Harper’s is happy to announce Spring, Summer time, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation options new work by Kim and opens Thursday, March 6, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
All through Spring, Summer time, Fall, Winter, and Spring, Kim expands upon his exploration of the standard Korean white porcelain jar as a vessel from which to check the passage of time. He refers to those work as visible haikus: poetic snapshots of ephemeral moments that are inclined to reckon with a change in season and the climactic evolutions that distinguish it. Amidst these evocative scenes of juxtaposed transitions, Kim makes use of colour liberally: good pastels and hypnotic neon saturate ecstatic landscapes whereby city greets the pastoral and daytime fades into the evening.
Works like Nonetheless Life with Jar, Moon Lamp, and René Magritte Postcard exude a dreamlike stillness: cool blue tones blanket a sleepy cityscape illuminated solely by a crescent moon. However indoors, behind an unlimited window, Kim fills a jar with a heavenly scene of lakeside greenery, conjuring a pristine spring day. Past the vase, a luminous yellow orb bridges the 2 worlds. The bulbous lamp emits a mild glow that spotlights beaming petals, trickling down from wilted gray flowers. Kim suspends the scene in temporal limbo throughout this ethereal work—the artist expertly phases diverging cycles of life and loss of life.
Kim continues to discover existential proximities in Nonetheless Life with Jar, Pencil, and Pocket book, the place time folds in on itself, and actuality lingers in a state of flux. A rose-tinted sky melts into the distant cityscape, casting an ephemeral heat over quiet rooftops—an ending and a starting intertwined. Inside an inside house, a jar holds a cherry blossom tree in everlasting bloom, like an oasis untouched by the passing seasons. A pocket book and pencil await simply outdoors of the jar, signaling human presence, beckoning the viewer to partake in tranquil introspection.
In the end, Kim masterfully inhabits the position of information, making perceptible the fragile threshold between what fades and what endures. In his surreal but exactly rendered compositions, he captures the refined transformations that circulate between opposing forces. Spring, Summer time, Fall, Winter, and Spring is an exhibition brimming with fragmented worlds—disparate existences and sensations, coexisting in fleeting concord. By fusing contrasting geographies and temporalities, Kim beckons the viewer to contemplate the perpetually converging realities that inform life. By these collisions, the artist challenges viewers to a meditative journey, soliciting the intricate webs that outline each the tangible world and the nice expanse of the cosmos.
