A Little Space: Anicka Yi, Byron Kim and GYOPO
As it happens, both editions hark back to the artists’ earliest work and discoveries: Yi, macerating natural perfumes for a Tribeca pop-up with designer Mary Ping in 2007; and Kim, scouring Duane Reade’s makeup aisle in the 1990s for his palette. Yi’s arrival to artmaking followed a serpentine path, with stops in film theory, fashion styling and scented guerilla takeovers of the lobby at Citibank and the perfume counter at Abercrombie & Fitch. But as a result, upon starting she knew what she wanted to make: work that would use air as a medium, and transcend the body’s habits of looking at art. Kim did not have much formal art training either, and it seems he has taught himself to paint through bodies of work that self-impose arbitrarily rigorous rules. Once he chose the makeup for his early drawings, he had to use the whole line, and there had to be an even number of foundations to make a grid. Just as in Synecdoche (1991–), each color represents a person; or rather, their skin color — a deliberately imperfect stand-in for who they might be. Kim would arrange these skin-toned squares with a funny logic: alphabetically by hue, or from dark to light. “All I want is a system,” Kim says. “Everything else will take care of itself. Meaning will accrue even if I don’t know why.” This geography of color is something like poetry, which he studied in college — a structured consideration of feeling, or at least an attempt at such. With regards to his 2011 paintings of the never-black night sky in the city, Kim explains: “It’s adulteration. The reason why the sky is such an interesting color is because the source of it is a bad thing [light pollution].” […]
Originally commissioned by GYOPO and published on GALLERYPLATFORM.LA on 17 December 2020
