Feminine Syntax : Personal Biographies - Kim Kyoungae

Threading Waves

“The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.

A pain when beyond human range becomes something else.”

When the sky clears, Ghalib (Translated by Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta)

Sound is a volume; trickling, dripping, wavering, piercing (or the many ways of defining sounds attached to tracing its origin). How do I trace a distant sound, its movement, intensity and definitiveness, to evolve the same as a space within me? Here I disclose a practice that I love to undertake – of choosing, extracting, and refining a sound that creates a sequential space within my mind. What follows may not explain my paintings as visual constructs, but unveil layers that define depth in my works.

I begin as an initial step, from the depth of darkness towards light- evolving intervening surfaces; from ignorance towards acknowledgement, or simply from a question of the pigment, as to what it can explain.

I like the practice of viewing; the ritual of opening books, maybe even upside down, to challenge what has become the set notion of “correctness”; like with the delicate drawings and prints of Ernst Heckle or with Barnett Newman’s paintings, as the existential need to question meaning through process-based works.

I often begin a day with looking out of the window of my sixth floor studio. What gets chosen to be viewed and what gets ignored by accident; what I return to view again, and what I eliminate, is all a part of the process of making a work of art for me. Colour tones ripen to allow a subtle exit or an entry into my paintings; paying heed that the edges conform to their own needs. Colours define architectural spaces; sunk in solitude. I knew the person who lived there, now there is no one; yet there is a tree bursting with life and energy under the blazing sun.

I could not ignore the empty window, sullen, yet traversing the monsoon like an insisting island, and as the monsoon passed it eloped from the mind. I come across what I had seen three years ago in the same town; its eroding quality encapsulating time and becoming one with the surroundings. I enter into nature, a cyclical experience of piercing time and healing itself, and again erupting from nothingness. I appreciate this very rhythm, this harmony that one lives with, within mundane surroundings.

An interpretation of Kim Kyoungae’s writings by Shubhalakshmi Shukla

2011