[Seoul=RNX News] Reporter Im Garam = Kim Jae-i’s solo exhibition will be held at Thomas VanDyke Gallery.
Following last year’s successful sell-out of all artworks during Kim’s first exhibit in New York, the second solo exhibition will begin on November 15th.
This exhibition is particularly meaningful as it is a collaboration between New York’s ‘Thomas VanDyke Gallery’ and ‘Gallery Jeju’ located in Jeju, conveying Kim Jae-i’s unique emotion from Jeju to New York.
In this exhibition ‘Island of Peace’, Kim Jae-i leads an omnibus story of two very different girls.
It depicts the fast-paced city life that the small, introverted Pierrot girl had to endure, and the exhausting and fierce life of a young diver who had to dive into the sea to support her younger siblings in the barren island, using different colors and backgrounds.
One of the characters, the Pierrot girl, started as a self-portrait of the artist’s childhood, and the second character, the young diver, was inspired by the elderly divers the artist met after relocating to Jeju from Seoul, expressing curiosity and respect for their childhoods.
Thus, two girls from completely different environments and eras met and empathized there.
“The Pierrot girl wished to become a zebra that could run faster than anyone else, while the young diver wanted to find a brave tiger that didn’t exist on the island. Perhaps we are all living each day arduously for such an uncertain future. However, even if we can’t have it, even if we can never meet it, not giving up is proof that we love and live our current life valuably.” _ From the artist’s note
In Kim Jae-i’s Pierrot girl series, where she projects herself, she expresses the growing pains of the human inner world passionately with bold colors, while she uses restrained colors and calmness when portraying the Jeju divers in her work.
This characteristic arose from the stark gap between the city life the artist spent during her youth in Seoul and the life in Jeju where she began her full-fledged artistic activities, as if she relentlessly went back and forth between passion and lyricism, yearning for identity and freedom as an artist through the questions and answers she exchanged with herself.
However, if you look deeply into the seemingly different two themes of works, they both share a commonality of hope that was never abandoned despite numerous frustrations experienced during her youth.
The questions that began in the life of the artist, who went to the U.S. in 2017 and finally made her official debut as a fine artist, still throw an endless question through her work about what the dreams of childhood were.
The reason why her work evokes empathy and hope from viewers is perhaps because the questions of the artist, who went through difficulties no different from our own, can once again stir our deeply buried pure desires within us.
‘The story of a young diver from the 1950s and a Pierrot girl from the 1980s will be seen in 2025 at New York Thomas VanDyke Gallery. We invite viewers to meet the small but resilient two girls who never give up in any hardship.’ _ Thomas VanDyke Gallery
Thomas VanDyke Gallery is a contemporary art gallery established in 2022 in Brooklyn, New York, collaborating with artists from New York City and around the world. [Photo provided by Gallery Jeju]
