Kim Yisu’s work shows multi-layered tapes attached to the surface of a milky-white acrylic plate, which has accumulated the lights reflected. The Inframince (coined anew by M. Duchamp) occurring on the surface of her work is rendered as thin lights between layers. The fact that she has pursued images by drawing multi-layered lights onto the painting is never new. For the artists ranging from the light artist Rembrandt to such Impressionists as Cezanne and Monet, the light has been a permanent theme for art. Like them, Kim Yisu may well be ‘a seeker for lights.’ She expands her formative thoughts with the invisible but sublime lights. Her work looks like a setting or rising sun over the horizon owing to the effects of the lights refracted. Otherwise, her work looks like a space beyond the window of a spaceship, which has got out of Earth’s gravity. Such images as layered tapes and the downtime of the light-speed shooting suggest both analogue and digital senses at the same time. The artist Kim who introduces such senses to us is called ‘searcher for lights’ quite legitimately. – Ueda Yuzo( Director of Gallery Q, Tokyo)

KIM Yisu was born in Korea. She obtained her BFA and MFA from Sungshin Women’s University in 1998 and 2000, respectively. In 2005, she received her second MFA from Pratt Institute of Art and Design. Five years later, she started her PhD at Sungshin Women’s University. She has held solo exhibitions since 2000 around East Asia and the USA at galleries such as Gallery Q (Tokyo and Rotterdam. Netherlands), Pratt Steuben Gallery (New York), Sejong Gallery (Seoul), Pho Gallery (Beijing), Gana Art Space (Seoul), and Kwanhoon Gallery (Seoul) amongst others. Her group exhibitions over the past eight years have seen her work in the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, Taiwan), Tokyo Gallery (Tokyo), PHK18 (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Whanki Museum (Seoul), Artstork 20 (Taichung, Taiwan), and Da Xiang Artspace (Taipei, Taiwan) amongst others. Her work is part of six public collections in Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea.

I intentionally apply the idea of ‘inframince’, which was introduced by Marcel Duchamp, into the visual scene through various viewpoints. The term ‘inframince’ means being extremely thin and small. This idea can be understood as something that has no proper identity, or as the intersection of unrecognizable areas and its edges. This is a complicated, unstable conception. From an artistic viewpoint, however, the ‘inframince’ represents either thickness which is realized by a series of thin lines (i.e., an ‘eppaisseur’), or the relationship between lines. In this perspective, thickness of lines or the relationships between lines are given an account of layers by means of translucent paper, dyed thread, colored bands and acrylic panel throughout a series of exhibitions. Particularly in this exhibition, overlap and the subtle nuance of colorful bands painted on semi-transparent tape were primarily used in order to describe the idea of ‘inframince’. My ‘Inframince-Landscape’ stands on not only the betweenness the time of sunset and the space of horizon, but also the boundary of being generated and extinguished constantly. I have never experienced the views of a landscape in the same way. The storage of my memory meeting the boundary is always present and progressive.– Yisu Kim