Wihro Kim: Reentry Points | In Collaboration with Diana Khoi Nguyen

6 October - 2 December 2023
  • Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Wihro Kim: Reentry Points as part of our current exhibition In Unity, as in Division.
     
    Wihro Kim explores the concept of "big, intimate space" through his work, creating a sense of grandiosity from small, everyday elements or fragments of dreams and memories. Often grappling to balance abstract and figurative elements, Kim creates an inexplicable sense of depth through layering and juxtaposition by harnessing both digital and analog practices to form his dynamic compositions.
     
    Reentry Points is accompanied by a risograph zine print featuring a poem by poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen.
  • What is missing in the ocean can be found in nearly all other arenas: from the chipped plateaus of slate stone lining a patio to gnarled roots of the shagbark hickory snaking aboveground, wet from summer’s afternoon showers; moss lives anywhere there is non-saline moisture: shaded and sunny terrains, oxbows, ponds, and waterfalls. Even the desert, where morning dew gathers along the finegravel crust.
  • Wihro Kim, No Star Realm Can Exist in Regrets, 2023 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
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    Wihro Kim
    No Star Realm Can Exist in Regrets, 2023
    Acrylic on panel
    60 x 48 in
  • Like refugees mid-flight, they put down no roots, tucking themselves indiscriminately into surfaces: pavement stained in pig-blood and motorbike grease, pebbles, rocks, and boulders, trees both alive or dead, too. Anywhere can be a point of attachment, a place to cling to, but never to drop anchor.
  • Survival ultimately comes down to competition: large, flowering plants dominate soil, so moss don’t even bother. In a lawn released to the wild, turf recedes as wild clover sprouts, moss gathering in lush shags. They are tiny reservoirs, holding tightly onto water the way a family newly resettled in a country saves every assistance check, sending out the older children to procure jobs. In Pasadena, California, two brothers stock inventory at a warehouse for the local bookstore, while their younger brothers man the parking booths at a nearby community college.
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  • Decades later, in this same bookstore, one of these brothers’ daughters will read poems about her father and uncles and their flight, the death of her own brother, and drive past the now automated college parking lot on her way home. In arid landscapes such as this one, moss creates the moisture essential for plant seeds to fall on.
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  • Artist Statement

    “This current body of work deals with a somewhat paradoxical notion of big, intimate space. Big, intimate space touches on...

    “This current body of work deals with a somewhat paradoxical notion of big, intimate space.

     

    Big, intimate space touches on an imagined sense of grandiosity evoked from unlikely places- small places, flat places, places that might be confused for objects or air, or places that are literally a few inches from your nose. Some of these “places” include sheets of paper, trees, other natural scenes, screens, and domestic settings like walls or corners. This big, intimate space feels large, almost infinite, but is revealed in small, finite moments. The paintings in this show do not attempt to depict this space (a futile endeavor), but aim to provoke the desire and curiosity necessary to glimpse this realm that exists between perception and imagination.

     

    The paintings in this show spring forth from moments when I had experienced this private expanse, and attempt to provide a pathway to that vista. Drawing from real moments, the paintings take that setting and build up in successive layers until a sensation of that large other space is felt. This is done primarily by overlapping different pictorial and conceptual orders to create an expansive sense of depth that feels simultaneously known and ambiguous, permeable in one sense and obtuse in another. Other formal polarities are utilized against one another to aid in the navigation towards that airy but stable sensation, balancing on poles such as hard and soft, abstract and figurative, loose and tight, vague and explicit.

     

    Through a mostly careful process of layering, the final image is constructed from an amalgamation of several different time periods of when the painting was being worked. Some marks from the very beginning of the painting are preserved, either by masking them off or through a more intuitive avoidance. Something that appears to be the background may have been the last thing to be painted, and vice versa. This somewhat contrived way of layering is done with the aim to further the effect of that paradoxical, expansive simultaneity of air and solidity. “

  • About Wihro Kim

    Wihro Kim is an artist based in Atlanta, GA, where he received his BFA from Georgia State University in 2015....

    Wihro Kim is an artist based in Atlanta, GA, where he received his BFA from Georgia State University in 2015. Since graduating, Wihro has shown consistently in Atlanta and beyond. Notable group exhibitions include Of Origins and Belonging, Drawn from Atlanta at The High Museum of Art, Painting Who? at The Zuckerman Museum, and Building a Ship from a Shipwreck at MOCA GA.

     

    Notable solo exhibitions include Memorandumland at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY, Living Room at The Atlanta Contemporary, and Nothing Lasts Forever Until It Does at Mammal Gallery. Wihro has also displayed work at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in the form of a mural entitled New Plane Blooming and a group exhibition- Inside the Perimeter. Wihro was a finalist for the 2017-18 Edge Award, and while he was in school at Georgia State, he was awarded the Vera Jernigan Green Memorial Art Award. In 2017, Wihro attended the Vermont Studio Center, and was a Hughley Fellow from 2016-17. Wihro has been written about in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Burnaway, and ArtsATL.

  • About Diana Khoi Nguyen

    Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and...
    Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen was born and raised in California. She earned a BA in English and Communication Studies from UCLA, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She is the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019) and debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Omnidawn Open Contest, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. It received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and Colorado Book Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals such as Poetry magazine, American Poetry Review, and PEN America.

    A Kundiman fellow, Nguyen’s other honors include awards from the 92Y "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Contest, Key West Literary Seminars, and Academy of American Poets. She has held scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She teaches creative writing at Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.