Hongik University, Ph.D. candidate, Printmaking, Expected 2022

Rhode Island School of Design, MFA Printmaking, 2012 with Honors

School of the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA, Painting and Drawing / Printmedia, 2010

Chung-Ang University, BA, Creative Writing, 2006

California State University, Exchange Student, 2004

Hello

I am a book artist. I make books.

When I tell people “I make books”, what comes to their mind is either a literary writer or a designer who designs book covers. But what I work on is to create objects that take the forms and structures of what is commonly called “a book” rather than the contents of it.

I progress my book binding by neatly folding, stacking, and binding Hanji (Korean traditional paper) and finish with the cover made of Mosi (the Korean ramie fabric). I believe that this entire process closely resembles that of writing - mind is inspired, captures to organize and reflects it into sentence by sentence.

The pages bound together with thread and the edges of Hanji meticulously wetted and torn are combined to create one single essay. For me, a book represents a chunk of my mind and at the same time, is itself an untold story.

Transcendental Reading, Yoorim Kim's Book Object

Yoorim Kim's book object is an existential image resurrecting in the ossuary of language. The unmarked gravestone raised over the tomb of language has lost its real-world form and language. To mourn this inner loss, and for the remnants of unspeakable language, it exists in a way that’s impossible to read. It thus transforms in a ritualistic and transcendental way.

The book object is a dual being, which reveals the limits of language yet also exceeds it. It has broken away from the square shape of books to combine with objects of different shapes and non-meaning. The books are themselves sentences made up of segments of objects, the language of ‘objects themselves' that can transform at any time. These non-linguistic images create the value of inverted language. Hence, Yoorim Kim's book objects have a transcendence beyond reading, even though they are unreadable in a normal system of language.

Transcendence is not something that exists abstractly and conceptually outside the world. The artist creates something transcendent through repetitive performance of the body that fills the gap between language and mind, material and non-material. For instance, the act of grasping a book's ‘galpi’ demonstrates the artist's autonomous existence and time. Galpi is a word that refers to the 'in-between' of overlapping or overlying things, and it lies in the continual act of stacking Korean paper. It is a ‘repetitive stacking’ that creates a subtle ‘dialectical difference’, which fills time by repetitively projecting the mind and body that changes every moment onto the material. In short, the continuous repetition of these subtle differences is one of the most active ways of dismantling uniformity. It’s an act of stacking by laying down, of filling by emptying.

Open shape, atonal variation

The subtle and glimmering form created at the edge of Korean paper is a phenomenological opening. Agnes Martin repeatedly draws thin delicate pencil lines on graph paper, which unevenly overlap with the grid in accordance to the pressure of her hand. And the lines produce an effect that look different every time depending on the viewer's position and interaction. From this phenomenological perspective, her work proposes an open shape. Yoorim Kim creates line space by overlapping and weaving Korean paper. Generally, binding in a book object is a basic unit of an external mass that composes a book, and it internally composes a narrative and serves to complete a work through editing. But for Yoorim Kim, binding is not a closure that means the end, but a continuous weaving that produces a structure of continuous relationship and openness.

The line space in books are faintly connected ‘lines of shadow’. They are line spaces that traverse vertically and horizontally to create a multi-layered relationship, which is decentralized and has no dominant part. Like a skin that breathes, its surface is an atonal plane that’s embedded with variable rhythm. From the beginning, the artist sought to remove all narratives from the work. This was because hypothetical and fictional narratives tend to drift away from the essence. The monochrome paintings of Korea in the 70s are its precedents. Monochrome paintings focus on the medium’s materiality and the performance of the body, exclude any narrative, and pursue true spirituality in its place. But unlike monochrome paintings that add materiality onto the pictorial plane, Yoorim Kim emphasizes the intrinsic materiality of the book object’s surface. In this context, it also connotes the variable temporality and interactive theatricality of Western post-minimalism, which embraces the object’s surroundings as a part of the work.

Synaesthetic figure-graphy

The work pairs the dyeing of Korean paper using shadings of the ink, with selecting the grains and strands of the paper. The books are made by piling the dyed Korean paper into a bulk, or by punching holes or tearing the stack. The resulting figure created in this manner has no fixed shape, but rather exists in the state of ‘shaping up’. In other words, the figure implies an open temporality that rejects closed shape. And the figure is not abstract, but synaesthetic. Let's name this 'figure-graphy'.

Figure-graphy is a synaesthetic figure that precedes conscious perception. A figure can be likened to a wave of invisible force such as an audible echo that radiates outward and converges inward. It is also a tactile synesthesia like that of a soft and warm angora hair. In other words, the figures are 'graphed' with overlapping synaesthetic properties. It is impossible to write this figure-graphy in equivalent language. Not all, but most of the works were titled after the figures were created. The titles are merely single phonologies, minimal understated words, and nonverbal signs. While this post-naming is a fundamental system for creating language and meaning, it reveals the artist's reluctance to be subordinate to existing systems. In short, Yoorim Kim is restoring with her own ‘figure-graphy’, the impossible fissure that, like the non-verbal elements in Saussure's parole, can never be expressed through the signs of language.

Warmth, making grains and strands

'Warmth' is the desire she wants to convey through Korean paper. 'Wool' that was used in her early works was a sensual fetish pursued by a distrust in language and a chilled heart. It is worth noticing that the exhibition <Warm Regards,> 2017 was composed solely on the theme of warmth. Just as with wool during her study abroad, she chose Korean paper because it was easily available, and she found the warm properties of Korean paper sensuously fulfilling. In order to make full use of the effect, she delicately picks the grains and strands from the fibers of Korean paper and pulls them out like feathers. Through the manual effort that revives warmth by meticulously plucking at Korean paper as though transmitting the warmth of the fingertips, the figure comes to hold a subtle enveloping warmth like angora hair. In addition, the manual work reflects the artist's intention to remove the artificial coldness from the paper. The warmth that is thus created perpetually envelops the entire figure and flutters around it, but it doesn’t blur the outline as there had been no clear outline in the first place. It is an atypical figure of warmth, a material property of warmth.

Blotches, in between Muru(無漏) and Yuru(有漏)

Ink is originally made by collecting ashes or soot and mixing it with glue. Hence, the ashes permeate into Korean paper through water as easily as they blow away. But ink sometimes has a heavy rock-like weightiness. Ru(漏) means ‘to be permeable', or 'anguish'. In Buddhist terms, Muru means a state of enlightenment without anguish, and Yuru means to be permeable, and to have anguish. What do anguishes of life look like? Could it have come from the weight of language? “I want to let go of my greed and obsession to say and convey what could not be said”. The underlying desire grows into an ethical practice. Nirvana of language would be a state of Muru that lays down obsession in pursue of emptiness.

In modern philosophy, ashes symbolize otherness such as trace and excès. It is a 'vacuum' that cannot be signified. Though it is just a figurative expression, the fact that ink is a condensation of this otherness does not seem to be a coincidence. A blotch is the figure of the other, and because it is not a meaning but a presence, it persistently returns even when fiercely emptied. And it is sometimes violent. If all encounters with others were defined by hospitality and love, all transcendence would disappear. So this encounter lies between the extremes of hostility and hate for the other. It becomes the base that makes me overcome myself from the extremes. The blotches are transcendental images that exist between love and pain.

Relationship, new beginning

For Yoorim Kim, the book object is a stout support that can contain all meanings. Hence, the new relationship is another language attached to the book. The distance between the branch and the book falls further or nearer in a horizontal equilibrium between the unfamiliarity and intimacy of the relationship. And the process of getting to know the others is expressed through the time of pervasion and the difference in shades.

In this method of continuous accumulation and addition or desmantling and emptying, the book object is Yoorim Kim’s identity that contains her own history. It is also a scene of experience that is inevitably created through action of the body. Yoorim Kim's book object will emerge as a new creative space, as a place where language simultaneously stops and begins.