KIMI JAAK paints memories and emotions encountered in unfamiliar places, along with anonymous existences in everyday life in vivid color and restrained form. Since her relocation to Hawaii in 2012, her work started from the gaze of an outsider who views the familiar world from afar, that unfamiliarity is not simply a feeling of unease or strangeness but rather a way of seeing that allows her to discover another sentiment hidden behind ordinary objects and landscapes.
Her paintings distance themselves from ones that faithfully depict objects as they are. She removes unnecessary details and flattens the perspective to focus on the underlying composition formed by objects and their surroundings. In this process, forms becomes simpler, colors grow more vivid, and the painting moves closer to a surreal feel where reality and unreality intersect, moving away from realistic representation.
‘John Doe’, a term used in the Western world to refer to an unidentified, unspecified individual, repeatedly appears in her work as a symbolic figure and reveals the image of modern people hidden behind anonymity. Figures with exaggerated torsos, small and frail hands and feet, and missing facial features are closer to nameless portraits of all of us rather than specific individuals.
The use of linen instead of canvas, and a practice that actively utilizes the touch of pigment seeping into the fibers instead of layering paint thickly on the surface, shows her distinctive style of handling material properties. Color is expressed not as a substance that glimmers on the surface, but as a sensation that subtly seeps out from within.
Her experience in lacquer craft also connects to her deep sense of color. The attitude of minimizing mixed colors and highlighting the inherent qualities of each color, along with the tension arising from deep, warm tones and complementary color contrasts, can be read as an attempt to reconstruct the color sensibility of Korean traditional crafts and lacquerware into the language of contemporary painting.
Her images of sports and circus are not just reproductions of games or playfulness. It is a metaphor of how our lives are structured in which we balance, stand firm, leap, pull, and move again. The anonymous figures with erased faces reveal the movements and relationships of the group, not individual heroic narratives. The figures that move within the same current without fully knowing each other, illustrate the social relationship of those who live in the same era, and at the same time capture the artist’s attempts to expose the existence and story of each and one of us even amidst namelessness and alienation.
