The earth is more sea than land and yet we know so little about it. In Minjae Kim’s second show with Nina Johnson, Ba-Da, the sea is explored both on a macro and micro level. Kim’s father grew up by the port of Busan, a seaside city that counters Western associations with the peace and quiet of life by the ocean. There is a new strain of chaos in Kim’s most recent body of work that speaks to his paternal inheritance, a vibration that the artist embodies in his personhood and lifestyle, balanced by the relative peace of his mother’s spirit and paintings (which have been exhibited alongside Kim’s work in 2022).
Kim’s practice evolved first out of an architectural language and only recently began to explicitly engage with his two cultures – Korean and American. Perhaps as an answer to the permanence-centered field from which Kim’s practice evolved, the work he has recently created exhibits an ad hoc ephemerality. Functional works are both sturdy and flimsy, dependent on their use. Longevity is an idea to pick apart, rather than a goal to strive for. Quilted fiberglass, a unique material intervention of Kim’s, covers light fixtures disguised as boat hardware. Wood, stained, waxed, painted, and lovingly hand carved, serves as load bearing bases and frames. Plastic appears as a direct reference to contemporary Korean seaside life while also gesturing to the pollution of our global seas – a crisis driven largely by the Western world.
Of the four central works that make up Ba-Da, three are thoroughly multi-functional. The ship-shaped fiberglass console holds several light fixtures, while a low coffee table, also vaguely ship-like in form, holds a tray, like a miniature, contained pool within its wooden landscape. A dining table, less explicitly boat-like, sits noticeably alone. The fourth work is a resin-coated, wood, foam, and plaster sculpture of a young, stooping boy, who with his contemplative presence and near life size scale, reminds us that this show is about humans: our relation to ourselves and our relation to the natural world around us. “He captures the sentiment of being at sea,” says Kim. “The romance, the awe, how it gives and takes.” The sculpture is Kim’s most literal foray into the figurative and with it brings us back to thoughts of permanence, impermanence, and control. Will these works outlive us? Should they? And what is it that we truly know of the forces that keep us fed: the sea, the sky, the earth?
In Ba-Da, Kim complicates the intentionally naive style of his previous functional works, adding, for the first time, consciously brusque and unpredictable undertones, formally embodying the mood of the sea. The palpably playful shapes that have dominated Kim’s oeuvre so far are met here with something more serious, representing the sea itself which takes as much as it gives. Kim’s references run the gamut from life to death, flesh and fantasy, the pleasures of consumption and titillation of corrosion, the salt and the sea, enclosures and thresholds, recycling and refuse. All fodder for his rigorous material experimentation. Ba-Da, like the sea, is where peace and peril meet.
Minjae Kim: Ba-Da will be on view in the Upstairs Gallery through November 23rd, 2024.
