Kim Seil: Things That Stand by the Wind
김세일: 바람으로 서는 것들
About the exhibition
Where a large base might be expected, one long plaster figure in this show has a heavy stone resting on its foot. Kim Seil's bodies do stand upright, but look for a while and you notice how they have been made to.
The standing figures, in wood, copper, plaster and other materials, extend the Touch series from the artist's 2023 solo show, where two bodies held each other up on a shared third leg. Others here grow from flowerpots like plants or crouch upside down in a handstand. The Wall series joins canvas to plaster cast from shallow hollows, with faint bodies in relief.
Kim once asked the critic writing for this show how a sculpture can stand. The point was that it can't, not as a person does. Instead of a textbook pose, the figures shed mass and weight or go hollow, and barely hold together as forms.
The title comes from a poem Kim wrote and placed on the gallery wall. Having stopped carving, the poet sits by the Nakdong River as wind lifts the water and tightens a sail, and whatever the wind raises is sculpture for a moment.
About the artist
Kim Seil was born in 1958 and teaches at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. GalleryMEME counts this as the artist's twelfth solo show, after exhibitions at Kim Chong Yung Museum (2023) and Moran Museum of Art (2010). The gallery lists the artist's work in the collections of MMCA and the Seoul Museum of Art.
Sources: GalleryMEME: exhibition page