About the world beyond the border perceived between repetition and change

Kim Rann

Artist Kim Rann presents abstract paintings that fill the screen with countless lines. She sometimes shows screens where lines come and go freely on the entire screen or a divided screen and similar works. She draws lines that look the same at regular intervals as if adding layers to the whole screen. By repeating it repeatedly, it seems, at a glimpse, to be covering up the work done before.

However, the space of her canvas filled with layers of lines like this gives some feeling of creating a small universe in itself, perhaps because she draws and erases countless lines and refills them. The screen created by the traces of the lines is approaching where a small piece of established history, containing her actions as if she were working in front of the canvas before it became a painting made with paint.

The core expression of her works can be said to be ‘repeated actions.’ However, something perceived as a result is the ‘feeling of change.’ Countless lines may all look the same, but if you look closely, you will find slight differences revealed. However, the space where these differences accumulated continuously is no longer an image but a situation in which it powerfully conveys the substance and meaning that created the ‘movement’ that was latent among the actions of moving to draw lines. She may have entered an experience of being immersed in the work and the action while performing these repeated actions. Perhaps that is why her sense of immersion can be seen everywhere in her works, even though it is the space of heavy abstract paintings. In her works, which seem to contain images of selflessness acquired by repeating the same actions, you may encounter a subtle energy of change beneath the phenomenal visual surface of the seemingly regular canvas.

However, you may find these detectable changes at the border between order and disorder. Rather than simply touching up while painting, Kim Rann tries to give temporality to the spaces by revealing phenomenal things and concealing visible stuff beneath the surface, as if by repeating erasing. She aims to summon the world behind material existence into the visible realm by doing so. In this sense, the repeated drawing of lines on the canvas expresses energy that brings the realm of the sublime into the real world, like an act of magic. Because humans exist within the limits of space and time, they cannot legitimately deal with things beyond them.

Nevertheless, humans long to be able to see the beyond and want to know about the beyond. The space filled with lines by her contains a story about this unknown time. However, we should now think about what to call and how to interpret the time inscribed in her works under the name of traces. It is because what she wanted to capture was something beyond the boundaries of the human realm. Ultimately, she is trying to share more deeply with others, not just herself, about this world she encountered by allowing us to reach subtle changes between the lines that fill our eyes through her works. As a single being, she wants to talk about what lies beyond that existence and reaffirm the meaning of the differences.