Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce a solo presentation by Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, KR) for Frieze London 2022. Five new paintings composed of Baltic birch stretcher bars, silk, and graphite are suspended and staggered, hovering in space.

Kim’s latest body of work reflects a deepening exploration of the anatomy of an image. Five double-sided grisaille paintings with exposed stretcher bars form a chamber-like installation through which viewers absorb image and structure in tandem. Taking the traditional archetype of an easel as her point of departure, Kim embeds easel-like reliefs into the negative space of each painting’s verso, emphasizing the transitional phases both inside and outside the realms of art-making.

In function, an easel provides temporary reinforcement for a canvas, which eventually parts ways with its supportive structure. Likening this transient state of dependence and separation to that of the relationship between child and parent, Kim explores the metaphorical and literal implications that result. Compositionally, the artist’s grisaille imagery ranges from dream-like figuration to tethered abstraction. Kim’s influences are etched into the imagined world of each work wherein echoes of Greek mythology, 18th century French cartoons, psychological exams, and Korean architecture coalesce.

Moonlight (2022) and Ancient Rain (2022) speak most directly to the parallels between easel and parent. In Moonlight, a young girl lays on the floor beneath an easel—its shape exactly mirrored in the stretcher bars of the work’s verso. Her braids rest limp on the floor under an easel without a picture. The skeletal state of an empty easel is disquieted by a looming window that gives way to a black abyss. In Ancient Rain, the absence of a child resounds. Replaced by the Greek mythological figure of Icarus, an easel, and a tilted pelvic bone resting on a child’s bed, Kim personifies the easel and collapses fantastical worlds.

In Prophecy (2022), Kim explores a painting’s capacity to exist as a threshold of subjectivity. A bat, a creature of keen eyesight, and a discarded theatre mask are semi-obstructed within a room inspired by Hanok, a traditional style of home in Korea. In an allusion to the process in which the viewer intercepts and translates a painting’s meaning, Kim emphasizes the nuance between deception and revelation. Psychological interpretations are furthered in Eyes Inside a Mirror (2022). Reversing the methodology of Rorschach inkblot tests, in which abstract inkblots are conventionally analyzed into digestible images and meanings, Kim begins her paintings with an identifiable source. The abstracted blots are mirrored and sutured together with needle and thread, cornered by silhouettes of the artist’s ongoing motifs of the mother, father, and child.

Memory and personal narrative are the subjects of 21st Century Love Story (the Third Estate) (2022). Cherry blossoms billowing from a branch occupy the composition. The artist’s adolescent memories of cherry blossoms in Korea are offset by present-day synthetic depictions of the tree in karaoke bars or sushi restaurants. Imagery of three men on piggyback nearly obscured by the flowers is sourced from a satirical cartoon of the French revolution that illustrates a peasant with a member of the clergy and aristocracy on his back. The connecting thread of support, from easel to painting and parent to child, extends here to societal ranks. In these five disparate works, linked by the easels on their backs, Kim toils with what might happen when the instruments of support are suspended, abolished, or otherwise ruptured.