François Ghebaly is proud to present a solo booth of new works by Incheon-born, New York-based artist Cindy Ji Hye Kim at Frieze Seoul 2023. Titled Requiem, the booth includes six new paintings on translucent silk and five wooden sculptures representing a new direction in Kim’s practice.

Requiem reflects upon the process of mourning. The works draw upon ancient Korean funerary objects and tomb murals, scenes of mythical creatures and Gods, and ritual objects like Kokdu figures to pay homage not only to the dead but also to the process of guiding the deceased into the next realm. Committed in washes of watercolor, charcoal, and pastel on silk, the paintings carry a nocturnal, dreamlike quality with powerful and ambiguous symbols: a sleeping donkey, a porcupine on a staircase, a whirling reversed clock. By mixing these sigils with iconography of ancient Korean tombs and mourning practices, Kim collapses the distinctions between life and death, ancient and modern, home and afar.

Taken together, the works in Requiem muse upon diasporic experience, grieving the attenuation of one’s connection to home. Kim takes fragments of history and transforms them into a visual record of difference that resists clear narrative. Her works at Frieze Seoul question what it means to mourn one’s disconnection to an identity, a language, and a culture. With her open ended and mysterious symbology, Kim shows that this passage can be one of beauty, celebration, and wonder.

Photography by Lance Brewer & Kyoungtae Kim

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