#26_Eun Hyung Kim

K.NOTe #26 A Very Subjective Appreciation of Artist Eun Hyung Kim’s Work Seo Jin-seok Director of Nam June Paik Art Center Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition At the OCI Museum of Art Eun Hyung Kim is exhibiting works he produced inspired by music pieces from Pictures at an Exhibition by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Inspired by 10 drawings done by his friend and artist Viktor Hartmann, Mussorgsky composed this music in suites. Artist Eun Hyung Kim again interprets this music into visual images. The 10 drawings Hartmann made have different stories that have no connection with one another. Mussorgsky links the suite’s movements with diverse narratives in a way that depicts the viewer’s own progress through the exhibition. Embracing the concept of ‘promenade’ in music and using this as a form of musical prelude or interlude, he exploits this as a linking pin to unify the 10 movements.

As in Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a typical realistic piece of music, Mussorgsky very realistically depicts motifs appearing in Hartmann’s drawings, such as dwarfs, ancient castles, chicks, witches, and catacombs, enabling viewers to associate such images through music. Mussorgsky represents what he saw and felt through music. Unlike other movements of episodes, the promenade movements are very subjective and have nothing to do with any story. Nevertheless, the promenades are not composed for a functional purpose to bridge each episode based on realism-based melodies.

In this sense, movements depicting pictures with different narratives come from the conscious mind whereas the promenade 4