December 13 – 29, 2019
2019년 12월 13-29일
Czong Ho Kyim is a Korean sculptor who expresses his fundamental concerns in both abstract and figurative sculpture, and finds a metaphorical resonance in each style of art making.
Kim is widely acknowledged to be the first artist in Korea to incorporate found objects in his sculptures of the 1980s, using casting methods to transform broken vessels and discarded instruments into unified metal structures of steel, bronze, and aluminium. By composing his sculptures with scrap-metal fragments that are left over from either construction or demolition, Kim invokes pre-information age technologies from an era that saw the first skyscrapers, transcontinental highways, suspension bridges, and jet airplanes.
Kim’s work, produced while in residence at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY, makes use of planer constructive techniques giving the places an architectural presence. In some sculptures the figure is overt and dominant, while in others the figure has a more subtle integration with silhouette forms cut into the edges of the planes that reference Greek Caryatids. Not unlike those anthropomorphic columns of the Classical era, Kim’s places merge aspects of figure and object into hybrid structures that offer ambiguous interpretations and multiple meaning.
There is a surrealist component to the work where his heroic “figural constructions” contain secret and sacred objects that speak to some notion of inner human desire not fully revealed. Stable superstructures are played off against those hanging “occupants” that move on the inside. Basic geometric shapes such as cubes, rings and spheres interplay with crosses, bullets, obelisks, and cylindrical forms that speak a language of personal and cultural symbolism viewers are not privy to. But, like the play of the moon on the tides, these have a pulling effect that draw viewers in to decipher the cryptic puzzles. The playful and inventive forms along with the richly modeled surfaces belie the sculptures’ simplicity.
Czong Ho Kyim received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Hong Ik University in Seoul. Further studies brought him to the United States for an advanced degree in Sculpture from the State University of New York at New Paltz in 1982. He was a professor of Sangmyeong University, where he headed the sculpture division. He has exhibited widely in Korea as well as galleries in New York and Los Angeles.
