Ornament - your and my

Kim jang-hee's art is produced by the tension between the global and local, inclusion and exclusion. and self and the other. Her work is appropriated from the other through reproduction. For some time her interest was concentrated on the imaged of the images of Hollywood Film stills and the iconic images of American modernism, but recently her focus has shifted towards the highly developed and refined Korean traditional ornaments. then what is the connection between American icons. Hollywood film-still, and Korean ornaments? Where does the boundary between the self and the other lie?

It is possible to regard abstraction of Western modernism as a universal pattern. In Kim Jang-hee's previous exhibition catalogues, her re-paintings of scenes from popular movies and mom abstract works of art are interpreted as semiotic images that have already lost their essential qualities, their established meanings. The original traditional ornament through repetitve gesture is reborn as a new pattern. And the repeated image loses its original meaning and is endowed with a new form.

The boundary between self and the other becomes all the more unclear when one looks closely at her paintings. in the reproduced images and the calligraphic drawings that overlap the images, as seen in her American icona series, the relationship between figure and ground is no longer distinct and the recreated image depicts a new, different picture.

The ambiguous relationship between self and the other is also affirmed by the fact that Kim Jang-hee's paintings are all done by hand, and not produced by mechanical means. The act of painting and writing demands high degree of concentration and mental training while at the same time leads one to let go of one's ago. Kim shows us only a segment of this endless pattern in limited scale, and the various patterns are revealed through contrast between light and dark and degrees of color tones. For example she juxtaposes the smooth and hard surface with the softer. fabric-like surface to show that two seemingly different characters can also simultaneously coexist.

Her paintings shift endlessly between appropriation of the other and resignation of the self. This movement like the seesaw ultimately creates a unique instant outside the existing domain. and this is what attributes a special and unique individual quality to her paintings.