Cincinnati Artist Bukang Yu Kim brings together the East and the West

 

by Eva Feld

Is space amid brushstrokes on a painting similar to what is between lines in a text? The answer to this question lies in paradox, subjectivity, individual culture and heritage.

The human creator transforms reality in a wide aesthetic spectrum: from exquisite beauty to outrageousness; from delicacy to audacious scandal; from elaborate techniques to basic lashes. But there is always a task adjudicated to each viewer or reader of art. It is called inference, and depicts his or her feelings, thoughts, and sentiments. As though an invisible god, the artist’s existence becomes part of the imaginary.

Nevertheless, paraphrasing Gertrude Stein about a rose being always a rose, an artist is an artist is an artist, and that is what Bukang Yu Kim is, an artist. Solid but fragile, introverted but outspoken, Cincinnati local yet universal, Korean immigrant nonetheless American resident for over 50 years, her sparkling energy has reached the public of her native Korea, the United States and Europe.

Bukang Yu Kim may be a luminescent beholder of answers about the space between paint strokes as she immerses herself with paint, space, lettering and silence in the canvas or rice paper that she uses. According to her, “Western art happens as a result of observation from a certain distance, perspective and composition being key factors. Asian art, on the contrary, seeks an insight. When I paint, I am part of the landscape or the object, I am not only an observer.”

She incarnates a vibrant paradox between her early training on Western Art at the Seoul National University before arriving to the USA (where she furthered her studies at the University of Cincinnati) and her Asian heritage. She refers to it as a bridge in constant progress to connect the two cultures without betraying either or herself.

The values that were imbedded within her as a little girl learning calligraphy at school remain intact in her memory. She knows how to hold the brush to express every sort of intensity both with images and words.

Bukang Yu Kim hasn’t forgotten the hardships her people have gone through. As she embraced her acquired American citizenship, she has also increased her understanding of her ancestors. As she adds western techniques to her art, she also clings to the depth of simplicity. She journals and thrives on that threshold.

Such edge is better explained by Hou-mei Sung, East Asian art curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum (home of twenty of Kim’s’s art pieces).

- What was the criteria applied by the CAM to select Bukang Yu Kim’s’s art?

-  Normally the CAM does not exhibit contemporary artists. Her quality and novelty stood out.

- What do the CAM and you personally find most significant about Kim’s art?

- The way in which she conveys the East and the West. Like in Taoism, she displays natural and philosophical contraries: the Yin-Yang approach to depict light and shadow, high and low, sun and moon, masculine and feminine with a mixture of techniques from Korea and the USA, the two cultures that have shaped her identity. Her rich and complex blend of colors and dynamic layered structures show us how she has mastered the gestural abstraction, yet her style remains unique and beyond definition

-What should a viewer observe while visiting Kim’s art?

-When I talk to visitors, I ask them not to hurry, to overcome the idea that her painting might be too simple, to discover a communion with the subject. If it is the traditional Korean bell, I invite them to feel its energy, its outreaching sound throughout towns to awaken people’s soul and enlighten their minds. If it is a landscape, I tell the viewers to look at it from multiple angles at the same time, and, if it is a humble trait of a rooster, for example, to captivate its essence beyond its shape. In short, to keep an open mind. In all her works we are taken on her evolving distinctive language based on spontaneity and universal harmony.

PS:

Beside the CAM, her art is permanently displayed at the Cincinnati Art Galleries.

In addition to being an artist, a wife, a mother, Bukang Yu Kim is also a member of an international group of women in Cincinnati. Its affiliates, around 25 women from all over the world, think of her as a generous, courageous, perseverant, and valuable person and friend. They have come to understand her mostly silent presence through her passion for art. So do her neighbors in Hyde Park, where she has lived for four decades.