Drink Water at No. 9 Cork Street, London casts mundane moments in bold, eye-popping paintings
In Jinhee Kim’s quietly unsettling paintings, monochromatic figures appear to go about their daily lives: the canvases give us glimpses while they shop, ride a train, wait at a restaurant or just lounge on a stairway. More often than not, as we look in on these disparate moments, Kim’s androgynous characters look back at us, calmly meeting our gaze and unflinchingly asking: ‘What are you looking at?’
What we’re looking at are mundane moments, depicted in bold contours filled with eye-popping colours. The figures we follow wear no discernible clothes, have their hair in short bobs and are endowed with round breasts, as if abstracted versions of the bulbous bodies that inhabit the canvases of popular British painter Beryl Cook. They pose, cigarette or drink in hand, with a placid stoicism while underlit by bright, garish colours, as if in a socialist realist painting set-designed by post-modern photographer Jimmy DeSana. In At the Supermarket (all works 2024), one such figure stands in the freezer aisle, clutching a vibrant yellow shopping trolley. Staring at us while reaching over their shoulder, they grab what might be a frozen pizza from the unearthly pale blue of the freezer, their body a mint-toothpaste green. The light from a match illuminates the face of another figure in At the Bar. While their martini-sipping companion looks to them for conversation, they stare coolly out from the canvas as if looking to the viewer to provide the lead. Their half-drunk tumbler of whisky sits on a circular table that looks as if it’s made up of concentric tubes of red neon – an aspect that highlights another feature running through Kim’s work. Her portraits take place indoors, stylised to be in what look like minimalist Pop interiors, providing an angular and theatrical backdrop to her figures’ innocuous lives; even an empty train carriage takes on a sense of neon-lit flair. Beer Right after… portrays one character, their body a sky-blue and deep red, in repose on a set of stairs, beer in hand. The apparent wallpaper they lean on consists of long stripes of dark green and blue, their evident relaxation in contrast to the fairground dizziness of the setting.
With the title Drink Water, Kim’s exhibition at No. 9 Cork Street promises a similar observational directness, implying a look for some kind of commonality between people, and seeking to depict their moments of repose, unthinking but apparently not unwatched.
Drink Water at No. 9 Cork Street, London, through 21 September
This preview features in the ArtReview Korea Supplement, a special publication celebrating contemporary Korean art, supported by Korea Arts Management Service
