A Time in Russia, 2021

Kim Yoon Kyung  

Kim Yoon Kyung is a Korean artist born in 1977 who lives and works in Daegu, South Korea. Yoon Kyung studied Art theory at Daegu Catholic University. She later earned a Master’s degree in Western Painting from the Graduate School of Kyungpook National University. In 2012, she received an MFA in Fine Arts from California State University and has since continued to work actively as an artist. Her recent works of oil paintings depicting figures, The Moon is the Sun’s Dream, begin from randomly selected individuals or from one among the countless images that exist on the internet. Within the endless flow of images in our time—images that are constantly produced, consumed, and circulated—the ones she collects reveal another layer of “circulation,” like a contemporary vanitas in an age that believes AI possesses self-awareness. Her work is not a reconstruction of a past childhood, but about the blurred yet vivid images left behind by the sensations of that time, and about light that re-emerges from what has disappeared. The figures depicted are not specific individuals, but rather resemble a state formed within memory. The children in the paintings remain suspended in a condition of not yet fully grown, while at the same time already having become adults. They quietly gaze at us, suggesting a certain state or origin to which we must return. The discarded objects placed within the frame also bear traces of time and what has vanished; together with the figures in darkness, they hold a subtle light, unsettling the boundaries between reality and memory, presence and absence. This work concerns a contradictory condition: things that clearly once existed but are no longer here, and things that have disappeared remained. It is a fragile yet deliberate attempt to record not just the wounds of an individual, but those shared by all of us. Such projections of images evoke layers of the unconscious. Like the idea of the “soul” temporarily inhabiting a “body,” the figures in these paintings may be closer to a more fundamental state—perhaps a form of being to which we long to return. Remaining within the frame while holding light, they do not belong to reality but instead allude to the afterimages of time that linger within us. Ultimately, this work asks the viewer to reconsider the very act of seeing at the point where the circulation of images and the circulation of existence intersect. What matters here is not a specific scene, but an exploration of how vanished times and events are reconstituted within sensation, as lingering reverberations of beings delayed and drifting within the ceaseless flow of images that are continuously generated and extinguished. The long-standing motif of “light” both reveals and erases form. What we believe to be real is perceived only as the residue of what has already passed; nevertheless, this work must move toward a “future origin” for us. Though it appears as an irreversible trace, it is also connected to the sense of recurrence—the return of the point from which we once departed. Therefore, rather than presenting a narrative, this work reveals the way existence perceives itself—the conditions of self-recognition that continuously slip within the structures of light and image, memory and the unconscious.