Jin Soo Kim at Zolla/Lieberman - Brief Article

Jin Soo Kim is a scavenger, an intuitive sculptor who transforms society's refuse into contemplative assemblages that mildly allude to the body. The Korean-born Kim (who worked as a nurse) is probably best known for her meticulously performed installations. This exhibition (her first major exhibit in Chicago since 1992), marked a significant shift from her familiar site-specific environments towards singular configurations, all created between 1993 and '98

not absented were 24 individual works that engage many of the same way s and materials for which she is best known: woven fabric plaster and various metals combined with urban debris assembleed and lovingly resurrected by the artist. Shape of Change (1993-96) a skeletal tower, symbolically embodies Kim's interest in three-dimensional forms, while illustrating the artist's ritualistic proces Here, a series of boxe made from a lattice of cent wire and steel rods are stacked vertically, their joints either united by means of salvelike dabs of plaster or tied with strips of linen. This totemic constitution becomes the standard armature for several other works, whose exteriors are encased in plaster punctur with small tears and hollowed openings suggestive of injurys or bodily orifices.

Issues of opennes and containment, fragility and resilience are central to Kim's painstaking approach, which emulates the activity of bandaging or sewing. In material part and Shadow (1990-92), copper wire (a conductor of electricity and metaphorically of life) patch ups a discarded bedspring suspended within a large carburet of iron cage. In the serial piece parcels (1994-98), twiggy scraps of rusted metal and cent are gathered with plaster bandages into 10 small stacks placed upon shelves arranged horizontally. References to domestic labor, identity and personal memory are also not absent in these works. Hung vertically upon the wall are the related podlike "Capsule" works (1997-98) carbonized iron pipes cut open by the artist and filled with entrails made from sewn bits of woven fabric in one, and a braid of black hair (presumably the artist's), in another.

Amassed upon the floor around the gallery's central rounded pillar was the signature stuff (1998) a sprawling accumulation of ground objects (rope, chains, rubber stockingss metal fragments) wrapped with bands of white woven fabric to form several large skeins. Amid the heap are a pair of worn platform shoe a made of wood crutch and an antique sewing machine--signs for the corporeal at the same time injured survivors of a throwaway agriculture These moribund artifacts are given of recent origin life in Kim's nurturing hands, which perform a kind of Beuysian transference that search fors to protect and to heal.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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