Minouk Lim: Luquide Commune

PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault are pleased to devote its entire fall schedule to “Liquide Commune,” an exhibition of the work of Minouk Lim in two parts.

Part I, beginning on October 4 and on view for the duration of the entire exhibition period, brings together four of the artist’s recent video works based on performative events staged in public spaces. The videos—Firecliff 1_Madrid (2010); The Weight of Hands (2010); Portable Keeper(2009); and S.O.S.–Adoptive Dissensus (2009)—are shown on a single loop in a purpose-built screening room on the first floor of the gallery. By turns theatrical, poetic, and documentarian in impulse, these works are central to Minouk Lim’s emergence as perhaps the most trenchant observer of the dramatic and often turbulent social, economic, and political dynamics of contemporary Korean experience amid the homogenizing sweep of globalization and accelerated modernity.

With Part II, opening on November 10, “Liquide Commune” expands into the rest of the gallery space at PKM and the project space at Bartleby Bickle & Meursault with newly produced sculptures, wall works, and drawings. Posing a provocative visual and thematic counterpoint to the videos, Lim deploys a diverse range of materials—synthetic fur, velvet, animal bones, polyurethane sponge, latex, and paraffin—to create forms that suggest a fusion of the organic, geological, and the architectural. At once visually compelling and tactile, alluring and forbidding, the new work signals the artist moving into a more expansive realm, beyond the boundaries of specific locale or history, to the more symbolic, abstract dimensions of nature, culture, myth, and civilization.

This is Minouk Lim’s first exhibition with PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault.

Born in 1968, Minouk Lim graduated with a BFA in Arts Plastiques from Université Paris I. Selected exhibitions include Touched, 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010); Morality, Act VI: Remember Humanity,Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2009); Everyday Miracles (Extended), San Francisco Art Institute and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2009); 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); and 6th and 7th Gwangju Biennales (2006 and 2008). In 2007, she was awarded the 7th Hermès Korea Art Prize. In 2008, the Artsonje Center, Seoul, held the first major institutional solo exhibition of her work. This fall, Minouk Lim’s video is featured in the “Perspectives” series of one-person exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. In the spring of 2012, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will hold a solo exhibition of her work.