Happy Painting to Console our Spirit
Cheolmin Song | Curator, Zien Arts
May, 2018

A number of people are enthusiastic about the paintings of Artist Kim Myung-Sik (a.k.a. Andy Kim). He has garnered international attention and reputation through art-fairs and his personal exhibitions.

Why are these people enthusiastic about his works?

The works of artist Kim are likened to the happy feeling of having a cup of coffee with brunch, while sitting next to a window on a sunny spring day, listening to sweet piano melody. With this sensibility, people want to feel the happiness of sitting in his living room.

Like the first taste of bitter coffee turns around in our mouth and leaves a sweet taste, sweetness and bitterness coexist in Andy Kim’s works. His level of aesthetic achievement rises far beyond any single taste.

When pastel tone are the basic colors, we are not apt to feel in-depth taste. But by adding contrast, the work attains a different, higher, stage. By using a knife freely in spreading them, the colors trespasses the boundary of form, and concrete figures appear through the feast of color and maître.

However, the form of a house is not depicted concretely, but it only appears that audience can associate that it is a house. Just in that part, a positive involvement of the audience is made.

Through brilliant variations and feats of color by usage of an artist’s fingertip, forgotten pieces of memory became lovely memories again – leading to our experience of spiritual consolation. The works of artist Andy Kim satisfy an instinctive return to the audience, let them feel utopia, and get consolation of their spirits.

In addition, the deformation performed by an artist stimulates our imagination and even provides a sense of space. The modifiers hanging around the artist make him a magician or alchemist of color itself.

We cannot but admit this routine modifier is operating when we face his works. The house that associates with our memory, the imagination stimulated by deformation, and the feast of color that his knife made, remind us of the sun shining on a clear spring day – and also lets us feel an exotic morning scenery in a strange place with healthy energy.

I have mentioned that the taste is deeper and deeper when bitterness meets sweetness. This artist evokes the melodious world of imagination through the houses that draw our memory, by means of the magic of color by deformation, and the brush as a ‘magic stick’.

Through the artist’s own recipe, he gives good-looking and comfortable feeling. It is like a clean aftertaste, not excessively oily.

It is not an easy painting process, although it looks comfortable. In that, there is the artist’s only true caliber that has become completed through long-time accumulated inner-ability, via trial-and-error.

Thus, many people feel happiness and consolation of their spirit through Kim Myung-Sik’s works, regardless of their origin in East or West.