Drawing Lessons: on the work of Sung Hwan Kim

(2016)

For an artist whose work is as complex and at first mysterious to the spectator as Sung Hwan Kim, an exhibition of drawings seems like a welcome prospect. This is not meant as a slight, but as yet another opportunity, a new entrance point for an artist whose entire oeuvre seems to be comprised of provocatively fashioned entrances into an interiority that fascinates and perplexes so many.

The exhibition [at the now-defunct Wilkinson Gallery, which took place in 2016] has its roots in a theater piece Kim staged in Gwangju in 2015, whose English title was A Woman Whose Head Came Out Before Her Name. (As often in his work, Kim eschews direct translation; the Korean title of the piece could be rendered as Trying Until You Bleed.) The theater piece was initially inspired by a set of prose poems by Roberto Bolaño. After reading the poems in their original Spanish, Kim would then “translate” the poems, in fact penning his own poems, in English, in response to Bolaño’s. The act of translation, or intentionally failed translation, would then continue in a sort of chain, producing then a drawing. Finally, Kim would translate these poemdrawing-?s into movement, gesture, which he then chained together into a series, forming a libretto.

This – excluding the integration of further textual elements (namely, a bit of dialogue from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and an adaptation of a speech from Electra) and the music produced in collaboration with dogr (David Michael DiGregorio) that would resound throughout – describes the genesis of A Woman Whose Head Came Out Before Her Name.