Yeon Jin Kim 

2009-10 Artist-in-Residence

About the Artist

Yeon Jin Kim was born in 1978 in Seoul Korea and received her BFA from Seoul National University in 2002 and MFA from Hunter College in 2008. She has most recently shown her work in “Eclectic Visionaries” at Gana Art Gallery in New York City, in a two person show “View Pints: Artifice and Reality” in Livingston Manor, NY, in “to: Night” at the Times Square Gallery in New York City and in “Collage Logic” at the Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY. Screenings of her work have been presented In “Reel Venus Film Festival” at Anthology Film Archive in New York City and “the Third video Festival” in Cairo, Egypt. She has recently completed residencies at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, Constant Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, NY and will be doing residencies at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY; and BRIC/BCAT in Brooklyn, NY.

Project Description

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. (2, tr. Burton Watson 1968:49)

I began remembering my dreams when I moved to the States from my home in Seoul, Korea in 2005. In one, I cross a bridge which connects Seoul and New York, I travel to different places on trains and airplanes and I visit and explore a house which is located on the border between America and Afghanistan.

I have been making a series of videos that stem from recurring dreams. I build three-dimensional models out of cardboard boxes, paper, tape, plastic, and hair and I also make pencil and watercolor drawings. I arrange these models and drawings sequentially, sometimes 300 or 400 feet long and film them in one long take using a tiny spy camera. In one piece, American suburbs, Islamic villages, European architecture and Korean landscapes endlessly appear and reappear.

In <Dreams 2> the camera is located in a small model train and travels through a desolate world. Although without human presence, we see many animals. As in Hitchcock’s <the Birds>, the breakdown of the natural order is signaled by the fact that there is something wrong with the animals.

The drawings and sculptural models allow me to fuse dreams, fantasy and reality. The spy camera creates the vantage point from which the viewer moves through and experiences this fictional space.

At Sculpture Space I worked on a piece called “All Intellectual Animals Are Dangerous 1”, which is comprised of a ninety foot graphite drawing representing the exterior of a building façade with several windows through which are consecutively seen, different apartment interiors with varied characters and events. This drawing, which includes many layered, two-dimensional cutouts of characters, some of which are moved by hand, will be filmed with a video camera to produce a single channel narrative video. Like Hitchcock`s “Rear Window”, each apartment contains a different world, but in mine, some are inhabited by animals, some by people, and one by an enormous spider, and all presided over by a giant “Alice in Wonderland” –like character.

“All Intellectual Animals Are Dangerous 2”, another piece I developed at Sculpture Space, consists of 26 three-dimensional models made from cardboard boxes, graphite drawing, watercolor and mixed media representing different rooms with characters and events related to the previously described piece.

Each room presents a unique architectural setting for events and characters governed by dream logic and influenced by a range of references; one of the rooms is modeled after Van Gogh`s room at Arles while another has wallpaper from the Danny Boyle film “Trainspotting”. One character is modeled after the Christ figure in a Caravaggio painting and one from Breugehl`s “The Fall of Icarus”. These models will also yield a video narrative as well as being sculptures themselves.