2020 Changwon
Sculpture
Biennale

Contemplation 202009

You walk into the room and you see a dark space filled with ruffles of light. Those waves of light come from the black water inside the large-size water tank at the center of the room making waves due to a wave machine installed in the tank. The light shed on the rolling surface of the water is refracted to the walls of the room. The light encountering water makes this work “non-sculptural sculpture.” Why don’t you look at where the wall meets the ceiling at the end of the space? There you see a big moon KIM created. A moon? This is an artificial moon made of stainless steel. Just as the real-life Moon can shine only when she reflects the light from the Sun, the moon in the work also shines ever so gently while reflecting the landscape created inside the room. One poet once sang that the Moon lives on a lake, but in the world KIM created, it is the lake that lives in the Moon, because the surface of the Moon is filled with the rolling waters. This work reminds us of what it is to look and what this action means. How? The title, Contemplation, lets us picture a situation of observing something or someone. We are only looking at the water tank that makes waves and an artificial moon, but we immediately imagine a lake and the real-life Moon there. In this way, the work creates a beautiful “space of both conflict and coexistence” between the reality and the virtual by putting together the real water on the floor and its real waves, and the virtual moon at the corner between the wall and the ceiling, and the virtual movement of light.