Today Newspaper | [Kim Jong-geun’s Artists I’m Watching (7)] From Naesung to Thirty-Year-Old Marriage, Her Audacious Confession
In his Today Newspaper column, art critic Kim Jong-geun wrote that Kim Hyun Jung has returned after three years with the theme 'A Tray of Eggs, Marrying Age,' praising the way the now thirty-year-old artist unpacks the real issue of marriage with her signature wit through parodies of famous paintings. He assessed that works including her representative piece 'Worlds Apart' make bold statements that resonate with both older and younger generations alike.
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[Kim Jong-geun's Artists I'm Watching (7)] From Naesung to Thirty-Year-Old Marriage, Her Audacious Confession
Kim Hyun Jung is now a promising thirty-year-old female Korean painter.
In the field of Korean painting, which is often severely neglected by the public and art lovers alike, the response to Kim Hyun Jung's work in particular has, strangely enough, been an exception — it runs hot.
Every time she exhibits, she draws enormous attention, and countless visitors are captivated by her paintings. She has even risen to become an idol and celebrity of the art world, and is genuinely regarded as such.
Proof of this can be found in her selection for Forbes' 2017 'Influential 30 Under 30' list. Outdoing major domestic exhibitions by the likes of Lee Jung-seob and Andy Warhol, her 2016 solo exhibition 'Naesung Amusement Park,' driven purely by SNS and word of mouth, set the record for the most visitors ever to a domestic solo exhibition, drawing 67,000 people to the "amusement park." This is why we cannot ignore her work.
That artist has now returned after three years with the theme <A Tray of Eggs, Marrying Age>.
This exhibition is also a special show commemorating the Korea Young Artist Award, given with prize money by Keumboseong Art Center and the Korean Fine Arts Association to an outstanding young artist.
For this exhibition, with her characteristic wit, she has titled it <A Tray of Eggs, Marrying Age>. In the title alone, there's already "marriage"! For her, now thirty, the painting reads like a response — or a candid confession — to the tired old question "aren't you getting married?" that pours in constantly, holiday or not.
She had already caused a stir online and offline with her trademark 'Naesung series.'
She often draws her issues and themes from her own autobiographical, everyday stories.
In one interview, she confided, "I'm not actually the type to pursue shock value. If anything, I was overly sensitive to other people's gazes and judgments. Living under the weight of others' eyes was so exhausting that I even suffered from depression because of it. So I thought I should capture, in my work, how that self-consciousness creates people who are outwardly one way and inwardly another — that's how the 'Naesung series' came about."
Her candid, unfiltered way of saying "this is exactly what's on women's minds" struck a deep chord with many young people.
Now Kim Hyun Jung takes that same voice and aims it at people in their thirties, with marriage as her weapon.
Naturally, women in their thirties are the generation most sensitive to marriage, and for women especially, marriage is one of the hottest issues, bringing far more conflict and agonizing than fear or excitement, even before those emotions come into play. In that Kim Hyun Jung targets the reality women in that position face head-on, this is a story every generation can relate to absolutely, without discrimination.
In her earlier <Naesung> series, by frankly and unreservedly coming out about how women hide and reveal their true feelings behind a mask of propriety, she delivered a kind of pleasure that ordinary paintings don't offer.
The marriage chapter of <A Tray of Eggs, Age Thirty> is without doubt bound to be just as much a talking point in this respect.
That's because, viewed through the lens of Korea's still-conservative art world or artistic style, this is clearly a statement about women's reality — a kind of audacity.
Now she has moved, in real terms, from <Naesung> to being thirty, "marrying age," but her painting style still dresses her figures primarily in hanbok, the expressive form of the Naesung series.
Where her earlier work placed Naesung atop formality and dignity, this time she vividly depicts, as if she were a woman who has already been married for years, all the worry and anticipation a woman holds about marriage.
For example, she dreams of the magical marriages found in fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White; she depicts the dignity and fantasy of marriage, the glamorous start of a wedding, a woman's instinctive, desperate dieting to look her best at the ceremony, glamorous shopping for a new household, the far-from-easy process of managing a household, savvy sampling and shopping techniques at the mart, doing laundry as bridal training, house cleaning, eating alone, the war of childbirth and childrearing, financial planning, housework, wedding preparations, mothers-in-law, and the ever-changing world unfolding before and after marriage — all parodying Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.
With her representative work <Worlds Apart>, she still seems intoxicated by a dramatic aura and the scenery of real life, an aura of marriage.
Almost as if answering directly to a question like Gauguin's <When Will You Marry?>
But as Michel de Montaigne said, "Marriage is like a cage; the birds outside despair to get in, and those within despair to get out." She understands this irony and dramatizes the contrast — as if she, too, were a woman married for decades.
And she does so quite cheerfully, blending outward and inward contradictions with satire and humor, mixing reality with metaphor, rendering it all lovably as a beautiful woman in hanbok.
Every one of her satirical, witty paintings begins with her acting as her own model for the scenes she wants to depict, and only then is each painting finally born.
The reason her paintings feel so vivid and alive is precisely because of this laborious process.
But there is another thing: Kim Hyun Jung borrows the technique for that genre-painting style from paintings of the past.
She discovers today's '21st-century genre painting' in Hyewon Shin Yun-bok's Washing Place, translates it into the present, and interprets or pays homage to Park Su-geun's <Washing Place>.
That Joseon-era genre painting unfolds into her 'Bathhouse series' set in a sauna, her 'Laundromat series' set in a self-service laundromat, her 'Beauty Salon series' set in a hair and makeup shop, and so on.
In her figural technique too, she uses the traditional Korean method of ink-and-color wash painting while contrasting it with Western-style collage, elevating the Naesung series into painting while preserving its identity.
Fundamentally, Kim Hyun Jung hopes her painting will reach us and be shared like music, enjoyed widely by the public. She is succeeding, fully living up to that hope.
If so, then through the paintings in this exhibition, the artist is inviting us all into a cheerful space where we can honestly and interestingly express the fear and anxiety around marriage and shake off that stress.
Perhaps she is the first artist since Shin Yun-bok to convey, through her canvas, the excellence and beauty of traditional hanbok.
Kim Hyun Jung, an artist who has consistently made women in hanbok, living their everyday lives, the subject of her work.
Needless to say, marriage is the story of "studying each other for three weeks, loving each other for three months, fighting for three years, and enduring for thirty years — after which the children repeat the same thing," and this confession is offered up plainly.
Ultimately, this <A Tray of Eggs, Marrying Age> exhibition is, as she quite candidly stated in her artist's note, "thoughts and feelings about marriage, childbirth, childrearing.... For me right now, marriage is the biggest topic that's always on my mind" — nothing less than a press conference in painted form, answering that very question.
And she hopes it will become a moment that sparks an important discourse that goes beyond the older generation's fixed ideas about marriage. In particular, her production method is worth noting closely. Her work fundamentally captures stories the artist has actually experienced. Keeping that scenery in mind, she photographs herself in hanbok and separately in tights, then overlays the appropriate parts of the actual canvas with hanji (Korean traditional paper) collage. That is why most of her works convey the emotion of real, lived reality so powerfully.
Through the theme <A Tray of Eggs, Marrying Age>, Kim Hyun Jung has, in her own distinctively humorous and witty Kim Hyun Jung style, already shown sufficiently original form for an intergenerational story, and through it breathes new vitality into the Korean art world.
And still, she seems to be pondering marriage.
Finally, I'd like to offer the artist a piece of advice for that ongoing pondering, in the form of an old Russian proverb.
Kim Jong-geun, Art Critic
Chair, Academic Criticism Division, Korean Fine Arts Association
Director, Goyang International Flower Art Biennale
Co-Director, Seoul Art Show
"Pray once before going to war, twice before going to sea, and three times before entering the wedding hall" — because marriage, that much, is a headache of a happiness.
In her thirtieth-year celebration, I am confident she will continue to unfold a world of novelty, where the value of art that transcends worldly success becomes a source of strength.
Donald Kuspit, the American art critic who wrote the mythology of the avant-garde, said that the art history of the future will be written by popular artists.
At the very least, I trust that Kim Hyun Jung will remain a shining, popular artist who continues, through hanbok, to show us new flavors of Korean painting. As for the orthodoxy and spiritual world of Korean painting itself — that may be another artist's task to carry forward.
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