Ham Jin

PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault are pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Ham Jin (b. 1978) from June 3 to July 15, 2011. Marked by the inventiveness and imagination that has distinguished his practice from the beginning, the works in this exhibition include sculptures as well as two-dimensional pieces.

Best known for miniature tableaus composed of micro-sized figures barely a centimeter high, Ham Jin has continued to garner attention from the media and the art world since his solo debut at PKM in 2004. He has developed a distinctive artistic practice while exhibiting in prominent venues both within Korea and internationally, including the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2005); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2005); Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris (2008); Rodin Gallery, Samsung Museum, Seoul (2008); and “Lustwarande 08 – Wanderland,” Fundament Foundation, Tilburg, the Netherlands (2008).

While his previous works have often revolved around clearly articulated thematic contexts and composed of characters suited to them, the new works in this exhibition are less readily legible though no less compelling, offering up fluid, multifarious stories from intertwined forms and figures that tend toward the fantastic and the uncanny. As though issuing from hands unfettered by conscious constraints, the small sculptures are dense with forms that freely wander, diverge, and tangle. These distinctive forms—evoking the lines of Surrealist automatic drawing—could indeed be perceived as what the artist himself has termed a kind of “spatial drawing.” Ranging freely over the gallery space, from the floor to the ceiling, the installation of these sculptures subtly brings forth their presence in a way that elicits a psychological engagement from the viewer.

Minimizing the role of color as a means of differentiation in figuration, Ham Jin has insisted on using black clay in these works in order to concentrate the viewer’s perception of the intricately varied forms that accumulate in the composition of the sculptural forms. Hovering between figuration and abstraction, these works may appear at first dark, perplexing, and bewildering. But gradually the engaged viewer becomes immersed in an intriguing microcosmic realm that emerges as much in the viewer’s psyche as in these sculptural forms.