Rkive Art
Keem Jiyoung: Scattering Breath
Keem Jiyoung’s paintings of candlelight encourage social change
Over the past month, P21 gallery in Seoul has been showing Keem Jiyoung’s Scattering Breath, a continuation of her Glowing Hour series, and the first time the young artist presented her 69 drawings Drawings for Glowing Hour (2020–2022). The exhibition was attended by BTS’ Kim Namjoon, who posted the exhibition on his Instagram page.
Keem Jiyoung (b.1987) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kookmin University, Seoul, and then went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from Korea National University of Arts, Seoul. Her artwork is in the collections of both the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea,
and the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea.
In the Glowing Hour series, Keem Jiyoung contemplates candlelight and attempts to portray how her emotional state and senses are affected by the flickering light. Used as light sources, vehicles of spirituality and of remembrance, in modern-day Korea the candle has become a symbol of resistance against social injustice. Candles were used after the Sewol ferry disaster, in the candlelight protests against President Park Geun-hye, as well as after the recent Itaewon disaster.
Keem Jiyoung’s paintings record the state of the candle flame in various densities and saturations. Sixty-nine are studies of the flame at a single moment in time, whereas the three larger pieces such as that shown above are the accumulation of those single moments into a single painting.
Through the depiction of candle flames — whose light will eventually go out — Keem Jiyoung reflects on the finitude of life without fear of death. She attempts to use the candlelight as a platform from which to unify and fight for social change, noting that disasters such as the Sewol ferry disaster that killed over 300 high school students in April 2014 can hinder cohesive social change due to their tragic and horrifying nature.
Keem Jiyoung feels that in order to enact social change, one needs to recognise the issues as their own, rather than viewing the deaths as a detached other. With Glowing Hour, she encourages the viewer to resonate with the idea of death, thereby neutering fear and its scattering effect.
