Reverberation in the Heart, Sonido
Sanghee Oh, PhD in Visual Culture
If we define modernism in a word, it will be 'innovation'. For example, in the Renaissance art, certain rules are found
such as themes, compositions, painting styles, and techniques even when we look at the works of different artists. However,
in the case of modern art, the works are very much different artist by artist and furthermore even the same artist creates
heterogeneous works. Because, as mentioned above, the top priority of modernists was the creation of something that is
different from the conventional art. From this point of view, modernists would have valued when they were blamed, despised,
and mocked rather than making great artworks that people recognized.
It is ironic that modernists, nevertheless, have become an elite art group than ever because of this pure spirit that places
even the status as an artist. In addition, we must think reflectively that the avant-garde attempts and unconventional techniques
that modernists did at the time were converging monotonously into an artistic thought by calm analysis and conventional
classification at the moment when two centuries have passed, assuming the origin of modernism as the late 19th century
impressionism. The contradiction that arises at this point is that the intense self-destruction spirit of modernists at that time
was diluted and modernism itself became a cliché, as did the new trends in Renaissance era or later times mannerisms.
If we look at Sunghye Kim's work in this sense, we can read two allegories of modernism. First, although early works of Sunghye Kim
looked like abstract paintings, they are actually landscape paintings that depicted nature. The work putting natural objects on a
canvas always encounters a limitation. The more we try to reproduce nature equally, the less useful any outstanding technic or
technology is. The right answer to this problem is abstraction. If nature is the essence, we can capture it fully when abstracting
the form and the color of the object.
Second, it is the use of mixed materials. Sunghye Kim used to follow the traditional western painting techniques using canvases
and paints. However, the canvas is now just a device for fixing the work, and there may not be a distinction between the top,
bottom, left and right of the frame. She destroyed the boundaries between painting and sculpture and paint becomes an optional
material rather than a must. There become no limitations of materials or techniques.
The Great Theory, named by aestheticist and art historian Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, was a constant formula of beauty that
consistently led aesthetic ideology from the 5th century BC to the 18th century. However, due to the hobby theory against
the Great Theory and Aesthetic Attitude that brought it to the extreme, we can declare that everything that echoes in our
hearts is aesthetic. When you look at her works, you don’t need to find out what the subject or the theme is. Listen to and
pay attention to Sonido, the reverberation in the heart
