Interview with Jun Kim
Tell us about how you decided to become an artist?
For me, it feels inevitable to live as an artist.
After working for a publishing company out of college, I left Korea at the age of 28. At the time, I had a vague desire to paint freely, but I didn't have a big goal in mind, I just wanted to get out there. For a while after arriving in Japan, I enjoyed living in a culture and people that were different from Korea. Perhaps it was this foreign life that inspired me more, but before I knew it I was drawing things on a daily basis. At first I drew only my own face, but gradually I began to draw the faces of the people around me. Eventually, the face began to lose its shape and cease to be a particular person, and eventually my drawings became a world of pure lines with no human reference.
I continued to paint on a daily basis and before I knew it, I had many artist friends around me. One day, a friend introduced me to an art organization he belonged to, and the first time I presented my work to the group, I received an award. ANTI-ENTROPY, that work, was the catalyst that allowed me to regularly present my work and be creative as an artist. I've had doubts about my work and my life, but what has always brought me back to myself was the undeniable fact that I am an artist who paints.
What influences you the most when you are in the process of creating new artwork?
The basis of my work is the connection between my body, mind and soul. The creation of my works is based on a method of approaching through emotions created by "the act of repeating and layering countless dots and lines. Its foundation is one's own body and senses a priori and one's own experience
What was, or is an artwork you especially enjoyed creating and why?
The "ANTI-ENTROPY" series is the first series of line-stroke works that I received recognition for. Among them, the 10-meter long piece is the most memorable. My studio was especially small at that time, and I had to spread out about three meters to draw, then roll it up and spread it out on the floor again. It was different from painting with a canvas upright, because I was really working inside the work, so it was not a sense of composing a screen, but a sense of directly entering the environment of the painting and performing the action. I began to use the title "ANTI-ENTROPY" - it was a sensation I had when I left work because I felt that the world inside the work had a different direction from the world of Entropy.
Do you have a dream project? What might that be?
I recently held my first solo exhibition in a long time, "ONE, the LAND". In this exhibition, I first exhibited one of my old works "ANTI-ENTROPY" to show the connection with my previous work. And now, for the first time, the "ONE, the LAND" series. There are three types of this new work, depending on the means of expression. The first is a work on paper made up of an accumulation of dots, the second is a video work "ONE, the LAND: A TRAVERSE" using photographs taken during a simple walk in the mountains, which I always do before creating a work, and the third is a steel image work that captures a moment in a video.
In particular, I would like to focus on "ONE, the LAND: A TRAVERSE" in this exhibition. This work became the key to uniting the world of my works that I have been working on since long ago.
I was walking in the mountains to create, but in fact I was walking all the way through the world of my work. I am traversing through "ANTI-ENTROPY" and "ONE, the LAND" and I would like to further develop this "ONE, the LAND: A TRAVERSE" in the future. The world of my work is different from the actual physical space, but it is a world that I am connected to as a medium, a related world.
Going forward, it could be interesting to choose different places to create - iit doesn't have to be mountains. My work will look different in different places, but the fundamental thing will remain the same - I want to see how it changes.
Finally, I would like to introduce "ONE, the LAND" simply to show that all things in the world are one. This idea was inspired by my actual practice of creating artworks.
One day, when I was walking along a mountain path to work on a piece of art as I always do, a bug flew into my mouth. It's normal to feel uncomfortable if it's an ordinary thing, but at this time, I felt strangely like I was one with that insect. It was an intersection of life and death, of me who will continue to live and the insects that will have died inside me. But at this moment, I felt that this crossing was moving toward a goal. It's like a snowball that rolls on and on with everything in it, rolling towards "ONE, the LAND".
Of course, I also exist in "ONE, the LAND '', and it's interesting to note that in recent years, instead of signing my work, I subtly insert myself somewhere in the work when it is finished.
