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1. Sculptural forms crossing perception and cognition

Inbai Kim’s works are sculptural. By calling them sculptural rather than sculptures, I want to examine some of the important implications they contain.

Kim has generally shown characteristics of presenting human shapes or modifications of them in the form of sculptures, or of rendering the properties of materials three dimensional through the structures or certain objects, geometric forms or abstract forms. But more important is the fact that, rather than manifesting completion as final outcomes within the context of his work, these things function as clues in events that single out some kind of methodological tool or process. You could say that although his works powerfully express material characteristics that we are bound to conclude are sculpture in terms of form, he in fact carefully stirs conditions and processes of perception that make his works at least “appear” like sculpture. At this time, he naturally creates ruptures in sculptural cause-and-effect relationships scattered with causes and effects, while leaving room for reinterpretation and rearrangement, thereby intensifying/relaxing sculptural sensations and thoughts by a notch. This is because the many sculptural forms that he has completed in visually strong forms contain (regardless of his direct intentions) impulses to evoke the flexible and sculptural conditions and processes to prove themselves. For example, when it comes to handling a series of media, he generally joins thoughts and perceptions about sculptural conditions and processes, ultimately allowing them to exist in the forms of completed sculptures while intimately introducing his body and actions to the internal procedures of the work itself, which cannot be immediately recognized as intuitive phenomena, thereby activating/synchronizing internal experiences related to some kind of “origin” of form. Surely the inner layers of such internal procedures are unique characteristics brought by sculptural methodology, too. (Like carving a shape out of stone or wood or casting a bronze figure in a mold, to put it simply.)

Kim’s most recent solo exhibition, 《Do You Remember Love》 (Perigee Gallery, 2020), gave a specific glimpse of these circumstances; here, the unique narrative spatial composition to which he had adhered since his first solo exhibition, 《Stand on the Edge of Dimensions》 (Gallery Skape, 2006), in order to resolve issues of perception and cognition of form, was highly prominent. Issues of time and space/distance, that is. For example, he did not leave the dramatic logic of installation simply to contribute to overall perception of the forms of solidly fixed sculpture, but handled it like a series of chessboards giving structure to the non-apparent relationships between each of the separate forms. What therefore became important was the fact that, faced with the many conditions and doubts and choices deemed to be sealed inside forms and already achieved, through somebody’s/anonymous physical perception of the outcome, he restored the entire sensation and once again carefully offered a glimpse of the possibility of (subverting) cognition.

How can I put it? As I recall old memories of 《Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes》 (Arario Gallery, 2014), it would be better to find appropriate clues there and to try and guess at arbitrary things that can prove the circumstances mentioned above. 《Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes》 was Kim’s fifth solo exhibition. The title, like those of previous solo exhibitions such as 《Stand on the Edge of Dimensions》 and 《Move in Earnest》 (Arario Gallery, 2007) and 《Turbulent O’Clock》 (DOOSAN Gallery New York, 2010), used words to demonstrate actions. In chronological order, the command to “eliminate points, lines and planes” can be seen as a request to “stand on the edge” of points, lines and planes and reflect seriously on them, thereby “moving” them to other places and things; as such, it is an enlarged and expanded version of the world view contained within his narrative time and space.

Kim, like someone trying to build a series of visual-perceptual world views by himself, has sometimes treated sculptural forms traversing perception and cognition as a means of performance (apparently unrelated to sculptural outcomes). (Here, performance joins or severs the relationships between artist, work and viewer.) In 《Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes》, Kim took the forms of monumental sculptures placed on plinths as several central axes and built relationships for the individual forms to coexist/separate within the space, as if tracing the orbits of pieces of space junk scattered several lightyears apart. All of the three-dimensional sculptural forms, which focused on human shapes, clearly showed the boundaries of (geometric) difference, but in fact Kim has already shown an attempt to disrupt the dimensions of space-time in order that these different things (with their identities as points, lines and places erased) coexist as “sameness.” In short, the stars we see as white points in the night sky must exist as masses of different sizes, different textures, different colors and different shapes in space-times several lightyears away; Kim makes forms that manifest virtual experiences with what he calls “edges of dimensions” as phenomenological experiences of his own body—ever-changing dimensions of perception and cognition, rearranged by different space-times, you could say.


2. Questions about sculptural relationships


His works are sculptural. But he does not readily describe his work as sculpture. He does not even mention common sculptural rhetoric before form. He sometimes shows behavior such as handling the messages sent by his works with abstract language of sincerity, love and memory, or moves and actions such as “do this” or “doing that.” Moreover, “Would you do well alone?” is the imperfect sentence that he used as a counter-question to the question “what?”; to me, this question appears like a theory that reveals his stance just as well as anything else, and I often feel an impulse to substitute it for the outcomes of all his works.

<In Would You Do Well Alone?> (2007), Kim put up a white temporary wall in the exhibition space and created the image of a large cone with its apex almost touching the edge of the paper. Displayed at his second solo exhibition, 《Move in Earnest》, the work began with questions about dimensions and edges, on which he was focusing at the time, showing an attitude of wanting to fantasize about and experiment in earnest with the phenomenological experience of (reciprocal) movement and coexistence of these things. Kim made it so that anyone would perceive the shape of a cone, but the metal “lines” that rose almost the entire height of the wall were arranged to make a series of pendulum-like movements from the apex of the cone, and a cone-shaped pencil drawing (exactly) resembling these movements was rendered in detail on the white wall. The metal wires swinging between the two sides of the cone were both nameless straight lines emanating endlessly from an arbitrary point and physical beings with virtual “power” sufficient to build the two sides of the cone and to manifest the non-existent circle at its base. Here, Kim mixes drawing and sculpture or, to put it simply, two-dimensional and three-dimensional edges, yet gives the impression that he is maximizing the relationship from the dimension of a slightly more sculptural perception. In my view, the core of <Would You Do Well Alone?> is the (actual) movement of the lines, and the movement/shifts that show this change produce an endless domino effect by enabling the presence of forms that temporarily trigger perception. As if recalling the intimate relationship between Marcel Duchamp’s <3 Standard Stoppages> (1913-1914) and <Network of Stoppages> (1914).

Here, the question, “Would you do well alone?” can be expanded to have multiple meanings. Firstly, it may refer to the respective dimensions of drawing and objects (which can be called sculptural substances); from a more biased perspective, it also sounds like the artist’s inner thoughts, certain yet doubtful of the potential abilities of the steel wires, describing a parabola as they move endlessly and draw a clear outline in the air. In any case, it’s a question of dimension. Going further, the word “alone” refers to severance in space-time and is ultimately a question of the “presence” implying the state of the layered drawings and objects within the bounds of the white wall; as such, it refers to the subtle relationship between the two-dimensional dessin that copies the three-dimensional model of the cone and the three-dimensional space acquired by the object by once again copying its reappeared form through movement. What draws the attention here, too, is the metal wires that enact actual movement: what is their true nature? As mentioned once above, they are performative objets that join or sever the artist-work-viewer relationship, apparently adding actual movement to everyone’s (three-dimensional) actual space. It might be a bit of a leap, but if we add some imagination it is a similar action to attaching wood and string to a core rod to guess the outline and determine the central axis of a still-to-be-created form. You could also draw a connection to the acts of perception and cognition experienced in that (sculptural) process and (sculptural) outcome.

Meanwhile, works such as <Deller hon Dainy> (2007), shown at the same exhibition, and the <Heavy Light is Light: Crown, Ruins, Column series> (Eliminate Points, Lines and Planes, 2014), produced with a similar structure, might be called the real-life versions of <Would You Do Well Alone?> <Deller hon Dainy> comprises three heads cast from the same mold. The work clearly brings together sculptural points of contention such as extreme omission and emphasis, resulting similarities and contrasts, and frontality and solidity. Moreover, don’t the sense of volume of the immobile necklines that seem to escape from their round plinths and the omitted faces call to mind the organic relationships of the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, while rendering abstract the logic of form? The various questions about sculptural relationships that result from the “sculptural copying” of such specific objects and abstract thought have been enacted through works like <Things modeled on 2> (2018), while evoking sculptural acts. Kim has also conducted formal experiments that question similarity and difference, origin and movement in form, like that of the constantly modified mold used in the Heavy Light is Light series.

  <Untouched side> (2019) hints at interesting possibilities regarding the sculptural nature that appears when the questions of dimensional edges, points, lines and faces that Kim raised from the start are eliminated. His experiment, in which cross-sections of sliced lotus root are individually scanned, then erected vertically as a sculptural form acquired from internal continuous material through the temporary layering of two identical sections, seemed to trigger an internal sculptural membrane of which the individual, flat cross-sections were totally oblivious. Here, the act of sticking the lotus root sections together and “standing” them vertically, the act of “standing” at the edge of dimensions and the act of “eliminating” points, lines and faces, are all the role of the artist himself, questioning a series of sculptural relationships. If we now bring back and examine the question, “Would you do well alone?”, we find that it runs throughout the artist’s role-play as he cuts across sculptural perception and cognition and subverts the logic of form.

3. Forms following sculptural sensation


The sensations evoked in 《Do You Remember Love》, too, are highly sculptural. For example, I thought he had brought together the material properties of steel wires emphasized in 《Turbulent O’Clock》 and <Backside> (2018) with formal effects, once again highlighted quantities of forms and implications of counting numbers as previously addressed in <Things Modeled on 2> and <Count> (2017), and aimed for spatiotemporal intersection between the origins or sources of forms as in <Heavy Light is Light> (2017), so that, overall, the whole series of situations evoked forms in accordance with extremely “plastic sensations.” This is similar to what Herbert Read, many years ago, called “the science of modeling” in the 1954 work The Art of Sculpture, which he wrote in order to separate sculptural thought from the formal sensations of contemporary art, influenced at the time by painting-based thought. Read mentioned the special sensation of annihilating general visual perception in order to embody the sense of distance/space from the central axis of the form to the surface of the sculpture; the moving/shifting outlines possessed by the frontality of forms; and complete tridimensionality within actual space, and overall sensation concerning touch, texture and sense of weight; this provides important points of reference when glimpsing the secretive world view that drives Inbai Kim’s work.

In this sense, it may be possible to say that Inbai Kim’s works demonstrate a subversion of visual-perceptive world views in accordance with plastic sensations. By slight extension, they can be called sculptural sensations. When the rhetoric of “sculptural sculpture” is applied, his practice can be described as visual-perceptive reinterpretation of sculptural methodology, and it seems that by proposing ways of sculptural seeing, he is actually attempting to subvert the tridimensionality of sculpture. But this whole series of attempts are less aims than experiences during processes; he may as well not call them sculptural attempts but relationships between “I” and “form,” or between “form” and “form.” Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it.