Re-Animator
Kyoungho Isaac Kim
Saturday, November 23rd, 2024
Glen Arm, Maryland

One of the most boring experiences on Earth is a trash painting without the courage of its lack of convictions. If it only wants to be cynical, it becomes lifeless in every brushstroke – a bad dream on the canvas. One of the pleasures of painting, however, is to find one that chooses a disreputable genre and then tries with all its might to transcend the genre, to go over the top into some kind of artistic vision, however weird or uncanny.

Kyoungho Isaac Kim’s Re-Animator is a pleasure like that, a frankly brutal visual manifestation that finds a rhythm and a style that make it work in a cockeyed, offbeat sort of way. It’s charged up by the tension between the painter’s desire to make a good painting, and his realization that few paintings about angry mobs and ferocious tigers are ever likely to be very good. The temptation is to take a camp approach to the material, to mock it as contemptible in it’s many contradictions both formally and conceptually. Kim resists that temptation, and creates a livid, bloody, potent exercise in the theater of the absurd.

The painting’s narrative involves . . . but why bother? You have seen other paintings before, in which the hero is described as having a good head on his shoulders, and another one in the laboratory dish in front of him. That more or less captures the essence of Re-Animator. Driven by an insane desire to vindicate himself by creating dynamic forms out of ordinary art materials, a painter uses his intelligence to burrow more and more deeply into sheer madness.

Kim’s direction, and particularly his use of special effects, will come as no surprise. He borrows from the traditions of Japanese Manga and Anime, Western and Non-Western urban landscapes, and Korean culture, using his special effects not as set pieces for us to study, but as dazzling throwaways as the action hurtles ahead. We are keenly aware that nothing of consequence has happened, but so what? We have been assaulted by a lurid imagination, amazed by unspeakable sights, blind-sided by the painting’s curiously dry sense of wit. We got what we came for.

Read an interview with the artist HERE