Gallery Hyundai Myong-hi Kim solo exhibition traces blackboard paintings that began at a closed school, capturing the landscape of an era and self-portraits, expanding beyond painting into media art
“A blackboard is a generous presence that lets us write and erase whatever we want.”
In 1990, at a closed school in Naepyeong-ri, Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, artist Myong-hi Kim, 77, found a discarded blackboard there. Since then, nearly 40 years have passed since she began painting with blackboards and oil pastel instead of canvas and paint. From children roaming through nature with butterfly nets to her own self-portraits doing housework, the artist has been recording the landscape of the times on blackboards and expanding that practice into media art, moving forward without pause.
Myong-hi Kim’s solo exhibition “Deep Time,” on view at Gallery Hyundai in Jongno-gu, Seoul, surveys more than 50 years of the artist’s work. It presents more than 40 pieces, ranging from charcoal drawings from her New York period in the 1980s to blackboard paintings that took full shape after the 1990s, video-based media works, and a series of self-portraits.
The trigger for the artist’s blackboard work came when she visited a closed school in Naepyeong-ri. In the early 1990s, while moving between New York and Korea in search of a studio, she discovered the abandoned school near a village submerged after the construction of Soyanggang Dam. At the exhibition, the artist recalled, “The moment I first drew a boy’s face on a discarded blackboard, I was astonished by the power of an image to leave a mark.” From then on, she began layering light with oil pastel on black American-style blackboards and deep green Korean blackboards.
The “Borrowed Scenery” series, which captures the four seasons of the pond in Naepyeong-ri, depicts nature reflected on the water’s surface and the sparkle of sunlight. The scenes of spring, summer, autumn, and winter are closer to images stored in memory than to direct reproductions of the real landscape. The artist explained, “I painted light on a dark ground, like a Baroque period painter.”
Also drawing attention is a group series depicting children from the postwar 1950s through the 2010s. She painted scenes that represent each era, such as children on a picnic and children playing at a fountain. In works depicting children from the 1950s, she overlaid symbols of atomic bomb formulas on the blackboard, capturing both the anxiety and memory of the age.
The artist also painted on blackboards while traveling through New Mexico, Vladivostok, and Tashkent. On a small portable blackboard, she painted landscapes and left portraits of people from different cultural backgrounds whom she met along the way. She describes herself as closer to an “ambulant” being who lives while moving than to a diaspora figure or a nomad.
Having lived between Korea and the United States, the artist has also shown deep interest in diaspora. On display in the exhibition are portraits from a series of Koryo-saram she encountered during a 1997 trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The faces of Koryo-saram, who live with the history of forced displacement, appear with a mix of Communist Party badges and Muslim clothing. The artist said, “I felt that once a country is lost, identity can no longer help but shake.”
Her work has expanded into media art. She creates “moving paintings” by inserting videos she shot and edited herself into blackboard paintings. She combined blackboard images with footage of swaying willow trees, rain-speckled views through a car window, and her own dancing on Soyang Lake in Chuncheon.
The exhibition also features a series of the artist’s self-portraits painted on blackboards. Her identity as both an artist and a homemaker emerges at the same time. Her image doing housework appears quiet, yet strong and steadfast. In everyday scenes such as preparing ingredients for kimjang or ironing clothes, she inserted a globe or a world map. It symbolizes the artist’s nomadic spirit, always casting her gaze toward the world even while remaining in a limited space.
Looking at the blackboard paintings naturally brings back memories of school days. Visitors can encounter the artist’s distinctive body of work, which warmly captures children while continuing experiments that move between painting and video. The exhibition runs through June 14.
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.