Bonam Kim’s Good Job Well Done at A.I.R. Gallery

(Feb 11 - March 12, 2023)

A.I.R. Gallery website

Bonam Kim is a sculptor originally from Seoul and now based in New York. In her work, she employs scale to present a broad discussion on how space regulates human behavior to its detriment. Many of her works appear as models, which she constructs with dollhouse miniatures as well as delicately self-made tiny recreations of objects. These small works offset the human perspective so the onlooker is perhaps larger than life within the viewing space. Her work challenges the sense of place in the world and opens the discussion about individual displacement, comfortability, and how this affects a sense of abetment and possibility while often closed inside figuratively small spaces or boxes.

The exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery titled Good Job Well Done presents a number of her architecturally influenced pieces that slight on miniature versions of reality. Contrary to an architecture’s model, they are not exactly small duplicates of man-made space nor are they even mock-ups of possible futures. They are instead representative of static scenes chosen among pinpoints in time from Kim’s past and recreate her memory of certain events from her childhood up until the last few years. And curiously, her works in the exhibition seemingly amalgamate here to comment on an entire event, the pandemic. 

Her medium provides a double entendre to the audience. Here she takes a form of control on the past through reconstructing it, while also creating a mode for critical contemplation of it, which may not be possible without her carefully built settings frozen in time. This is by way of the works’ size. They are also hauntings of a sort as they have all come about from her personal memories and dare I say, struggles as female, artist, and immigrant. This reveals to the audience a host of traumas, frustrations, and obstacles she’s experienced, which may relate to a broader audience within these realms.

Further to this, there is another lens which she places in front of the viewer, which is the shared universal experience of the pandemic. The most recent global event is definitely an underlying marker of the exhibition, which raises questions about problems society experienced during that time. As the concept behind the show was brought about by this event, the discussion also ties to social, cultural, and political issues present before and still relevant today such as cross-cultural communication, emigration, and even surveillance. I translate this as being a conversation on the issues of globalism by an encountering of various problems related to migration and travel, and everyday virtual communication. The works ask the audience to look closer at how our bodies relate to our inhabited man-made spaces on Earth, both real and imagined.

On the discussion of space, Kim has created three enclosed rooms. First and foremost, with four conjoined walls she has defined the parameters of these spaces and has therefore defined the possibilities contained within it. For example, Untitled (Classroom) (2022) is a model of a South Korean classroom with school desks neatly organized in a grid and pairs of hands placed on each desk. The blackboard portrays a branded ‘stamp of approval’. Here, the post-war South Korean education system is put under a critical microscope as the classical image of conformity that the government glorifies and rewards in this environment is quite objectively displayed in the open top box. The desks cover the space from end to end. The room has a carton-like feeling to it, almost pre-packaged like the perfectly manicured hands that only do exactly what the teacher says. As Kim desired to move on from what she feels is a tightly knit system of control in South Korea, the criticality of the piece is crucial to understanding her relationship with this system. This environment would perhaps be restrictive.

Untitled (203 Harrison Pl) (2022) is the second container like space in the exhibition. This one holding stacks of what appear to be the exact shape of a standard square shipping box. They are amassed one on top of the other all the way to the top where the ceiling should be. The systematic formation of the interior depicts a place that is imprisoning and so burdened with packages that it cannot hold any further contents. Therefore, you can think of this room as actually lacking and movement in or out would be quite difficult. Untitled (April 2, 2020) (2020) depicts tiny people inside a pack of Dentyne Ice gum, which is another wraith chimera of the surrealized corporeal experience of being stuck in sealed places. This experience of seeing pictures of filled space could easily cause one to gasp for air. The figures appear unable to move while frozen in the middle of a lucid dream. Like the former mentioned work in the show, these provide a glimmer of what reality was like during the pandemic as well as comment on the difficulties of finding one’s way in a new place.

Untitled (401 Sudyam Street) (2022) portrays another room model with the perspective into the piece also from the above removed ceiling. This work includes open doors on each side of the box, in which taxidermy pigeons are stuffed. It is a remake of Kim’s bedroom during an event when her ceiling had been infested by pigeons, which produced a sense of being watched in her private space. Surveillance becomes another subject matter of the exhibition and her praxis, which I think expands through the size of these co-located room pieces.

The pigeons represent a literal birds eye view into and onto the inhabitants of the room. They represent an annoyance, an intrusion, but also, by way of the birds’ natural abilities, another aerial perspective and reinforces the large sense of an eye watching. They are so oversized for the space that they are like bulls in a china shop. The discomfort of the closeness of birds that seem to take over, the thing that is supposed to be outside, is a metaphor for sensed visibility, a feeling aroused while being required to share small spaces. I find this work to relate to a previous performance work, where she walked throughout the New York City subway in a tube-like structure that resembles a larger version of an expandable heating vent.

Untitled (1990-2005) (2022) is a result of fusing together different miniature objects that Kim carefully constructed to fit inside a found wall clock. These small things include a hospital bed and a metal table where a doctor would keep patient care necessities such as towels, extra gowns, oxygen, a hazardous waste deposit, and medical equipment. On the lower tier of the clock is a sink. The replicated hospital room represents another of Kim’s remembrances. This one of multiple doctor visits endured after a traumatic event when she severely burned her hand as a child. The recreation inside the clock puts a playful spin on the event and situates it in a sort of locked up place. Now perhaps it is being brought out of its compartmentalization inside the artist’s mind.

Untitled (Mexico City-Seoul) (2022) presents the audience with a see-through clear cube fashioned in the style of a lottery box. There is an open hole on the top of the box as if someone were able to stick their hand in and pull out a prize. If anyone is familiar with the immigration system in the U.S., they know about the green card lottery available to potential citizens. In Kim’s constructed box, the internal contents consist of an immigration lawyer’s desk and two microphones on either side. Wrapped around the outside of the cube is writing taken directly from letters sent to Kim by the office of immigration while she swayed in a state of limbo. During the process of reinstating her U.S. artist visa, she was unable to leave Mexico City where she flew while prohibited from entering her home city Seoul in the midst of the pandemic. Not able to return back to New York City either, Kim was left without a place to maintain a stable residence for a period. Harkening back to her experience, the box represents the red tape that surrounds procedures for non U.S. citizens to enter and live in the country. It raises questions about the transparency of the process to outsiders and the realities faced by people living inside the notional boxes that are the only spaces made available to them by the imposed laws.

Between Dream and Dark (2018) is a miniature basketball court with basketballs that are too big for the hoops and placed on the ground in a staggered zigzag formation. The work stages a conversation about Kim’s feelings and frustrations with her experience in cross-cultural exchange. Similarly, Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down (2018), a wooden version of the artist’s legs in centimeters with plastic feet attached to the end, portrays a weakened, or somehow debilitated, frame that would have trouble standing in a stable position on its own. As reestablishing a home in another place may feel like being trapped in space and unable to fully realize the language and navigate more broadly, the works shed context on the experience of disablement and the desire to move out of this in between state.