Cindy Ji Hye Kim utilizes a rich grayscale vocabulary in iconic representations of the body under duress. Synthesizing influences as disparate as early animation, construction scaffolding, pests and flora, medieval torture devices, and Korean folk arts, Kim’s depictions of the contorted human form speak to the limits of both body and language. She places special emphasis on the sculptural qualities of her works, from round panels with notches that reference early animation technology to translucent silk works with carved stretchers bars that impose a ghostly silhouette onto their painted compositions. Recurring characters such as a father figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat or a beehive-sporting housewife—each presented as a looming silhouette—haunt the works as menacing superegos. In her practice, which extends through drawing and painting to installation, sculpture, and animation, Kim marries a playful tangle of visual information with a foreboding sense of what lies beyond the surface, beyond the body, beyond the word itself.

In the centuries before the widespread adoption of the Gregorian calendar, agrarian societies in Western Europe represented time as infused with the cycles of nature. Not unlike the modern Farmer’s Almanac or other global calendars based on solar and lunar movements, medieval farming calendars correlated times of the year with the sequence of labors necessary to raise and maintain crops and livestock. The calendars also served an invaluable psychosocial function, offering instruction for the timing of courtship, child-rearing, and other practices, and, in effect, creating a steadfast tie between the social order and the natural world. These agrarian calendars have become a new part of Cindy Ji Hye Kim’s visual vocabulary, extending the artist’s ongoing engagement with ancient myth, psychoanalysis, and archetypal iconographies. In her works for Platform, Kim explores ideas of collective action and the psychic reconnection of the human body as it moves through the first six months of the year. Across five paintings paintings, the artist depicts the labors and rituals identified with the Spring Equinox through the Autumn Equinox—roughly February through July—, reimagining the calendars’ diminutive peasant scenes in her shadowy grisaille palette.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim (Incheon, South Korea, 1990) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2016. Recent institutional exhibitions include Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger; and the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge. Gallery solo exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Casey Kaplan, New York; Helena Anrather, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and Foxy Productions, New York. She has shown in numerous group exhibitions, including those at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; David Lewis, New York; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York. Kim lives and works in New York City.