Texts
Weight, Cut Surfaces, Interior, Decorative Knots
QF(Ha Sanghyun)
〈Sleeper 1 (BEAM 2–1)〉, 〈Sleeper 2 (BEAM 2–2)〉, 〈The General (BEAM 3–1)〉, and ‹The Bride (BEAM 3–2)› are all too heavy for one person to lift. Some of them weigh more than 150kg. What stands out is that even moving these heavy sculptures slightly during the production process requires help from others. In fact, most beams seen in daily life are not something a single person can move. Beams need to be heavy and strong to support the weight above. Because of this, not only the beams that hold up buildings, but also concrete utility poles and even ordinary logs, cannot be moved by individual effort.
How much of the weight of these familiar beams can we truly perceive? Even after learning that one weighs 150kg, it is difficult to truly grasp the weight of Minhoon Kim’s sculptures. For comparison, 150kg is the weight of a barbell loaded with three 20kg plates and one 5kg plate on each side. At the 2022 USAPL Korea Summer Classic Season 2, the athlete Ruska performed a deadlift with this weight and immediately blacked out and collapsed. The deadlift is an exercise in which a person lifts a “dead weight” from the floor. Sometimes, in the act of lifting, a person ends up brought down instead.
What is especially notable when first encountering 〈The General (BEAM 3–1)〉 and 〈The Bride (BEAM 3–2)〉 in the artist’s studio is that they appear much lighter than their true weight. Their interiors, revealed as if opening a ribcage, show discarded styrofoam, making the heavy cement seem thin and light. The sense of weight perceived with the eyes can often create a strong illusion. These two sculptures pose the question of how much of a beam’s weight can truly be felt. Then, turning away, they disappear with dignity, their garments trailing on the floor.
Two ways in which humans ‘cut’ objects come to mind. The first is cutting materials into large units at the beginning of production, a process that determines the scale of an object. The second is cutting materials into smaller units, which involves applying a more aggressive force and, whether or not the maker is aware, carries a particular intention. In practice, these two approaches are not strictly separate. The distinction between large and small cuts is also relative, depending on the maker.
Minhoon Kim rarely employs either of these cutting methods in his sculpture. From October 2021 to March 2022, he carried out the project 〈GRABO〉, which focused on verb-based actions in the process of making sculpture. In this project, the artist concentrated on one verb per day, producing a sculpture and documenting it. Among the 133 recorded actions, ‘cut’ appeared only four times. (He is more likely to carve, apply, coat, smear, bind, twist, or tie than to cut.)
As a result, the cut surfaces found in his sculptures primarily reveal the specific choices made by others or by society in cutting the object. 〈Strangers (BEAM 1)〉 began with the artist collecting already-pruned branches and logs found during walks and bringing them into the studio. Pruning can help trees grow in a healthy way. However, most of the trees that can be seen on the street have had their branches cut by systems driven by profit, efficiency, or administrative convenience. Choices that consider the long-term relationship between trees and humans are rarely visible. The way humans treat trees seems closely related to the way humans treat one another.
A cross-section of a tree cut horizontally reveals its rings. Cutting in this aggressive way exposes the interior of an object in a particular manner. In contrast, Kim does not cut trees but intervenes by planing their bark vertically or making incisions. He has said that such actions seem to create a kind of attachment. He was struck by how, when peeling away the surface of trees that look similar at first glance, the patterns revealed are unique to each species. Viewers may feel there is little meaningful difference between each tree. However, to the artist, who brings each cut tree from the street and spends around 100 hours refining it, those differences inevitably become apparent. When I said, “The process is hardly visible to the audience,” Kim firmly replied that it does not matter if the 100 hours of labor are not revealed at all. I note here that many of Minhoon Kim’s sculptural decisions remain intentionally invisible on the surface.
Unless a building exposes its construction materials, as in the case of exposed concrete, the interior is typically finished in a particular way. How, then, are the finishes of art spaces chosen? The most influential model is the ‘white cube’ method, conceived by Alfred Barr in 1929. This approach involves painting all the walls white, flooding the entire space with timeless white light, and concealing all the building’s operational systems from view.
The interior finish of Art Space Boan 2, where the exhibition is held, closely resembles the white cube, yet several fissures can be found. First, natural light streaming through the large windows changes the appearance of objects moment by moment as time passes. The ceiling’s pipework is exposed, yet veiled again with white paint. The lines at the edges of doors leading to storage spaces, the junctions where the red brick exterior meets the white interior walls, and protruding corners are also visible.
While the basement level, Art Space Boan 3, actively reveals construction materials such as brick and the subterranean rock, Art Space Boan 2 covers the walls, ceiling, and floor entirely in white, yet simultaneously reveals this act of covering through a series of small gaps. This space draws attention to the whiteness of the white cube itself, turning inside out the inner flesh that was never meant to be seen. Is it possible to imagine such a turning inside out in an erotic way?
A knot is a technique for binding things together. The material properties of what is to be bound, whether the knot will need to be untied, and the required strength all influence the form and function of the knot. Everyday examples include sewing, which fastens thread, or tying shoelaces. Mountaineering knots are a matter of life and death, so their strength and adaptability to different situations are crucial. By contrast, knots used for binding prisoners or in hangings are intended to incapacitate or kill. There are also knots that form writing, such as the Incan quipu, and bondage knots used in sexual fetish play. Minhoon Kim has employed a variety of knotting techniques when combining two or more things. In this exhibition, he has especially experimented with a traditional Korean form of decorative knotting.
Modernists treated ornament as taboo. The architect Adolf Loos, in 『Ornament and Crime』 (1897–1929), went so far as to consider ornament a crime. Le Corbusier inherited this idea and, in the 1920s, actively eliminated ornament in architecture. For Loos, ornament was a display of ostentation and a waste of labor, a blind taste that prevented the imagination of newness. For Le Corbusier, ornament was a camouflage that hid the flaws of objects. “Decoration hides defects, blemishes, all shortcomings.” On the other hand, “A good object is well made, appropriate, clean, pure, healthy, and reveals its quality by being naked.” As industrial machines made it possible to cheaply reproduce ornament, the status of decoration, once enjoyed by only a few, changed. Although their reasons for criticizing ornament differed, both saw ornament as something that deviated from the ‘essence’ of an object, such as its purpose, function, and material honesty.
During the Art Nouveau period, when ornament had great influence, a tailor shop building was constructed without any decoration, and people criticized it, calling it a “house without eyebrows.” Since then, “without eyebrows” became a metaphor for purity in Western modernist architecture. ◼ Thinking of ornament and eyebrows brings to mind the act of drawing men's eyebrows. Eyebrows greatly influence the impression of a face and become thicker with higher levels of testosterone. For this reason, thick eyebrows become a marker of masculinity.
In men’s eyebrow makeup, the most important thing is naturalness. It is strange that naturalness is pursued through an artificial act, but it is important that this is a subtle technique for adjusting masculinity. For a man to carefully manipulate and embody the “signs of masculinity” is to treat masculinity itself as something decorative, something that can be put on or taken off at any time. The way men’s eyebrow makeup functions in a queer context is intriguing. Eyebrows can be drawn and erased at will. However, as the act of shaping the face is repeated, the drawn eyebrows become inseparable from the self. The more often one draws eyebrows, the more ‘appropriate’ and ‘better’ the result becomes. Both the moment when the drawn eyebrows are exposed, causing shame, and the moment when they become indistinguishable from the real ones are significant.
Minhoon Kim incorporates traditional practices, especially construction methods from traditional architecture, into his sculpture and steadily masters them through labor, yet he continues to play with them. This approach intersects with the act of drawing men’s eyebrows. It is a practice of othering ‘tradition,’ balancing between shame and pride. Making a similar sculpture twice or repeating a similar action is not about seeking a single origin, but about performing an erotic repetition in the here and now, like drawing eyebrows on both sides.
◼ Quoted from Kim Malgeum, 「For a sculptor, an exhibition becoming a medium means ornament escapes being a crime.」, a text written in conjunction with the exhibition 《Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty》 (2022).
QF(Ha Sanghyun)
Weight
〈Sleeper 1 (BEAM 2–1)〉, 〈Sleeper 2 (BEAM 2–2)〉, 〈The General (BEAM 3–1)〉, and ‹The Bride (BEAM 3–2)› are all too heavy for one person to lift. Some of them weigh more than 150kg. What stands out is that even moving these heavy sculptures slightly during the production process requires help from others. In fact, most beams seen in daily life are not something a single person can move. Beams need to be heavy and strong to support the weight above. Because of this, not only the beams that hold up buildings, but also concrete utility poles and even ordinary logs, cannot be moved by individual effort.
How much of the weight of these familiar beams can we truly perceive? Even after learning that one weighs 150kg, it is difficult to truly grasp the weight of Minhoon Kim’s sculptures. For comparison, 150kg is the weight of a barbell loaded with three 20kg plates and one 5kg plate on each side. At the 2022 USAPL Korea Summer Classic Season 2, the athlete Ruska performed a deadlift with this weight and immediately blacked out and collapsed. The deadlift is an exercise in which a person lifts a “dead weight” from the floor. Sometimes, in the act of lifting, a person ends up brought down instead.
What is especially notable when first encountering 〈The General (BEAM 3–1)〉 and 〈The Bride (BEAM 3–2)〉 in the artist’s studio is that they appear much lighter than their true weight. Their interiors, revealed as if opening a ribcage, show discarded styrofoam, making the heavy cement seem thin and light. The sense of weight perceived with the eyes can often create a strong illusion. These two sculptures pose the question of how much of a beam’s weight can truly be felt. Then, turning away, they disappear with dignity, their garments trailing on the floor.
Cut Surfaces
Two ways in which humans ‘cut’ objects come to mind. The first is cutting materials into large units at the beginning of production, a process that determines the scale of an object. The second is cutting materials into smaller units, which involves applying a more aggressive force and, whether or not the maker is aware, carries a particular intention. In practice, these two approaches are not strictly separate. The distinction between large and small cuts is also relative, depending on the maker.
Minhoon Kim rarely employs either of these cutting methods in his sculpture. From October 2021 to March 2022, he carried out the project 〈GRABO〉, which focused on verb-based actions in the process of making sculpture. In this project, the artist concentrated on one verb per day, producing a sculpture and documenting it. Among the 133 recorded actions, ‘cut’ appeared only four times. (He is more likely to carve, apply, coat, smear, bind, twist, or tie than to cut.)
As a result, the cut surfaces found in his sculptures primarily reveal the specific choices made by others or by society in cutting the object. 〈Strangers (BEAM 1)〉 began with the artist collecting already-pruned branches and logs found during walks and bringing them into the studio. Pruning can help trees grow in a healthy way. However, most of the trees that can be seen on the street have had their branches cut by systems driven by profit, efficiency, or administrative convenience. Choices that consider the long-term relationship between trees and humans are rarely visible. The way humans treat trees seems closely related to the way humans treat one another.
A cross-section of a tree cut horizontally reveals its rings. Cutting in this aggressive way exposes the interior of an object in a particular manner. In contrast, Kim does not cut trees but intervenes by planing their bark vertically or making incisions. He has said that such actions seem to create a kind of attachment. He was struck by how, when peeling away the surface of trees that look similar at first glance, the patterns revealed are unique to each species. Viewers may feel there is little meaningful difference between each tree. However, to the artist, who brings each cut tree from the street and spends around 100 hours refining it, those differences inevitably become apparent. When I said, “The process is hardly visible to the audience,” Kim firmly replied that it does not matter if the 100 hours of labor are not revealed at all. I note here that many of Minhoon Kim’s sculptural decisions remain intentionally invisible on the surface.
Interior
Unless a building exposes its construction materials, as in the case of exposed concrete, the interior is typically finished in a particular way. How, then, are the finishes of art spaces chosen? The most influential model is the ‘white cube’ method, conceived by Alfred Barr in 1929. This approach involves painting all the walls white, flooding the entire space with timeless white light, and concealing all the building’s operational systems from view.
The interior finish of Art Space Boan 2, where the exhibition is held, closely resembles the white cube, yet several fissures can be found. First, natural light streaming through the large windows changes the appearance of objects moment by moment as time passes. The ceiling’s pipework is exposed, yet veiled again with white paint. The lines at the edges of doors leading to storage spaces, the junctions where the red brick exterior meets the white interior walls, and protruding corners are also visible.
While the basement level, Art Space Boan 3, actively reveals construction materials such as brick and the subterranean rock, Art Space Boan 2 covers the walls, ceiling, and floor entirely in white, yet simultaneously reveals this act of covering through a series of small gaps. This space draws attention to the whiteness of the white cube itself, turning inside out the inner flesh that was never meant to be seen. Is it possible to imagine such a turning inside out in an erotic way?
Decorative Knots
A knot is a technique for binding things together. The material properties of what is to be bound, whether the knot will need to be untied, and the required strength all influence the form and function of the knot. Everyday examples include sewing, which fastens thread, or tying shoelaces. Mountaineering knots are a matter of life and death, so their strength and adaptability to different situations are crucial. By contrast, knots used for binding prisoners or in hangings are intended to incapacitate or kill. There are also knots that form writing, such as the Incan quipu, and bondage knots used in sexual fetish play. Minhoon Kim has employed a variety of knotting techniques when combining two or more things. In this exhibition, he has especially experimented with a traditional Korean form of decorative knotting.
Modernists treated ornament as taboo. The architect Adolf Loos, in 『Ornament and Crime』 (1897–1929), went so far as to consider ornament a crime. Le Corbusier inherited this idea and, in the 1920s, actively eliminated ornament in architecture. For Loos, ornament was a display of ostentation and a waste of labor, a blind taste that prevented the imagination of newness. For Le Corbusier, ornament was a camouflage that hid the flaws of objects. “Decoration hides defects, blemishes, all shortcomings.” On the other hand, “A good object is well made, appropriate, clean, pure, healthy, and reveals its quality by being naked.” As industrial machines made it possible to cheaply reproduce ornament, the status of decoration, once enjoyed by only a few, changed. Although their reasons for criticizing ornament differed, both saw ornament as something that deviated from the ‘essence’ of an object, such as its purpose, function, and material honesty.
During the Art Nouveau period, when ornament had great influence, a tailor shop building was constructed without any decoration, and people criticized it, calling it a “house without eyebrows.” Since then, “without eyebrows” became a metaphor for purity in Western modernist architecture. ◼ Thinking of ornament and eyebrows brings to mind the act of drawing men's eyebrows. Eyebrows greatly influence the impression of a face and become thicker with higher levels of testosterone. For this reason, thick eyebrows become a marker of masculinity.
In men’s eyebrow makeup, the most important thing is naturalness. It is strange that naturalness is pursued through an artificial act, but it is important that this is a subtle technique for adjusting masculinity. For a man to carefully manipulate and embody the “signs of masculinity” is to treat masculinity itself as something decorative, something that can be put on or taken off at any time. The way men’s eyebrow makeup functions in a queer context is intriguing. Eyebrows can be drawn and erased at will. However, as the act of shaping the face is repeated, the drawn eyebrows become inseparable from the self. The more often one draws eyebrows, the more ‘appropriate’ and ‘better’ the result becomes. Both the moment when the drawn eyebrows are exposed, causing shame, and the moment when they become indistinguishable from the real ones are significant.
Minhoon Kim incorporates traditional practices, especially construction methods from traditional architecture, into his sculpture and steadily masters them through labor, yet he continues to play with them. This approach intersects with the act of drawing men’s eyebrows. It is a practice of othering ‘tradition,’ balancing between shame and pride. Making a similar sculpture twice or repeating a similar action is not about seeking a single origin, but about performing an erotic repetition in the here and now, like drawing eyebrows on both sides.
◼ Quoted from Kim Malgeum, 「For a sculptor, an exhibition becoming a medium means ornament escapes being a crime.」, a text written in conjunction with the exhibition 《Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty》 (2022).
