Jiho Kim

Jiho Kim paints what is present but rarely looked at — queerness, women, violence: things that sit plainly within society yet go unmentioned, or are addressed only within a fixed frame. The artist describes the work not as healing but as digestion. A sore muscle only loosens if you keep pressing on it, and painting is much the same: a return, again and again, to the uncomfortable places usually left alone. The starting point is always personal experience. Painting something unrelated, something that stirs no feeling, leaves the artist doubtful of the work. So the first stage is to retrieve the emotions pushed into a corner and left unexamined, and to fold and sort them. One is chosen — whichever feels most urgent — and turned over for weeks until a scene surfaces in the mind like a film still. It passes through sketch and photograph before reaching the canvas. The surface is built from many thin layers of oil, blended and rebuilt until a colour that reads as flat from across the room reveals faint shifts up close — the way skin does. This is what draws Kim to the figure, and why the canvases are large. What the work asks for is time: not to be passed by, but stood in front of, approached, and found to hold something new on each looking. Nothing changes, Kim says, unless it is brought out.