in Seoul during the 1988 Olympics was a different kind of bodily offering: a performative participation.

Individuals were required to leave their homes to celebrate the games, and by extension, the spirit of what they stood for. The agency of the body, particularly that of the athlete, is similarly lost amid authoritarian power structures. A contemporary example of an athlete navigating similar power dynamics can be found in Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, who kneeled during the national anthem for the 2016 football season in protest of police brutality. The subsequent distortion of his message by Donald Trump and the National Football League transformed a response to racial inequality into an act of political dissonance.

The 1988 Olympics have become a kind of timestamp for Kim. The sleek modernity of his memorabilia documents a pivotal moment in which South Korea transitioned into a global power modeled after the fetishized West. The ways in which the South Korean government maximized their newfound international recognition was not readily apparent to the young artist. But the zeitgeist of the 1980s and the overall ethos of the games—the sense of ceremony, sacrifice, and honor shared by the athletes and citizens alike— lives on as a cultural legacy. By 28

contextualizing his experience of the games, Kim reflects upon the sociopolitical forces that shape our collective memories.

In co-opting the bodies of its citizens, South Korea continues to reinforce a nationalistic ideology, in which the value of the individual is outweighed by that of the state, a concept that contradicts the purported centrality of the self in Western culture. In these systems, to use Kim’s words, “your body does not matter.” Memorabilia represents merely one aspect of the legacy brought about by the 1988 Olympics, but for Kim, this shared history is inseparable from personal identity.

1 See Sergey Radchenko, Sport and Politics on the Korean Peninsula: North Korea and the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Washington DC: North Korea International Documentation Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.

This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified.

No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.

Re’al Christian is a New York-based writer and art historian. She is a contributor to various publications including Art in America, Art Papers, Art in Print, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB Magazine. She is a Curatorial Fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, and an MA candidate in Art History and Curatorial Studies at Hunter College. She earned her bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication Studies.

Mentor Sara Reisman is Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, where she recently organized exhibitions including To Cast Too Bold a Shadow, Revolution from Without, The Watchers, and Relational Economies: Labor over Capital, among others. Recent book projects include Mobilizing Pedagogy: Two Projects in the Americas by Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá (Amherst College Press), and Elia Alba: The Supper Club (Hirmer Publishers), both in 2019. From 2008 to 2014, Reisman was director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, commissioning permanent public artworks by Xu Bing, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pablo Helguera, and Jeffrey Gibson, among others. Reisman has worked in curatorial roles at the Queens Museum (2008), the New Museum (2005-2006), and the Philadelphia ICA (2004-2005).

She was a 2011 Critic-inResidence at Art Omi; a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bulgaria; and a 2020 Artslink Fellow in St. Petersburg. Reisman has taught art history and curatorial practice at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase, and since 2016, at the School of Visual Arts.

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CUE Art Foundation is a visual arts center dedicated to creating essential career and educational opportunities for artists of all ages. Through exhibitions, arts education, and public programs, CUE provides artists, writers, and audiences with sustaining, meaningful experiences and resources.

CUE’s exhibition program aims to present new and exceptionally strong work by under-recognized and emerging artists based in the United States, and is committed to exhibiting work of all disciplines.

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This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2019-20 Open Call for Solo Exhibitions.

The proposal was unanimously selected by a panel comprised of curator Marcela Guerrero, artist and critic David Humphrey, curator Michelle Yun, and curator Daniel J Sander. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition.

We are honored to work with Michelle Yun as the curatormentor to Myeongsoo Kim.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ADVISORY COUNCIL

Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Vernon Church Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Rachel Maniatis Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sรกnchez Lilly Wei Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)

STAFF Corina Larkin Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Lilly Hern-Fondation Programs Manager Sharmistha Ray Development Manager Josephine Heston Programs Associate

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CUE Art Foundation's programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Anholt Services (USA), Inc. Aon PLC Chubb

Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP Clifford Chance

Compass Group Management LLC Merrill Corporation

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation Wilhelm Family Foundation

New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

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All ar twork Š Myeongsoo Kim. Cover image: Detail of When we were shooting for the stars, 2020.

Catalogue design by Lilly Hern-Fondation.