KIM Dong Yoo

The subjects of Kim Dong-Yoo’s paintings, first of all, are people who, in reality, led lives that were quite different from what they appeared to be from the outside. Politicians, for example, always have to lead a life that is staged for the sake of public image, for their destinies largely rely on how they are perceived by the camera and the public. What is important for them is how they are viewed by the world, so more often than not, they have to cold-heartedly sacrifice their true lives for their staged images. The lives of movie stars are no different. Especially actresses, who had to play the role of sex symbols for men while masked under the image regulated by society as that of the free woman, have in some cases faded away as tormented souls, falling through the gaping gap between public image and the life they longed to live. The fact that such disparity, or autonomy, exists between the presented images and the object that it represents also serves as the backdrop for the ontological conflicts and identity crisis that people are faced with in the post-modern world. Early phenomenon of the split ego had to remain sealed under the pressure of social, artistic or philosophical modernity that advocated purity and extreme freedom of self-expression. In political and social aspects, a distinct line was drawn between enemies and allies by conflicts between the left and the right, as well as between the East and the West. In art, abstract expressionism, championed by Clement Greenberg and other critics, promoted the spontaneous expression of feelings and ideas, stripping off a false disguise that hides the true self. In philosophy as well, Sartre’s existential humanism relentlessly rejected any disguises that contradict one’s existential reality. However, social changes that occurred during the decade or so leading up to the 21st century—the end of the Cold War, the failure of reformist modernism, and the emergence of permissivism—put an end to the era of purity, determination, and excluvism. The development of Kim Dong-Yoo’s paintings also takes place against the backdrop of these recent social and aesthetic changes.

Kim puts together a combination of public figures to create an unusual portrait. His paintings feature a wide variety of subjects: figures of authority and power from the Cold War era including Park Chung-hee, Kim Il-sung, John F. Kennedy, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping; famous film stars, who represent American pop culture and consumerism like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable, and Henry Fonda; as well as members of the British royal family, Princess Diana and Queen Elizabeth II. Kim’s portraits of John F. Kenney, Park Chung-hee, Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung are composed of hundreds and thousands of small images of Marilyn Monroe that form one big image. The actress-politician combination is a political allusion to the cessation of the Cold War. The portraits of these influential political leaders created by numerous tiny images of Monroe, an icon of popular culture, also suggest that the wall between politics and entertainment has been dismantled. In other paintings, where the figures portrayed as the larger, central subject and the smaller, local subjects are reversed—e.g. the portrait of Monroe using the small images of Kennedy—the reversion is not just coincidental, but implies curious and fatal stories of desire between the two figures.
Apparently, Kim’s paintings are an endless repetition of small images with no central event or story depicted. Still, from their inner layers, low whispers of hidden stories can be heard, the stories of the dramatic lives of the subjects. Many of the political leaders depicted in his paintings are known, or alleged, to have had scandalous affairs during their time in power, so these paintings can be interpreted as a subtle satire of the interplay of power, money and sex in today’s society. These portraits of men created with pixel-unit images of women, or vice versa, indicate that all human societies consist of two opposite sexes, but that the distinction has become blurred to the point that one’s sexual identity is often subdued by his or her dominant image in the eyes of the public. One of the virtues of Kim Dong-Yoo’s paintings is that, in spite of their apparent simplicity, they are open to a variety of interpretations. The alternation of simplicity and complexity is expanded beyond the visual dimension to include a semantic one.

To Kim Dong-Yoo, individuals exist not as an entity but as an image. In other words, an image is not a representation that signifies the actual person but an independent being that exists separately from the signified subject. Thousands of tiny images are repeated, not to create a larger version of the same image, but an entirely different portrait. For example, numerous tiny images of Kennedy are put together to form a large portrait of Monroe. The face of Kennedy filling every pixel of Monroe’s portrait implies that the two individuals had a strong influence on each other’s public image. After all, the image of a subject in Kim’s paintings is not a truthful representation of the person, but the sum of all ideas and opinions, quite abstract in nature, that the public has about the person depicted. In the same vein, a portrait of Princess Diana consists of small faces of Queen Elizabeth II because the Princess was seldom viewed outside of the social context that surrounded her. To the artist, each individual is ultimately lonely and isolated just like the pixel-unit images in his portraits, but is still shaped and driven by social context.
Kim Dong-Yoo has also painted different versions of the Buddha: One portrait is created by the sum of countless anonymous faces, and another by various different renditions of Monroe’s face. These portraits reveal the artist’s idea of the Buddha and the Buddhist faith—that is, the oneness of all beings. On the contrary, his portrait of Korean nationalist leader Kim Gu is composed of myriad smaller versions of the same person’s face, emphasizing his image of independence, originating from the fact that the activist fought for his country’s independence from Japanese rule. The same logic applies to mini portraits of Van Gogh that make up the image of the sunflower. The Dutch artist’s name is so closely associated with his masterpiece “Sunflowers” that people tend to connect them almost unconsciously, and Kim focused on this association. All in all, the thousands of small images that fill his canvases testify to the number of times when the artist pondered upon the nature of human existence.

The images used in Kim Dong-Yoo’s paintings have been adopted from photography, an important medium in popular culture. Ever since it was invented, photography has been considered a tool for producing objective and technical images that obliterate the need for artistic intervention. Being machine-produced images, photography was more closely associated with technology, and was often viewed with aversion and fear by artists. For this reason, perhaps, impressionists wished to compete with photography, on the one hand, and while on the other hand, created incomplete paintings that were complete opposites of photography. Upon some pointillist artists like Georges Seurat, however, photography wielded stronger power. In favor of the scientific precision of photography, they tried to capture every grain of an image, as in photograms. In other words, they attempted to attain scientific truthfulness by including and restoring every detail rather than employ an artistic description that emphasized thematic focus through the process of selection and removal. Although photography was belittled by artists during the age of modernism due to its lack of subjectivity, it entered the spotlight for the same reason in the post-modern era.
Kim Dong-Yoo makes a clever use of this inaccurately perceived idea that photography is a medium of objectivity. He adopts photographic images to assure the verity of his portraits. As slick and solid as they look on the surface, his portraits are highly fluid due to their dual nature. Each pixel is in itself a unit—an image—absolutely isolated from its surroundings; however, it is still a part of the whole—the larger picture. This duality of identity is further reinforced by the photographic truthfulness of each image. These images cry out that they possess a certain truth in the form of a document with no adding or omitting. Nevertheless, the image does not represent the real person as flesh and blood; it is a “simulacrum,” a vague semblance of the original. Furthermore, each of the innumerable images is a painstaking copy made by hand from photographs, adding one more layer to the duality of his portraits. In the end, the duality of Kim Dong-Yoo’s paintings is like an onion, with its endless layers, representing simultaneously the here and the elsewhere; the now and another time; of me and the other: and of this and that, all at the same time.

Soukyoun Lee
Director of Curatorial Bureau
Seoul Museum of Art

KIM Dong Yoo
Born in 1965, Gongju, Korea

EDUCATION
1990 M.F.A. Dept. of Paintings, Graduate school, Mokwon University, Daejeon, Korea
1988 B.F.A. Dept. of Paintings, College of Fine Art, Mokwon University, Daejeon, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2016 Scope New York 2016, 639 W 46th St, New York, USA
2015 Sis Gallery, New York, USA
2015 Living Together, Hasted Kraeutler, New York, USA
2015 Kim Dong Yoo, Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, Korea
2014 Kim Dong Yoo, Gallery Sesom, Changwon, Korea
2013 Kim Dong Yoo, Lotte Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2012 Kim Dong Yoo, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea
2012 Kim Dong Yoo, Hasted Kraeutler, New York, USA
2011 Kim Dong Yoo, Gallery Baton, Seoul, Korea
2010 Kim Dong Yoo, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2015 Esprit DIOR, DDP, Seoul, Korea
2015 SCOPE Basel 2015, Basel, Switzerland
2014 Garden, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
2014 Constructive Units, James Christie’s room, Hong Kong
2014 PEOPLE, The Palace of Independence, The Gallery of Modern Art, Kazakhstan
2014 Meaningful Patterns, Art Center White Block, Paju, Korea
2014 Comment about Paintings, I gong Gallery, Daejeon, Korea
2014 Paintings of Contemporary Generation, I gong Gallery, Daejeon, Korea
2014 Art Stage Singapore, Marina Bay Sands Exhibition & Convention Center, Singapore
2013 LA Art Show, LA Convention Center/South Hall J&K, Los Angeles, USA