Akita Tatehata

President, Tama Art University

Director, The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama

On a series of paper coffee cups that have been flattened into small fan shapes, discrete images such as a man sprinting, a pregnant woman, a naked figure wearing a star, and a street engulfed in flames appear superimposed, in savage irony, on the sacred icons.  A veritable Los Caprichos in paper cups!

Working and living mainly in New York’s Soho, a chaotic corner of Manhattan where myriad forms of contemporary cosmopolitan expression converge and collide, Kim deploys a satire that is as acidic as that of Goya. To him, the brittle response of Pop Art to material civilization is unacceptable. He feels compelled to replace the existing chaos with an alternate one.

An artist always exists in the present. Committed to the labor of expression, he has no choice but to live in the glitter of the endless present. Kim holds tight onto his unique, sharp critical stance toward the time he inhabits. It is as amply illustrated in the simple sketches on the paper cups as on the paintings on rectangular canvases.

A coal-black mountain looms on a huge canvas. On another canvas, a large rounded mound of dirt sits giving off an eerie sheen. Given that these images are born amid the angularity of an inorganic cityscape, they extend and underscore the nonsensical irony of the paper coffee cups. They become dark metaphors bringing forth the heavy, bitter feelings of an inward scream and mirthless laughter.

Translated by Yer-Ae K. Choi. From the pamphlet for “Kim Tchah Sup Exhibition”(June 1986) at Iteza Gallery in Kyoto, Japan