For his third solo show at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Kim Jaeil (b. 1969, Seoul) presents a series of radiant sculptural paintings cast from resin. His wall-mounted work, which hovers between painting and sculpture, is defined by abstraction, material experimentation, and a meticulous, labor-intensive process.
Kim creates his paintings using fiberglass resin, which he pours around small, pebble-like clay forms that, once removed, create networks of voids, which he paints with vibrant, light-reflecting hues. The voids form both figurative and abstract motifs inspired by the natural world, including ocean waves, radiating fields of energy, and cellular structures.
Raised and educated in Seoul, Kim studied sculpture at Hongik University in Seoul, earning a BFA in 1993 and an MA in 2004. After graduating, he worked as an assistant in a sculpture studio, where he received hands-on training in creating large-scale public monuments, many of which incorporated wall reliefs. As these commemorative monuments were often cast in bronze, he also learned the intricacies of plaster modeling and mold making, techniques that would become the technical foundation of his practice.
As Kim’s interest in relief as a means of expression deepened over time, he moved away from three-dimensional forms toward a hybrid approach combining the spatial qualities of sculpture and the planar qualities of painting on canvas. Kim cites American sculptor Lee Bontecou (1931–2022) and Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) as primary inspirations. The work of Fontana, a central figure in the development of Spatialism, an approach that sought to transcend the conventional boundaries of painting and sculpture by incorporating space, light, movement, and time as formal elements, resonated deeply. Like Fontana, Kim makes empty space a central focus of his work.
Kim’s labor-intensive process, which he developed during his early experiments with relief sculpture and casting techniques, begins with a sketch that he sets inside a deep frame. He then creates pebble-shaped clay forms of varying sizes, arranging them on top of the sketch to build the image in three-dimensional form. To enhance the sense of depth, Kim stacks additional layers of clay forms, offsetting each layer by half a pebble’s length. He then pours fiberglass resin over the clay composition until it is submerged. Once the resin has set, he removes the clay forms, leaving behind a network of recessed hollows, which he smooths and refines using power tools before applying acrylic paint to the contours. These luminous hollows, strung together by an unseen connective tissue, invite close observation, beckoning the viewer to discover the picture plane’s hidden depths.
Kim’s work invites us to consider how a surface can function simultaneously as an image and a physical space. “While painting and sculpture generally adopt forms of representation that reveal their subjects through perspective or three-dimensional forms, I seek to conceal through carving inward and obscuring,” Kim says. “Through these techniques, I aim to give tangible form to the various traces that surround us through the act of engraving them in intaglio. This is my own visual language for imprinting into my works the vestiges I do not wish to lose.”