Bo Kim – Ambiguity between the Real and Virtual

Looking at Bo Kim's paintings - angled mansards and long corridors depicted with the single vanishing point of central perspective and thus composed by various geometric elements - create a strange illusion of depth within the two dimensions of the canvas. The earthy tones and sky-blue colors used to paint the plain walls, floors and ceilings reveal a second type of architecture beyond: a different architecture, which sources refer to imagination - and are rooted in art history. In the inter-war period Swiss architect Le Corbusier proposed a new view on architecture. In his book "Vers une architecture" (1923) he claimed, that architecture could better be perceived and experienced when walking through and around space. In his Unité d' habitation in Firminy, France, each step in the long and angled corridors unveil a new perspective on space and interior structure. The viewer in front of Bo Kim's paintings may feel comparable; the next striking sight seems to be just a step and a corner away.

The artist refers to modernist painting - a telling example, where you can find the radical reduction of 3D reality into the flat two dimension of canvas, is Ellsworth Kelly's "The Window" (1949), an icon of modernism -, and similar to the Colorfield Painting of Barnett Newman, no brushwork is left visible in Bo Kim's paintings. But she changes the modernist red, blue and yellow into broken colors and thus recuperates and reinvents a form of contemporary modernism.

And she chose a further approach within her work, which can be seen as logic consequence on the way from space to plane: Bo Kim compares the canvas to a screen.

My work addresses the relationship between the Real and the Virtual. The dynamic-energetic world we experience with our senses and emotions is flattened upon a television screen and through cyberspace, creating a Virtual space which is isolating and problematic in its psychological and phenomenological dimensions. My paintings serve as a reminder to the viewer of their physical existence within the Real while simultaneously drawing their perceptions into the virtual-simulation of the screen-canvas. Viewers become a bridge, spanning real and virtual spaces. -Bo Kim

BO KIM received her BA with emphasis in Art History and her Bachelor of Business Administration from the Hong-Ik University, Seoul, Korea in 2006 and her BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, in 2010. She lives and works in Chicago. Since 2010 her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in the US.

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