KOH SanKeum

If an artist is one who longs for a non-literal experience of the world, one who experiences a differentiated holism while rearranging in painting a world polluted and arrested by letters, given a society of spectacle in which the world is organized into a structure centered on vision, the power of violation assigned to painted images nearly exhausted, and the doors of same thoughts and sentiments leading outward all but closed, she ‘first’ applies her calling, her temper as an artist to the experience of literal imagination pertaining to writers who read, destruct, and reconstruct the world. While maintaining her desire to read whatever comes to hand, she selects as her ‘image” a portion of text read entirely in one sitting. Translating the part she has read into a part she has seen, she explores the formative possibilities created by her artistic imagination, energy, paper and margins, and letters. If it is the artist’s destiny to live in the world while preserving the ‘residue’ of experience in images, she indeed maintains her artistic individuality while mixing the life that pierces through ‘self’ with the life that others have driven into ‘letters.’ ● Upon closing the book filled with pages of sentences of letters, she sits at a table in her studio. The main view of the studio is occupied by a small, hard, wooden chair and a plastic table purchased at a discount store. Her tools consist of a wooden panel covered with nearly a hundred coats of acrylic paint, graph paper attached thereon, a carpenter’s square, a plastic bowl filled with 4mm cultured pearls, a glue gun, and tweezers. The work is quite simple. She begins to transcribe a part of a book she has read, a part that has left a decisive impression. She is equipped with a professional sensibility regarding adjustments to the size of the panel and the number of letters to be replaced with pearls. She adjusts the panel’s outer rim with the exactitude of her graph paper and carpenter’s square; she follows a scientist-like accuracy in determining the number of lines to a transcription. Needless to say, the foundation of such mechanical and mathematical arrangement lies in visual formation or aesthetics. For she is a ‘modern’ artist. The regular movement gradually begins to operate. She dabs glue on the panel with her glue gun, picks a pearl with her left hand, passes it to the tweezers held in her right hand, and lays it on top of the glue. Her transcription, her pasting of pearls proceeds according a standard based on the number of letters and spaces between them. The semantic context of sentences disappears while a morphological, visual formation appears instead.
Excerpt of Homage to you Catalogue, Yang, Hyosil, Ph.D in aesthetics

KOH SanKeum
Born in    1966, Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
1997    M.F.A, Painting & Mixed Media, Fine Arts, Seoul Pratt Institute
1991    M.F.A, Painting, Graduate of Fine Arts, Ewha Womans University
1988    B.F.A, Painting, College of Fine Arts, Ewha Womans University
    
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2012    Homage to You, Gallery Sun Contemporary, Seoul, Korea   
2011    Typography + Transliteration, Dr. Park Gallery, Yanpong, Korea
2009    Transformation as I mentioned ? PRUGIO Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2008    Transformation as I just mentioned ? Study of Manhae “Han Younghun”,
              Take out Drawing, Seoul, Korea
2007    Mist of Signs four, Gallery Sun Contemporary, Seoul, Korea
              Mist of Signs three, National Art Studio gallery, Goyang, Korea
2006    Mist of Signs two , Gallery Ssamzie, Seoul
              Mist of Signs – Gallery Skape, Seoul, Korea
2003    San Keum Koh Solo exhibition, Williamsburg Art Historical Center,
              New York, USA    
1997    San Keum Koh Solo exhibition, Second Floor Gallery, New York, USA

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2014    Warmth, Cultural Station 282, Seoul, Korea
2013    White & White(Nel Dialogo Corea-Italia/Dialogue Between Korea and Italy),
              Museo Carlo Bilotti Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy
2012    Dansackhwa Exhibition,  Korean Monochrome Painting, National Museum
              of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
2011    Ceation and Parody, Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju, Korea
2010    Observation a Like Leonardo da Vinci, Sabina Museum, Seoul, Korea2009  
               a’ la Yves saint Laurent, Gallery Artside, Seoul, Korea
2008    W  Daily Life in Korea, The Queen’s Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand
2007    Writing paintings, Painting Words, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
              Korean Project ? C5 Art Beijing, Beijing, China
2006    Channel 5 Five , Daejeon Museum of Arts, Daejeon, Korea