François Ghebaly is proud to current Animal Triste, Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s third exhibition on the gallery. Within the centuries earlier than the widespread adoption of the Gregorian calendar, agrarian societies in Western Europe represented time as infused with the cycles of nature. Not not like the trendy Farmer’s Almanac or different world calendars primarily based on photo voltaic and lunar actions, medieval farming calendars correlated instances of the 12 months with the sequence of labors essential to boost and keep crops and livestock. The calendars additionally served a useful psychosocial perform, providing instruction for the timing of courtship, child-rearing, and different practices, and, in impact, making a steadfast tie between the social order and the pure world.
These agrarian calendars have change into a brand new a part of Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s visible vocabulary, extending the artist’s ongoing engagement with historical fantasy, psychoanalysis, and archetypal iconographies. In her latest exhibition Animal Triste, Kim explores concepts of collective motion and the psychic reconnection of the human physique because it strikes via the primary six months of the 12 months. Throughout a collection of work, the artist depicts the labors and rituals recognized with the Spring Equinox via the Autumn Equinox—roughly February via July—, reimagining the calendars’ diminutive peasant scenes in her shadowy grisaille palette. The labors embody, so as: making love, pruning, gathering flowers, falconry, mowing, and reaping wheat. In works like Days within the Wind (2025) and Cardinalia (2025), the sweeping movement of a scythe is conveyed by a single, gliding brushstroke, and a pair’s embrace seems as an act of erasure. The varieties that emerge in Kim’s work mirror the artist’s connection to her supplies and to her personal palms, mirroring her depicted topics’ expertise of nature and the passage of time.
Largely, Kim’s curiosity in medieval farming calendars comes from her analysis into the early origins of Hellenistic astrology and the sexagenary calendar of Historic China. Shifting away from individualistic narrativization, these calendrical techniques mirror the artist’s need to keep up sacred reference to nature reasonably than to grasp it or distantiate herself from it. The works in Animal Triste push past the confines of the psychic inside because it’s been explored within the arts and letters of the commercial centuries, and search to acknowledge humanity’s shared journey as it’s formed by land, labor, and the collective unconscious.
Cindy Ji Hye Kim makes use of a wealthy grayscale vocabulary in iconic representations of the physique beneath duress. Synthesizing influences as disparate as early animation, pests and flora, medieval torture gadgets, Jungian psychoanalysis, and Korean people arts, Kim’s pictures communicate to the boundaries of each physique and language. She locations particular emphasis on the sculptural qualities of her works, from spherical panels with notches that reference early animation expertise to translucent silk works with carved stretchers bars that impose a ghostly silhouette onto their painted compositions. In her observe, which extends via drawing and portray to set up, sculpture, and animation, Kim marries a playful tangle of symbols and visible data with a foreboding sense of what lies past the floor, past the physique, past the phrase itself.
