Hongbin Kim and Yong Eun Kwon:
Pleasure as the Driving Antithetical Life Force Counteracting Suffering and Death
By Chunbum Park, September 2, 2024
Hongbin Kim (also known as Vanhada) and Yong Eun Kwon (whose fictional character is “Fish Daegari,” meaning “fish head”) represent a new generation of artists who are trying to uproot our conventional understanding of and approach to painting. The two artists have a colorful and energetic duo show titled, “Slice of Watermelon,” at the Stephanie Kim Gallery in Tribeca.
The themes that Kim and Kwon deal with include fun and play pleasure and sex, and the fear and the love of both life and death.
The artists feel the fear of life for its offering great stresses of modern life, which sculpt us into the pearl-hood that makes us human. They see the love of life for its pleasures and play that eases those sufferings like a painkiller. They identify life with possibilities and the chance to live the dream, and they worship death as the end of all human suffering. In their works, we see the yin and the yang, each of which is a yang and a yin. Pleasure is the driving antithetical force that counteracts suffering in life as well as death itself.
Through pleasure, the artists seek to overcome death and celebrate life as the temporary subjugator of death. The victory is short-lived, but worthy and meaningful for these young aspiring souls who recently graduated from SVA’s MFA Fine Arts program. Examples of their focus on pleasure can be found in Kwon’s “A Mouthful of Happiness” (2023) and Kim’s “Last Mayfly 24-01-38” (2024), the latter of which is named after the aquatic insect that lives for only one day.
In terms of style and visual approach, Kwon’s figures and objects exist on the plane of 2-D illustrational and 3-D animation-like visuals, both of which exist on the surface of the body of the object-based subjects that she is depicting. Through the unexpected and colorful arrangement of various relationships between the object-based subjects, Kwon throws suggestions toward her viewers of the ideas that she is working with, including the pleasures of life such as alcohol, humor, vibrant colors, and sex.
On the other hand, Kim’s paintings and sculptures exist as abstractions and metaphors that point to the core subjects and ideas that he is investigating on a conceptual level. His works infer the idea of death as an instantaneous and powerful moment, expressed as the explosion of paint and canvas on canvas, as in “Nameless Cocoon 24-01-35” (2024). Reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s works that applied incision onto the canvas, these paintings serve as abstract and/or conceptual allegories that show that death contains life force within it within its unseen dimensions.
If honesty and integrity are key assets for an artist, Kim and Kwon are direct about their goals and desires as artists: they are not shy about experimenting with commercial and/or illustrational styles that catch the collectors’ eyes.
Both Kim and Kwon’s works challenge the conventional teachings on painting and sculpture. There are certain ideas and conventions on painting, such as that colors must be mixed, and the style for a work of fine art cannot be too illustrational or commercial. The work’s main purpose cannot be a sale but rather a purely artistic exploration; in other words, selling the artwork should be an afterthought, and the ideas of money, success, and fame should not taint the artist’s way of being and approach to making. These are some of the rules and ideas that professors at art schools imbue into their students. But can new things come out of those same conventions and guides to fine art painting? What happens when many paintings that come out after one another from artists’ studios start looking similar as if they had been done before?
The other topic that Kim deals with is the question of what makes art and differentiates it from any other product within the capitalist market. In the “Transcendence of Value 24-02-09, 27~67” (2024), Kim inserts a dollar bill into the opening of the framed painting that is shaped like the lips or the vaginal opening. He is essentially asking the question of what decides the value – is it the dollar bill, the artist’s labor, or the historical importance of the artist that decides its worth in the art market?
Kwon is asking a similar question on fine art versus illustration. With her visual device of blurring the image, which she likens to taking off her glasses, Kwon finds a means of taking out the detail from the vision to make it feel more abstract and relaxed or laid back. The artist has privately stated that she prefers the blurred view of New York because it is more beautiful. As a result of this move, the illustrational details and qualities as seen in her previous works are dissolved into a seemingly continuous, abstract style within her current body of work. What is fine art, and how is it different from illustration? Is illustration necessarily a bad thing? These are some of the questions that she throws at the viewer with her works involving vibrant and sweet colors expressing the joys of life.
Images courtesy of the Stephanie Kim Gallery.